Almost 30 years ago I was teaching tennis to a lovely girl who just resisted every creative attempt at getting her to “naturally” loop her forehand stroke. In a moment of blind frustration/inspiration, I cut a hole in a tennis ball, pulled out a shoelace, tied it like a 2’ long yo-yo, and handed it to her declaring, “Now try to keep THAT from looping.”

She most definitely looped.

That pinhole I poked into the new universe of pure timing (no strength) led me down an intriguing and very interesting path. Suffice it to say I had to abandon nearly every preconception and standard tennis instruction technique in service to the truth of the new understanding.

Ultimately, this congealed as the Effortless Tennis system. I then took this understanding to skiing, and then golf, with equal results in those areas.

Succinctly, results are obtained really using EITHER timing/position OR strength. Fundamentally, they are mutually exclusive. In the real world, we, of course, use some strength, hoping for a preponderance of co-ordination and a minimum of forceful coercion.

Let me say this clearly and directly: I routinely let the student demonstrate that a voluntary reduction in strength of about 80% yields HUGE gains in power, endurance, comfort, mechanical soundness, and most importantly, FUN.

As someone once noted: “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” In drastically short form, a figure 8 motion (like the ying-yang infinity symbol) is the actual path of fluid, drastically energy-reduced motion.  There are several intriguing ways to “trick” ourselves into doing this. Most of these simply remove the possibility of using strength as a compromiser for the timing/position. For instance, swinging the “ball-string” offers NO possibility of using strength, as there is no rigid connection between the momentum (the ball) and the motor (us) via the string. We HAVE to LET it do its thing. When I let students translate this utterly natural, truly effortless and free motion into racket swing, the results are just amazing. In golf, taking the right hand out of the position of power using the full overlap grip yields the same improvement. In skiing, standing bolt upright and facing downhill to trigger the turns again does the job in an absolutely effortless, quick, pleasureful way.

Obviously, to give you the in-depth experience and understanding of this new approach to the exiting essence will require more than just a few words. Hence, I have expounded on this approach at length in the “Effortless Approach”, available as CD, or hard-copy.