Many people hear the word fitness and almost have an allergic reaction, why? Well, one reason is that exercise has long been used as a form of punishment for misbehavior. Even in tennis many teachers have fallen into the trap of acting like drill sergeants and giving students exercises as punishment for making a mistake. I learn my personal lesson about this, the hard way. Let's listen in.
And if you are like me, the longer we have been teaching, the more we realized that teaching as an art board. It is not an easy thing, it's not mechanical and we can't get out there like drill sergeants. I remember the first group lesson I taught, this is a true story, it was in Hawaii 1975, at a club called Hawaii High (ph) and I had a group of eight ladies. I was 22 and they were in their 30's, and I thought they were old ladies.
At that point in my life and we had four in each court, leaving the remaining tens, then we called them in, and when they made a mistake, I said okay if you make a mistake, you have to run a lap around the court, and within two hours, the manager had heard about it, and called me into his office and rest assured if I continued teaching like that, I were then flying back to New York.
Just hearing that story again makes me cringe so just how can we integrate fitness drills into large group classes. After all it is very important, one way is to combine exercises with ball handling skills. In the example you are about to see, only two workshop participants are demonstrating the activity. But you should be able to easily visualize how 50 or even 100 people or more on a single court could be doing the same thing. Always remember that handing exercises with large groups are easy, if you pair the participants. Large groups are just multiples of smaller groups. This particular segment is a good example of making exercise fun and skill building at the same time, let's take a look.
Push ups are probably the least liked exercise you can find. But in this sample, we will incorporate ball skills with a push up position so that we will gain fitness while the players are actually doing some. So let's have you guys play catch back and forth in a push up position, where we go, go in a push up position and play catch.
Alright, make it switch hands and then here's the second ball, Mark you ready toss to him, toss to him and the variation is two balls and you can do left, right, right left, they could do it on the bounce, you guys bounce, bounce now. Throw it on a bounce now, on a bounce now, ten in your row and you are done Mark. Are you hurting Mark?
Mark: I am fine.
Joe Dinoffer: You look like you are hurting, but I trust you. Yes give them an applause, okay. Okay push up position ready, here we go, now you roll between legs, feet apart a little bit, I will take the ball, get a ball Mark, give your ball please, ball. You don't need a ball. I roll, you catch and toss it over your head to me. Ready the first team to five quench ready, set, go. Roll, toss, back, toss, we got to catch it for to score. Two, three, four, over your head, over the head, five. So it gives you another idea of how to incorporate fitness into tennis, without them really knowing that they are getting a workout. Okay, well done.
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