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 Tuesday, July 21, 2009
What did you see? What did you think you saw?
A videotape of tennis professional Andre Agassi hitting a forehand shot in tennis was skeletonised so that the movement of every joint in his body was clearly visible and measurable. It was possible to see Agassi's wrist turning as little as an eighth of a degree.

While it was not the original intent, the video illustrates our inability to describe what actually occurs in mere moments. For example, virtually all pro tennis players would say that they use their wrists to roll the racket over the ball when hitting a forehand shot.

Vic Braden, a well known and outstanding tennis coach, went further than many of his colleagues in using digitized imaging to see, with absolute clarity, how much the wrist actually turns prior to the racket striking the ball. The result showed that players almost never move their wrist at all prior to hitting the ball. For the vast majority, the wrist does not move until long after the ball is hit.

Baseball player Ted Williams believed that he could look the ball into the bat, tracking it to the point where he made contact. Sometime after Williams’ retirement, he and Braden met at an event.

Braden told Williams of the studies he had seen that clearly showed human beings could not track the ball into the bat. In fact, a player has no more than 3 ms to see the ball into the bat.

Williams was wise enough to say, "I guess it just seemed like I could do that."

I often feel that I must be one of the few in the world of sport training whose vision has become impaired over time. It must be wonderful for those who are nearly my age (or older) who can still compare turnover rate during competition between two athletes on the far side of the track or field.

Many of these blessed coaches can tell, with apparently absolute certainty, whether a runner passed another contestant because of better speed maintenance, greater rate of acceleration, longer acceleration, or simply the passing of fatiguing, decelerating opponents.

Yeah, right.

The majority of these coaches also believe in their innate ability, by eyeball alone, to make a variety of performance assessments (often "seeing" much more than reality allows per Williams above) during training. The few that attempt to use something besides the unaided eye often rely on video panning as an aid to performance assessment.

Video panning offers a greater degree of viable feedback since it doesn't "forget" what it sees- as long as it's not erased or videoed over. Certainly this is a better way to make assessments of the training needs of each athlete.

Or is it?

The very nature of video panning reduces the ability to supply sound analysis of an athlete's overall performance because of the lack of reference points. The result is a significant reduction in viable information for training purposes. It’s still better than the guessing by eyeball, but not by much.

The bottom line of what preceded is simple: go to the top line of this blog and read the first two sentences.

Use assessment tools whenever possible; the video tape of Agassi was an assessment tool!

An assessment tool need not always be expensive. We use that anaerobic speed reserve as a tool for a variety of assessments including whether our athletes are currently in as good condition when compared to previous years.

Can one go overboard in assessing their athletes?

We are adamant about training as little as needed, not as much as possible. We are just as adamant in assessing as little as needed, not as much as possible.

Barry Ross

Categories: Articles
Posted: 7/21/2009 12:03:02 AM UTC  #    Comments [0]