Technique Is Not a Shape to Copy

When someone comes to me who has never held a racket before, I don’t mention forehand or backhand. I don’t talk about technique. We just start playing.

I send a ball to their right side. Something happens. The arm swings, the racket comes through, the ball goes somewhere. What emerged? A forehand. Nobody taught it. The body found it.

I send a ball to their left side. A backhand emerges. Usually a one-hander. Sometimes the racket switches to the other hand entirely. Almost never a two-hander, unless the player has watched tennis and decided to copy what the pros do.

Then we need to start a point. I ask them to put the ball cross-court into a small square. What happens? Sometimes a sort of underhand serve. Sometimes a bumpy overhead. One player did something I had never quite seen before, part swing, part push, part instinct. It worked. The ball crossed the net. It landed in.

That is what I call a movement solution. The body, faced with a problem, finds a way. And honestly, that moment never stops being wonderful to me.

Technique is not a fixed shape. It is problem-solving through movement. That distinction changes almost everything about how coaching works.

Why “Movement Solution” Changes the Question

The usual framing around technique is corrective: there is a right way, and the coach’s job is to identify the gap between what the player is doing and what the right way looks like. Straighten the elbow here. Turn the shoulder more there. Step in like this. The assumption underneath it all is that good technique looks a specific way, and most players are imperfect approximations of that shape, to be gradually corrected.

I find this framing increasingly limiting. Not because technique doesn’t matter, but because the question it asks is not quite the right one. “Is this technique correct?” is less useful than: what movement helps this player solve this problem, in this moment, with this body?

“The question is not whether the technique is correct. It is whether this movement helps this player solve this problem.”

Take the serve. One player uses a wide slice with a relaxed wrist. Another drives through with more body rotation. Another adjusts the ball toss position. And in the right situation, like an opponent standing very deep behind the baseline, an underhand serve can be the most effective movement solution available. None of these is “correct technique”. All of them are answers to the same problem. The right answer depends on the player, their body, their proportions, their tendencies, and the context they are in.

There are patterns, principles, and useful references. But there is no single perfect shape that belongs to everyone.

Exploring Together, Not Mandating

What I love about the movement solution framing is what it does to the coaching conversation.

Once that natural backhand has emerged, I don’t say “now here is the correct grip.” I say: have you tried holding the racket like this? I’ll send the ball to your left side again. Try using two hands this time. How does that feel?

Never forcing. Never mandating. Just exploring together the different solutions that exist.

The body already knows how to search for answers. The coach’s job is to create conditions where that search can keep going. Environments that are safe enough to experiment in, engaging enough to stay curious, and close enough to real situations that the solutions found there actually transfer when the pressure arrives.

Then the conversation looks like:

  • What happens if you aim wider?
  • What changes if you use more slice?
  • Where was the ball when you felt the most control?
  • What did that movement let you do?

These are genuine questions, not instructions in disguise. The goal is to help the player build a richer picture of what is happening, so they can start guiding their own search.

There is something durable about a player who knows how to find a movement solution. Their technique might not look like the textbook. But when the ball comes in differently, when the opponent adjusts, when the conditions change, they have a process. They can search. They are not dependent on the one shape they were shown.

A player who has only ever reproduced a model is fragile in a specific way. The moment conditions depart from what the model was built for, they know what they were supposed to do, but it is not working, and they have no way to find something else.

The ability to search, experiment, and discover what your body can do is far more durable than any specific shape. That is what coaching is ultimately for, not to install technique, but to help players develop the kind of relationship with their own movement that lets them keep finding answers as the questions keep changing.

You might also enjoy: Practice Should Prepare You for the Game You Actually Play

References and Further Reading

  • Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Bernstein, N. A. (1967). The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. Pergamon Press.
  • Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. (2008). Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: A Constraints-Led Approach. Human Kinetics.
  • Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., Button, C., & Renshaw, I. (2015). Nonlinear Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition: An Introduction. Routledge.
  • Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Newcombe, D., & Roberts, W. (2019). The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design. Routledge.