Why is Tsonga Injured Again?

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is injured again and thus we enter into a discussion on biomechanics.

This summer I read an article about baseball pitcher ”Tiny” Tim Lincecum, a stringbean body who regularly throws a baseball at 98 mph (158kph) for the San Francisco Giants. Teams were reluctant to draft him because they were afraid his body would break down. If he threw that hard with such a skinny body, they asked themselves, how could he possibly survive the long baseball season without breaking down?

His body hasn’t broken down and the article asks the obvious question: Why is it that Lincecum is thriving and injury-free while 6’5” (196cm), 225lb (102kg) Chicago Cub pitcher Mark Prior cannot stay out of the doctor’s office?

The answer is body mechanics and I thought about Lincecum when I noticed that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga retired from a match in Tokyo today after winning the first set against Viktor Troicki. Jo-Willie strained an abdominal muscle and that adds one more injury to his long list of injuries: herniated disc 2005, two right shoulder injuries 2005, back and abdominal injuries 2005 & 2006, knee surgery 2008.

Baseball teams now hire consultants to look at pitching prospects and identify mechanical flaws before they invest millions of dollars in these guys. Junior tennis programs might want to follow suit. If someone breaks down repeatedly, they’re clearly doing something wrong mechanically and it’s much easier to identify and correct earlier rather than later, and, to put it in a crass way, they’d be protecting their investment.

I’m not a biomechanical expert but if you look at the Jo-Willie’s forehand above and compare it with this video of Roger Federer’s forehand, Jo-Willie’s arm does not appear to move as freely as Federer’s.

Think of it like this. If you move your trunk like a block of ice and keep your arm stuck to your side, you’ll hurt your back because the spine is meant to move vertebra by vertebra, not as one piece. That also puts pressure on your knees because they’re being asked to rotate instead of the spinal vertebrae.

If, instead, you move as a spiral with the shoulders, ribcage, and hips rotating and the arm following – a la Federer, you’ll use your body the way it was designed to be used and you’ll hit the ball a whole lot harder because you can generate so much torque. That goes for the serve as well as ground strokes. A service motion is a whole lot like pitching a baseball, it’s all about generating arm speed through body rotation.

The first player that comes to mind when I think of Jo-Willie is Marcos Baghdatis. They both rose to stardom with magical runs to Australian Open finals and they’ve both been injury prone since. Baghdatis just returned to the tour after a ten week layoff for a wrist injury and promptly retired in both tournaments he entered. This week it was Metz where, a newspaper reported, Baghdatis “screamed with pain and fell on to the court” after a serve in his first round match with Ivo Karlovic. Ouch, that doesn’t sound pleasant.

Look at this video of Bagdatis’ forehand, he looks less flexible than either Jo-Willie or Federer. Baghdatis and Jo-Willie are both broad muscular guys, well, doughy might be a better word for Baghdatis but, for sure, he is broad. That doesn’t mean they can’t move, these are two agile tennis players, but it probably does mean they have to work much harder to be flexible than someone like Federer.

Baghdatis is not known to work hard and that’s part of his problem. Jo-Willie is credited with working hard to come back from his injuries, but his time might be better spent changing the mechanics that lead to injuries. And if he wants to increase his flexibility, I could direct him to a good Rolfer. Those guys will pound the crap out of you but you’ll be more stretchy when they’re done, guaranteed.

Yellow Fuzzy Balls

I don’t think you can correct injury producing mechanics by watching a video alone – a tennis instructor with good biomechanical knowledge might be necessary, but you might learn something by going to yellowfuzzyballs.com and looking at their instructional videos. It’s distance learning for tennis and it’s free, kind of. Ads streams across the bottom of the videos while they’re playing.

Those streaming ads might be the future of google advertising if not youtube. Currently I only have to put up with some invasive but innocuous text ads down the side of my gmail page – I’m still trying to figure out how they came up with a text ad for golf in response to an email about a vulva puppet, but I can see where video ads might replace text ads sometime soon and then I’ll have to learn to tune them out too.

Meanwhile, check out yellowfuzzyballs.com, it can’t hurt.