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One of my mom’s new hobbies is pickleball. Pickleball is a new sport, very similar to tennis, and is the highest growing sport in the nation right now. Pickleball is played on nearly the same court set-up as tennis, but the courts and rackets are much smaller. Another large change from pickleball to tennis is the ball used. In pickleball, they use a plastic wiffle ball, which is very different than the green fuzzy tennis ball.

To please my mom, who needed an extra pickleball player for her doubles match, I agreed I would go play with her, even though I had never played before. She gave me a brief rundown on the rules on the way to the court, and I had promised her I was most likely not going to be any good. It was hard adjusting to the bounce of the plastic ball at first, as well as adjusting to a smaller racket frame. Because of the difference in the ball bounce, it resulted in a change of footwork. The ball did not bounce as high as a tennis ball, meaning I would need to get to the ball sooner than in tennis. As soon as I was able to learn the knew frame of the racket, my footwork quickly adjusted to this sport.

One transition that was easy was that pickleball uses very similar form in groundstrokes in tennis. The most fundamental shots, forehands and backhands were almost the same, so once the footwork was down, I was actually just as good as the rest of my moms friends who had been playing pickleball for years.

This easy transition from pickle ball to tennis can be attributed to positive transfer of learning. Even though I had not put in nearly the same practice into pickleball, I could still keep up with regular pickleball players. The skills I had learned on the tennis court had positively transferred onto the smaller pickle ball court. Transition of learning is the idea that one skills practice can transfer to another, resulting in a gain or loss in proficiency in the skill that did not experience practice. In the case of playing pickleball, the skill of playing tennis for several years had transferred to pickleball.

This can be described as positive transfer as there was beneficial effect in my transfer skill from my practiced skill. The reason for my transfer from tennis to pickleball can be proven using Thorndyke’s identical elements theory. This is the idea that transfer occurs when two tasks share a number of similar elements. One of the similar elements used to prove this theory is observable elements. Observable elements are seen in each shot between pickleball and tennis. Volleys, forehands, backhands and overheads are all performed the same, and because I have spent countless of hours practicing these shots, it was easy for it to transfer, even when using a completely different racket.

Below is a demonstration of a pickleball forehand. When comparing to Federer’s forehand in topic two, you can see that both movements are nearly the same. The racket head is facing towards the ground, there is a guidance from the non-dominant hand, and a follow through to the other side of the body.

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As I got older, I became more and more confident in my tennis abilities. Even though I was seeing great strides in my tennis game, one thing began to bother me. My brothers were getting much stronger than me, and I, a newly turned teenager was not gaining muscle as fast as my brothers. I found myself falling behind the two people I had competed with my whole time playing tennis. But as the annoying little sister that I am, I would not let this stop me.

One way I thought would help me keep up with my brothers was to start hitting the ball harder. If I wanted to begin hitting harder than what my body could easily perform, I would have to increase my racket head acceleration, allowing for a faster ball speed. In the beginning, I did not make many shots, and was losing my consistency in my groundstrokes. This can be attributed to the speed-accuracy trade-off. The faster I wanted to swing, the less accurate I would be in my performance. Fitts’ idea of the speed-accuracy trade-off was discovered in 1954, and he found that with increased speed, came with decreased accuracy. The harder I hit, the less accurate I was going to be in my shots.

I was so determined to increase my racket head speed, that I neglected accuracy in order to perform at a higher velocity. As time continued, I was finally able to start hitting at speeds that would allow me to complete with my older brothers. I wish I could say that just swinging faster allowed me to keep up with my brothers strength, but what actually allowed me to hit harder was getting older and stronger. Fitts’ Law on speed vs accuracy was a hard lesson I had to learn as a naive 13 year old girl, but fortunately, with time, I was able to compete with my brothers again.

Below is an accurate representation of my reaction once I had gotten older, and began to hit the ball harder.

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Whenever I couldn’t get either of my brothers to hit with me, I would end up setting up a court time with the ball machine. I used to think the ball machine was the coolest thing. You could set up your preferences on the machine, and it would feed you balls in the exact order that you had asked it to. You could set it to feed you a whole cart of forehands, backhands, approach shots, you name it, the ball machine would give it to you. My backhand was always worse than my forehand, so sometimes, I would only hit backhands for half of my court time. This can be described as blocked practice. I would hit only backhands, then only forehands.

The ball machine had another setting, which would project a ball in any random position on the court. It was mainly to work on my footwork, as I never knew which shot to expect. This was called random practice. The last setting I could use was picking the order of which balls were fed to me. I could ask for a forehand, backhand, forehand approach shot, backhand volley, repeat. This setting is used to describe serial practice.

