hey guys when i get into conversations with people naturally the question comes up what do you do for
a living i always say i teach tennis i keep it vague for a reason and then naturally the people
like to dig a little bit deeper and then i say i teach tennis online and often these people are
left perplexed they cannot understand how someone can teach tennis remotely without being on the
court with the students so today's video i want to answer the question is it possible to improve
at tennis by watching instructional videos online and if you had asked me this question a long time
ago i might have given the answer no you cannot improve in tennis by watching videos however
since i'm in this industry i've been doing it now for three years i have had a lot of students i
can say without a shadow of a doubt that yes you can improve your game by watching instructional
tennis videos online i want to give a shout out to my friend and student felipe souza who owns d
tennis i'm representing d tennis today if you're ever in sao paulo brazil look this guy up he's not
only a great tennis coach but he's also a great player felipe someone who started playing tennis
later in life and he's got a big desire to improve and he found me very early on on my
online tennis instructional career and he had watched a bunch of my serve videos and he put
them into practice now the great thing was that he recorded himself serving at the very beginning
and then two weeks later and then two weeks later and all the way months in he had recorded himself
and he sent me the footage which was apart three months and there was four tapes and at this moment
i realized that you can absolutely without a shadow of doubt improve by watching instructional
videos however i'm going to say there might be some pitfalls along the way so there's
going to be some things that you can improve by yourself for example if a coach online shows you
a different grip that might benefit your game and you go on the court and try that grip or maybe a
different way to prepare your forehand this can work very easily and it's something that i've
seen work with my students as well however there's going to be some more intricate technical details
for example things that you might not be aware that you're doing wrong the beautiful thing is
that it's 2021 about to be 2022 and everybody's got a slow motion camera in their pocket you can
always record yourself and in that case if you watch an instructional video for example a coach
explaining the most common errors on the serve and then you watch yourself serve you might recognize
some of the errors so improvement can work in that way as well now how about something that you hear
very often that you cannot correct yourself that you need somebody standing next to you on the
court or coach and telling you what you're doing wrong and that is true to some extent however
as i explained earlier with the help of video footage this is something that you can
do yourself of course this is a little bit more tiresome than having a coach next to you if you
have video footage you would have to look at the footage throughout the practice and most likely it
would have to be good quality footage recorded in slow motion because some of the things that
are executing those strokes are some are things that we're not conscious of these are things
that are happening too fast so these things need to be looked over in slow motion footage
and there is a hidden danger in that as well that you become a little too obsessed on these small
intricate details of your technique and you spend way too much time looking at slow-motion footage
and this disrupts your practice and it takes away from the reps that you would normally get now look
i'm not going to lie to you if you ask me nick what's better having you on the court with me in
a private lesson or having you talk to me through a screen of course it's going to be better and
easier for you to get better if i'm on the court with you there's absolutely no doubt about that
but this doesn't mean that instructional videos in general i'm not even talking about myself here
instructional tennis videos can be very helpful because you might have been taking lessons for a
long time and all of a sudden you hear something that you've never heard before and now you're
excited you are ready to hit the practice courts again and try out the thing that you heard online
and see if it really works so guys i'm not being a hypocrite here i'm always telling you my honest
opinion yes online instruction does work and i'm not only telling you this because i make money
teaching tennis online i myself have learned a lot of things online with a beautiful thing that is a
platform called youtube thank you youtube without youtube i would not have been able to develop
my methodology because i went through painstaking detail to do research on the best players in the
world and we have all this footage available to us for free and it's not only free slow motion
footage there's also hundreds of thousands if not millions of free lessons online you don't
have to pay anything you type in the thing that you want to work on you're going to see tons of
videos pop up on youtube and there's going to be some fantastic coaches that are going to teach
you remotely so online instruction is a great thing it's not a bad thing at all i know some
people will make the argument hey people are just on their computers at home or on their phones on
their couch watching these videos and trying to get better from their couch this is obviously
not the case these people are watching instructional videos and of course they're
going to go out the next day and try out whatever it is that they heard now one more thing that i
want to point out that youtube is not only educational but it also is entertainment and
we as content creators that are in the online tennis instruction niche we also have to make
the videos entertaining because we know that if we make the videos boring you're going to tune off
and go somewhere else however i do think that the entertainment factor is super important because
this can possibly create a lot of excitement for tennis and grow this beautiful sport