2007 ITA Convention Impressions

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of making a presentation about what we’ve being doing with the SpeedChain to about 100 college tennis coaches at their annual convention (“2007 ITA Coaches Convention”) in Naples, Florida (12/14 to 12/17/07).

First, I want to thank all of the coaches who attended the presentation, and I hope that we were able to provide them with some new and useful information regarding how to increase the overall performance level of their players.

Second, I want to express how grateful I am to the person who has been the greatest supporter of the SpeedChain and TennisSpeed, and who is a true legend among modern American tennis coaches, the one and only Greg “The General” Patton (former USTA National Coach, Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame member and currently Head Men’s Tennis Coach at Boise State University). Our presentation would not have ever happened if not for all of Greg’s help in getting TennisSpeed get off of the ground.

Third, I want to say thank you for all the support given to TennisSpeed over the past two seasons by our 4 collegiate early adopters of the SpeedChain:

Boise State Men’s Tennis (Head Coach Greg Patton)

UCLA Men’s Tennis (Head Coach Billy Martin)

Colorado Women’s Tennis (Head Coach Nicole Kenneally)

Syracuse Women’s Tennis (Head Coach Luke Jensen)

Overall, I thought that the presentation at the convention went quite well (I am thankful that I have had some experience speaking in public in front of larger audiences—that turned out to be one upside of my whole academic science experience), and the I think our message was well-received by the coaches who attended. And, we also received a wide range of very interesting and challenging questions from the coaches regarding the SpeedChain training concept, and our findings from our various pro, collegiate and junior early adopters.

From the TennisSpeed side, what was especially interesting was that we learned who among today’s college coaches are the great “seekers” of advanced (coaching) knowledge and who want to learn the most cutting-edge ideas and methods to help their players find their highest level. Not surprisingly, most of these coaches lead programs that have been very consistently successful season after season.

Alongside our presentation, there were also a number of other interesting talks and on-court clinics given by various experts in the American tennis community at the Convention, including one by celebrated American coach Nick Bolletieri, but the one presentation that stood out in my mind was the featured on-court clinic led by former Top-5 player, Todd Martin on Saturday afternoon (December 15th).

“Coach” Martin’s clinic was essentially a one-hour primer on how to be successful in singles at the pro level. The ideas that Martin presented were indeed fascinating and enlightening, and for many coaches there, counter-intuitive. When you compare Martin’s “4 skills” to the kinds of tactical ideas that are commonplace in today’s collegiate and junior game in the US, the way to be a successful tour pro is almost 180 degrees opposite from the prevailing “Big Strike/First Strike” philosophy so widely held in American tennis at the high-performance level.

Martin’s clinic was titled “Taking it to the next level: 4 skills necessary to transition from college to pro tennis.” Effectively, Martin summarized the four core tactical adjustments (taught to him by former top-10 player, Jose Higueras) he had to make in order to improve his chances to succeed on the tour after two years as an All-American at Northwestern University.

I created a written summary of the ideas that Martin presented over the course of his scheduled hour and you can email me at speedmaster [at] tennisspeed [dot] com if you’re interested in getting a copy (it’s a PDF file, FYI).

Oh, I thought I would close out this post by mentioning this recent development for us here at TennisSpeed…

TennisSpeed has been invited to give a technical presentation about our work with the SpeedChain to the newly-formed Tennis Education Group (TEG) based in Spain (yes, that Spain with the 12 pros ranked in the ATP Top 100) sometime in February 2008.

What’s really exciting about this opportunity is that many of the top federation coaches in Spain are already involved in this new venture (spearheaded by Jofre Porta (who coached Carlos Moya to ATP #1) and Pedro Zierof (one of the top physical trainers in Spanish tennis)), and TennisSpeed is honored to have the opportunity to speak alongside these luminaries of Spanish tennis.

Until next time, TTFN!

My own SpeedChain testimonial

Maybe you guys would like to know how I got involved with the revolutionary SpeedChain in the first place…

It all began innocently enough with me trolling the mighty Internet for information on speed training, specifically for ideas and methods for increasing racket speed in tennis.

You see, coming from an academic background (I’m a trained, published scientist—my doctorate is in biology, if you’re wondering), I have a very empirical approach to virtually everything I do. My brother calls me a “professional deconstructionist” as I want to analyze, breakdown and question every idea that attracts my interest.

