{"id":62,"date":"2004-09-02T17:38:59","date_gmt":"2004-09-03T01:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=62"},"modified":"2004-09-02T17:38:59","modified_gmt":"2004-09-03T01:38:59","slug":"palmball-technique-or-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/palmball-technique-or-results\/","title":{"rendered":"palmball, technique or results?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter was practicing his serve on the court next to me. I sprained a ligament in my thumb trying to return his serve a few weeks ago. He made up for it today – he looked at my serve<\/a> and suggested I toss the ball with the palm of my hand instead of my fingertips. This way the ball doesn’t spin. I suppose it’s like a juggler, they pop the ball up in the air with their palms.<\/p>\n

Before each stroke in a match, I rehearse<\/a> my next shot – I am practicing technique. Once the point starts I think about where I want the ball to land. After the point starts, it’s too late to think about technique, there’s no way the one-step-at-a-time conscious mind can keep up with all the steps needed in even one rally. But what happens if I lose technique during a match? My serve starts going into the net for instance. It’s likely that I’m taking my eye off the ball but to correct that, I would have to be thinking about technique during the point. I don’t know the answer and the back and forth yo-yoing between the two is driving me a bit crazy. I can sometimes choose to think about one technique thing only during a point, say keeping my eye on the ball while serving, but it takes me out of the rhythm of my shots. Any suggestions?
\npracticed<\/a> for an hour; played two sets with M.: 6-4, 7-5; practiced my serve<\/a> for one bag of practice balls
\nSuccess Analysis<\/em>:
\n1. I hit some hard serves<\/a> for service winners.
\n2. I played agressively and won a lot of points at the net.
\n3. I moved back a bit and gave myself room to step into the ball and hit it more solidy.
\nInjury Report<\/em>: I went to see my physical therapist, Andy Choi,<\/a> because I was feeling twinges in my elbow<\/a> again. Two things seem to be bothering my elbow: I am still dropping my racket<\/a> as I hit the ball which weakens my wrist and puts pressure on my elbow, I twist my racket to hit across the ball when I make contact on my serve<\/a> but I don’t really have enough flexibility in my forearm to do this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter was practicing his serve on the court next to me. I sprained a ligament in my thumb trying to return his serve a few weeks ago. He made up for it today – he looked at my serve and suggested I toss the ball with the palm of my hand instead of my fingertips. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,50,68,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-mechanics","category-injuries","category-mental-skills","category-tennis-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}