Chain Reaction Biomechanics. Part 9. The Shoulder Complex.

Should, and do these statistics worry you? Shoulder pain is extremely common in tennis players. Studies suggest up to 25% of high-level players aged 12 to 19 and up to 50% of middle-aged players have shoulder pain. The pain is mainly linked to overuse injuries related to repetitive activity of the muscles around the shoulder (particularly the rotator cuff) and imbalances in those muscles that stabilise the shoulder blade (scapula). I want to help you understand how working with an understanding of chain reaction biomechanics will aide prevention, enhance performance and support rehab if required. It’s worth noting that professional players are not immune, viz a young British hopeful with recurring shoulder problems who has had to miss the entire grass court season this year.

If you have been around  amateur tennis for anytime you will have come across players with current impingements, histories of past acute injuries to themselves or others they know or have known, chronic shoulder pain and a preference for underarm serving. These anecdotal stats are surpassed only by the number of players with shoulder pain who play on and  consider it a normal condition, not worth worrying about.

In my 30 year career coaching tennis, I have seen more variations of serving than I can or want to remember. One that stands out was actually an overhead, but with the same action as her serve, which made me wince as I was standing nearby at the net. It was a supervised club night  and a relatively short lob went up. The player smashing went into a crouched position, slightly sideways on and bowled her racket arm over to contact.  She manged to hit a winner somehow and was applauded by her friends. My gentle technical query was met with ‘get the job done, anyway you can’ which was echoed by another player who was just returning from a long lay-off for shoulder surgery. This was a Friday night club session at a tennis center and not the first round at the French Open, which makes the sentiment all the more surprising.

I worked with three siblings last week who were pleasant and reasonably talented players with varying degrees of proficiency in their games. They all mentioned serving as an area that they wanted to improve. The eldest teenager boards at a prestigious independent girls school and plays 2nd team tennis for them. I managed to persuade her that baseline rallies was something she could do anytime, and that a better understanding of footwork patterns and the chain reaction of the serve, would be time well spent and motions she could revisit when back at school next month,

She resisted a little at first as she was getting what she needed and not what she thought she wanted. With gentle persuasion about the needs and benefits, she warmed to the task and began to produce more power effortlessly on her forehand and more control on her backhand. She began to understand  the role of the feet in the chain reaction that produces fluent, effortless and repeatable groundstrokes. Her serve was more difficult to remedy but we achieved a level of consistency in her action that will allow her to add the power she desires, from the ground up. She had come to understand what she needed to do and was now keen for her brother, who was on next, to work with me on his serve and not his groundstrokes as their mother wanted.

Her younger brother was football mad, not surprisingly, and already knew that his feet were not just for standing on. We managed to achieve some tennis specific  changes to his already active feet and the resulting power and control amazed him. We only had time in his half hour lesson to establish some basic serving principles but the results were immediate and encouraging for him.

The middle sibling attended a different prestigious independent girls school, and had spent some time at a world renowned tennis academy, this summer. Like her siblings she was a reasonable athlete and her first love, floor gymnastics gave her a good understanding and experience of the body’s connectiveness. Her groundstrokes improved markedly as I helped her draw on what she knew from her gymnastics. Her issue with the serve was how to move from the ‘waiters serve to a throwing action with a chopper grip’. She couldn’t feel any difference when using it and wanted to know how to ‘perfect it’. In fact she was performing the ‘waiter’s serve’ with a chopper grip and getting frustrated by her lack of progress. Like so many trying to learn it, and so many online tutors who fail to understand it, it is the failure to generate internal shoulder rotation that is the problem and not the grip per se:

Although this clip is titled loading the hip, you can still see the action at the shoulder and can plainly see that the arm moves further and faster than the shoulder. This creates relative internal rotation at the shoulder joint which I have mentioned before but won’t dwell on the mechanics again. Instead I want you to see the result by tracking  the racket face position in the whole throw which you can see is on edge all the way up to contact, and turns  180 deg. through contact:

It’s the chopper grip in the action that helps to keep the tip pointing up and the racket on edge. To help my teenager ‘perfect’ her chopper grip action, I got her to throw and hit the ball with the edge of the racket, and then progress to throwing the edge and turning the face through contact as the clip above shows. Her problem was that at the back of the throw the racket face opened with the string bed pointing up as it does in the ‘waiters serve’, making it impossible to throw the edge. We achieved some success and she now has a task, a mental picture, which when practised and repeated will put the shoulder through internal rotation subconsciously, which is how it is  designed to work., as a chain reaction.

Let me make it clear that I am not impugning the work of their coaches as I don’t know what they teach or what and how much these siblings have understood and learnt from them.

My real concern is the potential risk of shoulder problems for players of any age or standard who do not understand or haven’t been coached by someone who understands the design.

This is a quote from a osteopathic practice involved in treating tennis injuries, which is saying a chain reaction understanding is vital in tennis coaching and is the way to safer performance gain.

“The kinetic chain is the linking together of the different body segments during a tennis stroke including feet, ankles, lower legs, knees, upper legs, hips, pelvis, spine, shoulder blades, shoulders, upper arms, elbows, forearms, wrists and fingers. This chain is vital in terms of maximising efficiency and force and minimising the risk of injury to each of the segments including the shoulder.”

In conclusion

Understanding the stats about shoulder injuries I mentioned in the introduction, what are we as coaches and coach educators going to do about it?  Should we be satisfied with what we do if our players are having to spent time out of the game, whether professional or amateur, with injury.

Should we as professionals be worried about our industry and the rise of shortened versions of our game which remove the overhead serve. I work at a venue which from next month will have a 5:1 ratio of court space in favour of the short versions.

It is surprising to me that our Industry will spend millions on providing shorter versions of the game that remove shoulder problems from overheads and ignore the range of other impacts on our bodies, which still include shoulder problems, that these games expose us to. Could it be a financial rationale? Smaller spaces and plastic bats?

Are we doing all we can to minimise the injurious impact of playing our game for our clients or are we going to follow the cultural trend of supposedly lowering requirements rather than raising standards.

How far does our duty of care extend as professionals? Can we afford to ignore design and still be successful in meeting these many challenges?

Let me know.

Best Wishes

Vaughan Ebrahim

LTA accredited Level 4.

Gray Institute, CAFS 2013, 3DMAPS 2017, FGS 2023.