| Sports That Hurt Your Tennis | |
As I mentioned in last week's feature about sports that help your tennis, I haven't found a lot written about how other sports affect one's tennis, so most of what I write here is based upon personal observation of my tennis students and experiments with my own game.
When we talk about sports that can harm your tennis game, we're only considering potential harm--and only for some people. If another sport does damage your tennis, it will almost certainly do so by damaging your stroke production. Unless you do intense training for a sport that builds interfering muscles, you are unlikely to experience any harm to your tennis footwork, court speed, strength, or flexibility. In fact, these aspects of your tennis game are likely to benefit, even from those sports that might harm your strokes.
If your tennis game is solidly grooved, it will be less likely to be thrown off by another sport. The converse is more likely: you'll play the other sport with motions that look too much like tennis strokes--e.g. trying to hit a racquetball with topspin. Tennis players who are still in the steeper part of the tennis learning curve are the most vulnerable to the effects of other sports.
From my teaching experience, especially with kids, the sports that have the worst effect on tennis stokes are baseball and softball. The reason is fairly simple: in these sports, rotating your wrists has little effect, because bats are round. If you rotate a tennis racquet, it has a profound effect. One degree of upward tilt on a hard-hit tennis shot will send the ball several feet deeper than intended. When the spring baseball and softball seasons come around, I see lots of beginning and intermediate tennis players hitting unintentional "homers" over the fence. Some also start raising their racquets too high on their backswings, like a baseball backswing, which will often make them hit into the net. Many players adjust within a few weeks, but some have persistent trouble keeping the swings from the two sports separated.
Another sport that can cause too high a tennis backswing is golf. I see two common golfer mistakes in tennis. Some players start with a high backswing, then hit slightly downward at the ball, which can only get the ball over the net if done as an intentional slice. Others start high, then dip the racquet head way below their hands before coming back up toward the ball. This creates the wrong kind of low-to-high motion: the racquet head cannot brush up the back of the ball properly, but instead hits flatly against the underside of the ball, creating too much lift and almost no topspin.
Racquetball causes a completely different set of problems. In racquetball, topspin is generally undesirable. It makes the ball jump up off the front wall, which only helps your opponent. Also, racquetball swings concentrate on the lower half of the arm, with a wrist snap that produces much of the swing speed. In tennis, letting your wrist snap through by keeping it loose (in the forward direction only!) can accentuate swing speeds, but the wrist action is always secondary to the motions of the whole arm and body. In tennis, using your wrist as much as you would for racquetball will harm both your game and your arm.
Like racquetball, squash discourages topspin, but it might help you handle low balls in tennis, as a squash ball often bounces quite low.
Platform tennis uses strokes that are much like tennis strokes. As in tennis, topspin is desirable in platform tennis, but it's much harder to generate effectively, and the attempt can cause errors. Playing a lot of platform tennis could cause a detrimental flattening out of your tennis strokes, but I think the risk is small.
That's about it for the list of sports that might harm your tennis strokes. I may have left out a couple about which I know almost nothing, but look like they could cause problems, such as cricket, but it's fairly safe to say that those sports I haven't mentioned shouldn't cause any problems with your tennis--assuming they leave you in one piece. One bad day of skydiving might keep you off the tennis court for quite a while!
Please stop by the forum to join our discussion of conditioning routines and let us know what your own experience has been with the effect of other sports on your tennis.
