Everything Changes

The main approach of traditional tennis instruction is to break the game down into its sequential parts and learn the game via learning these individual parts. Nothing wrong with that until you have to start putting these individual parts back together into a unified whole whose parts must be adapted to and performed within ever-changing spatial and temporal parameters.

That’s where your visual/cognitive/motor (VCM) operating system comes into play; where the actual performance of your overall game is constructed via your VCM relationship with the elements of the tennis environment.

Tennis teaching – at least in the traditional approach – spends very little time on the VCM operating system. It’s taken for granted that your operating system works by inputting visual information about the visible elements of the tennis environment, especially the movement of the ball, then your brain processes that movement information and outputs relative countermovement information to your motor system, which in turn creates the strokes you use to hit the ball over the net.

That’s the general overview of the incredible complexity of the human operation system. Then, the operating system is broken down into its individual parts with each part being studied by professionals in that field. The eyes are handled by sports vision experts, the brain and mind by neurologists and sports psychologists, the body by kinesiologists and biomechanists. Each expert has their own take on what their particular specialty has to do with peak performance.

But, in reality, your peak performance state involves your whole operating system interfacing with the elements of the tennis environment, only with a very important difference. In your peak performance state, the VCM operating system is interfacing with the elements of the tennis environment in a parallel interface. In your normal performance state, your operating system is interfacing with the elements of the tennis environment in a serial interface.

Question: how can you expect to perform to your full potential as a tennis player when you do not use your operating system to its full potential? And a serial mode/serial interface is not using your operating system to its full potential. It’s not a bad way to use your operating system; it’s just not the most efficient and accurate way to use your operating system.

Of course, changing from a serial mode of operation to a parallel mode of operation will change the way you visually perceive the game; it will change the way you mentally perceive the game; and it will also change the way you physically perceive the game. All-in-all, your whole relationship to the game changes when you switch from a serial mode to a parallel mode.

Everything changes when you switch from playing tennis in the norm to playing tennis in the zone.