Tennis Circuitry: Master the Hardware of a Professional Tennis Player

By Jason Goldman-Petri

Every piece of hardware that makes up a computer must work together in synchronicity for the computer to operate, and if you want to avoid making frequent runs to the Apple store, they must be maintained too. Likewise, every muscle, bone, tendon, and ligament in your body works together synchronistically with every shot you make and every serve

• Language: English
• Publisher: TENNIS CIRCUITRY, LLC
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733677332

Jason Goldman-Petri

Jason Goldman-Petri is the author of the series "Tennis Circuitry" and the go-to Video Analysis Expert and Tennis Strategy Speaker at IMG Academy. Jason began teaching tennis at the ripe age of 17 and went on to become one of the youngest Tennis Directors of 2 Country Clubs, as well as a Head Tennis Pro at IMG Academy all before the age of 30. ACE Certified and a Certified Tennis Performance Specialist with iTPA, Jason is one of only 1000 USTA High Performance Certified Coaches and one of only 50 Tennis Coaches in the world selected for the USPTR Master of Tennis in Performance Certification. While studying at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Jason Goldman-Petri got his start as a Tennis Coach working at the Bare Hills Racquet and Fitness Club as a part of The Tennis Institute. There, he was personally trained and Certified by his long-time mentor Lenny Scheuerman, who coached several world-ranked players, including former Wimbledon doubles champion JoAnn Russell. Jason also served as the Assistant Men's and Women's Tennis Coach at Stevenson University for three years. Later, he was promoted to the Head Men's And Women's Tennis Coach. During this time, Jason served as an Assistant Coach at Roland Park Country School where he helped lead the Varsity team to four-straight MIAA Conference championships from 2008-2011. He also served as the Head JV Coach and Head Middle School Coach at Notre Dame Prep. Having coached extensively at various levels, Jason has trained players to transition from the Juniors directly to playing professionally, from the Juniors to top level college tennis teams, and from college tennis to the pro tour. As a player, Jason was a member of the men's team from Wilmington, Delaware that captured the national title at the 2011 USTA League 4.5 Adult National Championships held at the Jim Reffkin Tennis Center in Tucson, Arizona. He was also a member of the Green Spring Racquet Club's Men's USTA Tri-Level Yellow Team that won the Mid-Atlantic Sectional championship on Jan. 23, 2011. Jason was ranked in the top 150 of the Mid-Atlantic USTA Open rankings and in the top 50 players in Maryland through the Men's Open Ranking. He was the runner-up in 2010 for the Maryland State Men's Indoor Championship and finished 12th in the Men's Open Singles of the final 2009 Maryland Adult/Senior Rankings. Today, Jason Goldman-Petri is a World-Class Tennis Coach with a talent for coaching players to go Pro. If you're ready to make the transition to becoming a Professional Tennis Player, Jason is the coach for you.

Book preview

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Contents

Section 1: Rehearsal

Chapter 1: Evaluation

Chapter 2: Periodization

Chapter 3: Repetition

Section 2: Physical

Chapter 4: Evaluation

Chapter 5: The Lower Body

Chapter 6: The Upper Body

Section 3: Technical

Chapter 7: Evaluation

Chapter 8: Fundamentals

Chapter 9: Advanced Techniques

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright © 2019 by Jason Goldman-Petri

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, digital or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

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Chapter 1

Evaluation

The first step in every good endeavor is a proper evaluation. When there is something wrong with your computer, you run diagnostics, so just think of this evaluation as running diagnostics on your tennis.

Now imagine you’re like me, and you want to write a book. But you’re also like me, and your computer is five years old. No matter how brilliant the information in your head and no matter how quickly you want to write, you are going to have to wait for your computer to load and your slow-ass software to catch up to your typing. (Yes, I am bitter about this. Buy my book so I can upgrade my computer please!)

As a tennis player, if you can’t run down the shots, you will fail to win at the highest levels, no matter how smart you are or how good your decision-making is.

Good physical fitness and technique start with your practice. Many coaches have said that you play in the way you practice, but as cliché as that saying is, there is truth to it. People screw up so many aspects of training and that is where you can set yourself apart and edge out the rest of the field.

You will need to apply two very important principles to the physical portion of practice to be successful. One is the adaptive principle and the other is called muscular facilitation.

The adaptive principle states that your body adapts to what you ask of it. If you want to hit the ball increasingly harder to catch up with the best in the world, you will need to attempt to hit the ball harder during certain aspects in practice. This also applies to movement. You will need to spend part of your practice running down the most difficult shots and putting in pure physical effort!

