One of the most significant contributors to mitigate injury in the aspiring and/or active professional player/athlete is the ability to integrate functional movement into your game. The ability to adopt a stance that is open to and accommodates functional movement is a head start that most developing players are deprived of and in turn not taught until well into their formative years when they’re on the cusp of potentially turning professional. The draw back here is two fold — one, the player/athlete needs to recondition their current technique to incorporate functional movement, and two, are more susceptible to developing an injury due to their repetitive motions to movements not aligning with functional movement principles.
The best and most natural way an athlete can take their health and wellbeing into their own hands is by integrating these patterns of play.
Imagine for ten whole years using a technique, or multiple that do not align with functional movements and respective patterns of play. In tennis, it may be the groundstroke to your serve and if your body is not equipped and/or accomodating these techniques in a way that works with your body, that’s a potential ten years of overuse of an area of the human body that is being worn out and becoming more and more susceptible to an injury over time discussed more broadly in What is Your Game Missing, to Win?
That’s the thing, these type of injuries linger in the background until it comes full frontal and you’re left to deal with years upon years of a technique that was responsible for causing this injury in the first place.
In order to avoid these types of derailing injuries, functional movement patterns and their integration in your game is a head start. And one of these natural by-products is momentum. By using momentum in our game not only are we allowing our body to move more fluidly with motion, but we’re also not relying on ‘muscling’ the shots with our upper body, for example, as we learn to use our body as a whole and work with the ball. Little steps that progressively call upon functional movement and its steady integration into the varying technical patterns not only leaves a player at a significantly reduced risk of injury, it in fact sets the player up for greater success in the years ahead.
To listen to this week’s episode and dive deeper into momentum, visit Beyond Top 10 Tennis for all the links to listen to our Podcast wherever you prefer listening to them.