in this video I want to give you a brief summary of my teaching methodology which
is called intuitive tennis now the interesting thing is that tennis is
actually not intuitive and you're probably thinking why did you call your methodology
intuitive tennis if tennis indeed is not an intuitive game so let me give you
an example of a beginner who has never played tennis before and that beginner
steps on the court they're intuitively going to utilize the wrong technique
now why would that be the case because the beginner that steps on a court would intuitively
have stroke mechanics footwork and timing that's going to give them the best chance to make contact
with the ball which is very much going to be an intuitive process but unfortunately it's going
to be fundamentally wrong so let me give you an example so as far as stroke mechanics are
concerned a beginner will usually associate the string bed going towards the ball as their best
chance to make contact with it so a serve will often look like this very shallow toss and then
the strings approaching the ball because this is going to give the beginner the highest chance of
making contact with the ball it's not going to make a lot of sense to a beginner to have the
racket Loop in the back come out on edge and then pronate into the contact the likelihood of this
happening naturally or in other words intuitively is very low so how does one become an intuitive
tennis player well it's going to be crucial that a player learns the fundamentals regarding
stroke mechanics timing and footwork and let's talk about stroke mechanics what will happen is
that the fundamentals are going to have to be developed and now it's super important that a
player does repetitions in other words the muscle memory has to be built and something fascinating
will start to happen as the player is learning the fundamentals and getting their reps in they
will slowly gain confidence in their strokes and it will start to accelerate them faster and faster
so with two factors that need to be present which are the fundamentals and acceleration
intuitive technical elements on all Strokes will start to develop on their own these are
the small little intricacies of The Strokes when the racket is moving at its fastest on
the professional level that racket will be moving over 100 miles an hour on various
strokes and intuitive technical elements will take place naturally without the players being
conscious of them in the fastest portion of The Strokes which I call the intuitive Zone
now some people are up to belief that you have to learn these intuitive technical elements of
The Strokes and one example is the pronation into the contact on the serve or the lag on the
forehand there's many other examples of intuitive technical elements that are taking place in the
fastest portions of The Strokes but fact is that these things will be developed on their own and
having talked to many high-level players having talked to a lot of professional level players
what you will often find is that players of that caliber are completely unaware what happens to
their Strokes when they're accelerated to the fastest so you have to put this in a proper
context when we're talking about the time span of the stroke that happens shortly before contact at
contact and shortly thereafter we're talking about milliseconds is the blink of an eye this
part of the stroke is so fast that it cannot be observed in real time things that happen
to the body the hand and the Racket in this short time span is only visible in slow motion
footage so of course players are not consciously executing any of these actions this is the natural
result of possessing the correct fundamentals and accelerating the stroke properly now it's super
important for you to understand the information that I'm giving you because some of you might be
trying to manufacture certain movements at the conscious level when the stroke is accelerated
at its fastest and this is humanly impossible to do so if you try to adjust things at the
conscious level when the stroke is accelerated at its fastest you are forced to abruptly shorten the
stroke and slow it down severely so that you can actually consciously adjust things inside
your stroke now you're gonna have to put this into the proper context of the game of tennis
and we're talking about timing footwork stroke mechanics the game of tennis by design has to
be played intuitively because there's not a lot of time there to have these conscious thoughts
you're gonna have to call all your mechanics up automatically without thinking about them
that's the only way tennis can be played and the same can be said
for your footwork and your timing which is very much connected to each other so it's important
that you learn the fundamentals that you get your reps in what will happen once you start
practicing a lot is that you will slowly start building confidence in your strokes and you will
start accelerating your Strokes faster and faster intuitive technical elements will start to get
developed on their own this is not something that you have to be aware of I can tell you
personally that I play tennis at the high level I have a very good serve and I have spent my entire
active playing career without knowing that the serve actually is completely on edge prior to
the contact so I was completely unaware of this technical element and I served at the high level
so you understand my point it is completely unimportant that you even think about intuitive
technical elements of The Strokes the way you're going to build your tennis game is simple learn
the fundamentals get the Reps in build confidence and start accelerating faster and faster
now an important caveat in the intuitive tennis teaching methodology is that I differentiate
between fundamentals and style and these two things are often confused and style is very
much developed intuitively now we're going to have to differentiate between The Strokes
because some Strokes are more compact some Strokes are biomechanically more simple and some Strokes
are more complex and generally the more complex the stroke is the two strokes that are by far
the most complex biomechanically speaking are the forehand and the serve it is there where you will
see the most stylistic differences among the best players in the world so let's take the forehand
and the serve as an example and let's look at the top 100 female players in the world and
the top 100 male players in the world what you will see is that all the players have different
styles on their serve and their forehand now how can that be possible well it is only possible
if style is developed intuitively if it was not then everybody would play with the exact
same style now I will say that when you're building your game there's going to be some
room for experimentation when we're talking about Different Strokes some Strokes will leave you less
space to experiment with different styles while some Strokes will give you a little bit more room
to try some different stylistic elements for example the serve but generally speaking it is
going to be very useful for you to develop your own style and not copy somebody else's because
the fact that a certain style works for another player there's absolutely no guarantee that this
style is going to work for you because the player that you're trying to copy the style from has a
different genetic makeup they have a different game style than you and most importantly they
have a completely different muscle memory see the thing about tennis that you have to understand is
that it is very much an intuitive of game by Design when players are on the court they're
not thinking about technical things everything is called off automatically now how can this
be possible what is only possible by getting enough repetitions in I'm going to repeat it
again you're gonna have to learn the fundamentals and most importantly you will have to get your
reps and you will have to get your 10 000 hours of repetitions in now what will happen naturally
is that the more you repeat the fundamentals the more ingrained this movement will become so that
you can call it off automatically without any conscious thought you got to remember that this
is the only way that tennis can be played if you are of the belief that you can step on a
match court and have conscious thoughts about what foot you're going to set on the court or
how you're going to take your racket back or that you can look down and change the grip and find the
correct angle of the racket face as your racket is going back there's absolutely no time for that
this makes sense in theory but when you step on a court and you're actually playing and the ball is
coming back to you quickly you will realize that tennis has to be played intuitively by Design