As an example, my sister and I are very much alike. We both have the same parents, played a lot of the same sports growing up, and we even look a lot alike (I am of course the better looking one, sorry not sorry, Megan). Yet, I play a sport where speed and quickness are paramount, and you would be hard-pressed to see me run any distance longer than a mile. Yet, my sister runs marathons. We have similar genetics, but her body has adapted to what she asks of it, which is to run for freakin’ ever, while mine has adapted to tennis. This has happened over many thousands of hours of training our bodies. Over time, we adapted into two completely different athletes.

The second aspect of physical training refers to long-term athletic ability. When you have done something many times, your body becomes better at doing it and will remain so even into old age. This explains why old tennis coaches can still hit the ball hard, and why old basketball coaches can still jump high.

At one of my early tennis coaching jobs, I coached a famous football running back named Joe Washington. Joe made his living in the NFL by being one of the quickest and sneakiest players ever. He had to be, because the big problem Joe had was his size… he was 5’7" and 180 pounds, well below the norm for football players. One day, Joe came to talk to our tennis players about work ethic. Just for fun, Joe said he would play tag with the kids. At nearly 50 years old, Joe was past his prime and had bad knees, yet you would never know it from watching him juke and leave those in-their-prime teenagers in his dust.

This is called muscular facilitation. Almost no one has heard of muscular facilitation, but everyone has heard of the idea of muscle-memory. Unfortunately, muscles don’t have memory, only brains do, yet Joe’s muscles seemed to remember how to juke and move insanely quickly (confusing, I know). This is different than the skill development that people talk about when they refer to muscle memory. Skill goes away over time (but slowly), so when people say that you never forget how to ride a bike, and call that muscle memory, they are saying that we never lose the skill of riding a bike.

Muscle facilitation is different than skill development. As you repeat the same action over and over, your body adapts in more ways than just becoming physically fit. In between every muscle is a connection or synapse. The synapse responds to being activated repeatedly by becoming better insulated. Over time you become faster and faster at the same action through those repeated firings. While I’ll never forget how to ride a bike, I also won’t be as good at it as a former professional cyclist would be, even if they took WAYYY more time off than me. Their bodies’ synapses have adapted. Even if I am in better shape than they are, they will still be faster or more adept. That is an advantage that only comes with numerous firings of an action. Skill can be learned quickly, but this permanent imprinting on the physiology of the body takes insane repetitions and therefore time.

Ask yourself these questions to evaluate whether your practice stands up to the two tests:

Are your practices long enough and frequent enough to accumulate the repetitions needed to create muscular facilitation?

Do you have dedicated portions of practice where your goal is to increase the neural firing of your shots? For instance, do you actively spend time trying to hit the ball harder than you ever have before? Or do you spend your ENTIRE practice trying to hit the ball as hard as you can? (Later we will talk about why this is not ideal either!)

Are you monitoring the effort you put into each practice session, with certain sessions being high intensity while others being lower? Do these monitored practices factor into a greater plan of work/rest that allows your body to adapt into a faster, stronger player?

Do you spend every practice drilling? Or is every practice point play? Do you plan your practices to build towards improved performance in meaningful tournaments that fit your long-term goals?

How software and hardware intertwine

Because our practice sessions are more than just physical (they are also important skill-building times), we will carefully cross the bridge into the software side of things. The complement to this book, Tennis Circuitry: Master the Software of a Professional Tennis Player, discusses those aspects in greater detail. Because this book focuses on the hardware, we will only touch on mental topics. Of course, if in touching on them your interest is piqued, get that book as well!

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If you are my new student, I would first evaluate your practice rehearsal. I would want to know what stage of your training you are in and whether today’s practice is supposed to be high or low intensity. Already 99% of athletes are scratching their heads. We haven’t talked about exercise physiology and we haven’t talked about periodization, but what I want to know is whether you incorporate proper rest. Without rest, your body cannot get stronger, but you also can’t just take time off since you need those critical repetitions. We must carefully elect to do certain practices at high intensity, where you can build on your strength or power levels. On other days, you need to let your body rest and take it relatively easy.

Not only will certain days be high or low intensity, but also your stage of training will make a difference in our choice of drills and whether point play is necessary. Directly after a big tournament, I would expect you to be taking it easy and working on something new with meaningful reps at low intensity levels. As your familiarity with a concept grows, your intensity can grow, and practices can become more grueling. Finally, as your training reaches the final stages of preparation for a meaningful tournament, practices will begin