Exercise of the Week 18 - Stability - Follow the Leader Series

This week's Exercise of the Week is actually a series of stability exercises, that come from the SuperMovers Level 2 programme.

They are partner drills, where each player takes turn to lead. You can also lead the drill as a coach/parent by challenging your player to touch your racket.

The series progresses from the most stable to least stable base.

1- Two-leg/Bilateral Exercise - Squat

2 - Split-Stance Exercise - Split-Squat

3 - Single leg/Unilateral Exercise - Single leg balance

The goal is to challenge your partner/player to reach and touch your hand/racket, while maintaining a good athletic position based on the type of stance.

For example, if you are performing the squat variation, they when observed from the side, you should still see a solid squat 'shape', using the legs to get low while trying to keep the body as upright as possible.

So if we observe the kinogram below, we can see that the 'follower' (player in pink top), actually doesn't use the legs well, therefore her upper body folds forward, which produces a poor athletic shape.

Whereas below, if we watch the follower in the split-squat version (player in the red top), they do a much better job of maintaining a solid lower body athletic shape, which allows them to hold a more upright upper body.

The ability of player to create these strong athletic positions if very important as these underpin their movement on the tennis court, at SuperMovers we call these the 'Tennis Shapes'. 

Additionally, it is the goal of the coach to be able to observe the player's shapes, communicate with the player if the shapes are not optimal and finally understand how to intervene and help correct and improve the shapes via exercises and drills such as the ones in this post.

As always, I hope you have found this post helpful, please comment below if you have any questions or requests for future exercises.

If you want your players working on their key Tennis Shapes, then look no further than our player programme. Click here and for a limited time offer of 10% off the annual subscription by using the Back to Tennis code BTT10 (offer ends Sunday 5th September).

Last week's exercise - Exercise of the Week 17 - Agility - Movement into the court