Tomaz,

First off, let me thank you for your email updates.

If you have time, I would appreciate your perspective on tennis ball machines.

As a former golfer (30+ years), I was accustomed to playing and practicing by myself. Now I’m a tennis player.

Beyond working on my serve alone, it seems that ball machines are the best substitute when I don’t have a playing or hitting partner available.

Here are a few questions I have:

1. What do you think is the best way to use a tennis ball machine?

The ball machine can shoot tennis balls very accurately at the same spot over and over again which is difficult to replicate even with feeding from the basket. So you can use it to work on your technique.

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I’ve recently come across 3 interesting articles which scientifically approach the game of tennis and how our brain and eyes work when playing the game.

The first study found out that “found that tennis players are often better than the rest of us at certain time-related, perceptual skills, such as speed discrimination.”

Which of course makes sense since tennis players have to constantly watch a fast moving ball and very quickly calculate the trajectory of its flight in order to make a good contact with the racquet.

There were seven different tests and skilled tennis players did really well on most of them compared to non-tennis participants. You can read the full article by following this link.

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Hi Tomaz,

After watching your service video, I still can not completely understand it.

Here are my questions: In the video, first we should hit racket from low to high, left to right(parallel to net), to give the ball a top spin so ball can land on the other side’s court.

Then, when the racket reach the highest point, we do pronation to have racket hit ball at an angle to the net.

I followed your instruction and practiced pronation, but I always fell awkward and not natural. I feel that I first move racket parallel to net direction, then by doing pronation, I have to change the direction of my racket movement(at an angle to the net). Just like you are driving car on straight line, when you reach highest speed, you make left turn.

Not only you are slowing down, also you are not using your highest power. Is this right? Am I missing something? Can you draw a graph or explain more clearly about the correct racket movement? (more…)

Dear Tomaz,

I have a daughter who is 14 years old and we are to put her in an academy to improve her tennis. My gut instinct is that she will not make it because she will not be very tall maybe 5ft6″.

She is very strong in the mind and an extremely hard worker. Should I be discouraged or should I go for it?

She will be going to the 6th Sense Tennis Academy.  I am so confused?

Interesting question and I hope I will answer in a way that will give you some food for thought.

First, you say that you feel she will not make it. Make it to where? Become what? Top 10 in world?

Is that all that counts? Do you feel that she will not make it as a human being who is not judged by the external results but by internal values and actions?

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