So, when in late 2005, I happened onto a link that led me to an online column written by a Hawaii-based golf teacher who claimed to have invented the ideal golf training aid—a training aid that supposedly delivered unheard of improvement in clubhead speed in a very short timeframe—it dawned on me that I might have stumbled onto something promising.

As I read that first column, two things occurred to me right away.

First, the scientific concept behind the training aid, called the SpeedChain, was dead on correct. Second, because the concept was so sound, this meant that some layman (not one of the “esteemed” sports science minds of our day) had solved one of the long-standing challenge of sports conditioning.

What this golf teacher did was find and develop a training method (and device) to increase the speed at which the human body performs complex movements that involves the coordination of multiple body parts moving in a complex sequence through multiple joint angles and planes. Sports science has long acknowledged that no known conditioning methods have been proven to increase the throwing, swinging and kicking speeds of athletes from all levels of sport.

So, in essence, this layman, golf teacher has effectively solved the “holy grail” of athletic conditioning that has eluded the so-called “experts” in sports training and conditioning.

About 5 seconds after I came to this realization, all the alarm bells and red flags in my mind went off about how what I had just read was simply “too good to be true”. That is what we are conditioned to think, after all, when we run into something that promises and claims to deliver the solution to a problem that supposedly the best minds in the world haven’t been able to solve.

How could some golf teacher with no real scientific training have come up with the solution to one of the challenging questions of sports science?

Well, as the weeks passed, I got over those prejudices and realized that this longstanding challenge of sports science could only have been solved by an outsider who wasn’t biased and brainwashed by the so-called experts. And, believe me, there is a ton of bias, prejudice, dogma and ego that lurks in the sports science and conditioning community (as it does everywhere!).

Finally, I decided to call up the golf teacher and made an appointment to demo his invention called the SpeedChain. And once I put the SpeedChain into my hands and began to swing it and tried the special exercises that can only be done with the SpeedChain, it became obvious that the SpeedChain was going to deliver on its promise of improving racket speed…Or bat speed, or golf clubhead speed, for that matter.

Once anyone who has been any background or experience as a competitive athlete puts the SpeedChain into their hands, they will “intuitively” understand why the SpeedChain will deliver on its promise to make them swing faster than ever before.

The only question was, how well was it really going to work? As the golf teacher had no quantitative information on how much racket speed improvement was possible by training with the SpeedChain, the scientist inside me led me to propose doing a pilot study where together we would study the effects of SpeedChain training on two, young (a 13 and a 14 year old) tournament players I was coaching at the time.

We decided to follow the changes in the boys’ serve and groundstroke speeds over a 10 week long training program using the SpeedChain. Outside of interval running over the same 10 week period, the boys performed no other conditioning exercises outside of training with the SpeedChain. As the boys trained only with the SpeedChain, whatever speed improvement they would show would have to be due to the effects of SpeedChain training.

The results of this pilot study were nothing short of remarkable. Both boys increased their 1^st serve speed by over 25 MPH in 8 weeks. One started at in the high 60s and ended up hitting regularly in the low 90s, and the other started in the middle 70s and ended up in the low 100s.

And for you skeptics, there were no major technical adjustments to their service motions involved, only training with the SpeedChain: no plyometrics, no medicine balls, no resistance bands, and no strength training was performed during that time. None.

So, guess what? I’m a believer. Theory is one thing, hard, quantitative evidence is another. SpeedChain training works. Training with the SpeedChain more than delivered on its promise to help players increase their racket speed. The evidence doesn’t lie. Both boys increased their racket speeds significantly on both serves and groundstrokes.

Does my story seem to be “too good to be true”? What I’m actually finding out is that the results for the boys in that pilot study may not be at all exceptional. Those results may represent average improvements given what I’ve observed with the college players and touring pros I’ve introduced to the SpeedChain. Some of those players improved 10 to 15 MPH on their serve after their FIRST WORKOUT ever with the SpeedChain.

So, what’s the bottom line?

1) SpeedChain training increases your racket speed (and more).

2) All other training methods don’t increase your racket speed, and many of them will make you swing slower instead.

Theory and reality and one and the same with the SpeedChain.

I know that many of you out there are thinking that the SpeedChain is "too good to be true".

Well, I used to be just like you until I found out the real truth with my own hands and eyes.

If you want more racket speed, there’s only one answer. Train with the SpeedChain.

TTFN!