What Science Tells Us About The Demanding Game Of Tennis
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.
The second study explains that the world around us moves most of the time quite slowly and if our brain wants to calculate the trajectory of a fast moving tennis ball it has to predict based on its memory.
I can certainly confirm that since I’ve taught many tennis beginners and I know that some of them had no data (no memories) about the ball flight so they had problems just hitting the ball with the racquet.
Dr Welchman, the lead scientist of this study said: “Although it is not surprising that sportsmen who practice a lot build up a better statistical picture in their minds about where a ball might go, it is surprising that what should be a vital survival skill is based on such a trial and error learning experience.”
Follow this link for a full study…
The third study was about the tennis referees (those who make the calls on the lines) based on previous findings that “people consistently mispercieve moving objects as shifted in the direction of their motion, so that at any moment they appear to be farther along their path than they are.”
In a review of more than 4,000 randomly selected Wimbledon tennis points, the researchers uncovered 83 incorrect calls. Of those, 70 of the errors were of the type predicted – meaning the referee called the ball out when in fact it was in.
This could be a good guideline for tennis players who want to challenge a call; challenge calls on balls that were called out.
The full article explains even more on how the brain processes information and what the researchers suggest for the future of tennis.
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