People perform the best when they are practicing in a random order. They might not show the best results during practice, but they will perform the best during the match. The reason that random practice is better than blocking is because in random practice, you are utilizing more working memory and remembering your action. With random practice, you are constantly reconstructing your action plan because you do not know which movement you will need to produce. With the tennis ball machine, if I knew I was getting 40 forehands in a row, I knew exactly the movement I would need to perform. If it was random practice, I would not know whether or not I was about to perform a forehand or backhand.

Unfortunately for me, hitting backhands for thirty minutes at a time without switching to a different stroke was my favorite setting on the ball machine (reaction to this realization below). This probably explains why my backhand is still trash, so hopefully I can take the knowledge from this class, and apply it to my practice from now on.

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I started to really get into tennis around age 8, when I could consistently make contact with the ball, and was beginning to be able to aim my forehand, and backhand. One of the fundamental forms of tennis is using your opposite hand to guide the ball out in front of you. This is one of the first things you learn, because especially as a child, a guide hand helps you reach your movement potential. As your non-preferred hand is guiding your movement, you preferred hand is completing the groundstroke. Bimanual coordination is used to complete this movement on a variety of shots; forehand, forehand volley, overhead, and serve. It was difficult to guide my left, while also focusing on my technique in my right hand. At first it was hard to do as both my limbs were performing a different task, which is called asymmetric bimanual coordination. Luckily, both the guide action in my left, and the original backswing in my right hand both started and ended at the same time.

As we learned from class, the task with a higher index of difficulty determined the movement time of the actions. Because the backswing has many factors to it, including racket head speed, grip type, and frame angle, it has a higher index of difficulty. Therefore, the ID of my backswing dictates how long both actions will be. The asymmetric bimanual coordination leads to temporal coordination between guiding with my left hand, and completing the stroke with my right. Even though guiding your movement may seem elementary, even the best pros utilize it in very sport.

Below is a video of Roger Federer, who has the best forehand on tour. You can see him using his left hand to guide is movement, and he pulls his hand back in once his forehand is completed.

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I began my tennis career when I was just 6 years old. I had begged my mom to take me to my brothers tennis lesson so I could play with them, and I was hooked immediately. I still remember the exact court I was on when my brothers started cheering for me because I had finally made contact with the ball. Throughout my fourteen years of playing, I say major strides and triumphs with this sport. There were highs and major lows, but overall, I saw quit an improvement during my tennis career.

Of course, starting a sport at such a young age was not going to be pretty. Fitts and Posner’s three stage model can explain just how my performance improved over all these years. My first years playing tennis, I was in the cognitive stage of learning. In this stage, I was seeing large improvements in my game. I was learning which strategies to use, and when to use them. I was also ignoring strategies I found not helpful. These strategies were very cognitive, and I would have to think my way through my movement. For example, when switching between a forehand grip and a backhand grip, I would have to cognitively think about the action to achieve the best potential outcome of my movement.

As I continued my practice and my cognitive process of movements began to decrease, I transitioned into the second stage of learning, the associative stage. During this stage, I did not make as noticeable improvements, but I did become more consistent in my performance. I now was determining the most effective strategies to obtain the best performance outcome. I had always had troubles with my serve as a child, the ball always seemed to go into the net. I tried everything to approve my serve from a higher ball toss, to standing closer to the baseline. One strategy that has stuck with me to this day is keeping my head up longer. It was natural to me to take my head down as soon as I made contact with the ball, but when I kept my head up longer, the ball would have a higher trajectory, resulting it to go in. During this stage, I also began noticing my errors after each shot. During my serve, I began noticing whether or not I took my head down too early, or kept it up too long. I wouldn’t be able to fix it during the movement, but I would know how to change it for next time.

Now, whether or not I have fully entered the last stage is still up for debate. The autonomous stage is mainly automatic and you now can detect and fix your movement as it is happening. This leads me to believe that some of my movements are in the autonomous stage, and some of my movements are still in the associative stage. Like I stated previously, my serve was always a struggle to me, and I still use cognitive processes to maintain the correct movement. Luckily, you get two serves in tennis, so when I detect my error during my first serve, I can correct it during my second. One area where I noticed autonomous movements was when transitioning between forehand and backhand groundstrokes and volleys. Now that I reached a level with faster paced serves and shots, I need to have a quick reaction to switched from a backhand to forehand grip. I no longer have to cognitively think about changing grips when the ball is approaching me at increased speeds, it just happens naturally.

Below are two pictures of my serve, showing the strategy of keeping my head up longer. The one on the right is from my freshman year in high school, and the one on the left is when I was a senior in high school. The two pictures look very similar, but any tennis player would notice the difference. In the left picture, my head came down too early, resulting in my shoulders and torso dropping as well. In the picture on the left, I most likely hit the ball in the net. The picture on the right is when I am utilizing the strategy correctly. My head was kept up, resulting in a better posture in my shoulders and torso. This strategy is still not automatic, but it is nice to see what it is actually supposed to look like.