Footwork Study (Page 1)

Pick up any tennis magazine or book and you'll find instruction and advice on the full range of stroke production: forehands, backhands, overheads, serves, volleys. You name it - you can find information on technique and effective practices.

Surprisingly, in our review of popular books and magazines as well as technical and scientific journals we discovered little information specifically on footwork. We found lots of footwork drills but not a lot of information on effective footwork. (One book with a good section on footwork was Dr. Jack Groppel's "High Tech Tennis", another was Rick Elstein's "Tennis Kinetics".)

Skeleton Movie Size: 363K - Full Body Model Movie Size: 290K

Yet footwork is a major source of loss points in tennis. You have to reach the ball in time to swing and your body needs to be in a good biomechanical position to strike the ball effectively. Being "off balance" or stretching to reach the ball results in loss of power and control. You may not be able to rotate your body to obtain optimum power or control and place the ball in your opponent's court effectively.

If you've been following the project then you know that the team collected high speed digital footage at the 1997 and 1998 US Open.

You also may recall our earlier efforts in developing a biomechanical model of a tennis player. We extracted the motions of a forehand return from the 1997 US Open footage and applied those motions to a 3-dimensional skeleton. We later tried a full clothed body model.

On one of our visits with Dr. Paul Roetert, then the USTA's administrator of sport science, he told us adding muscles to the skeleton would create a better tool. Coaches, trainers and even players would be able to see and understand the muscles activated during play. This could aid in understanding why and how certain muscles are developed for tennis.