Racquet Sports
{A Written Practice}
Racquet Sports
Tennis, squash, padel, pickleball, ping-pong, etc.
From the perspective of restorative practice, racquet sports are a uniquely wonderful way to coordinate hand and eye. In order to swing a racket to strike a ball, to stay balanced, and not fall down, to move around the court fluidly, you have to coordinate proprioception, spatial awareness, balance, rhythm, and timing.
Because striking a ball utilizes many of the same motor movement patterns that are engaged in self-protective motor movements of fight–e.g., striking a person– racquet sports are very effective ways to work through anger and aggression. There is something that happens physiologically when you strike a ball cleanly that is very supportive to the Autonomic Nervous System clearing out a backlog of incomplete fight responses.
Additionally, because racquet sports involve a back-and-forth, they provide an arena to play out relationship. We can rally, which is a form of dancing, a form of call-and-response, varying the tempo, intensity, and depth of shot-making. In this manner, racquet sports can be a dance that moves from collaboration to competition: rhythmic and organizing to our nervous systems. It can build our sense of cadence, and timing, and relatedness in relationship with another.
Skills from racquet sports are transferable to other domains in your life. Playing racquet sports builds proprioceptive awareness. It builds spatial awareness and agility because you have to be organized spatially to move effectively on a court.
Racquet sports are deceptively simple. Although each of them have their own rules, you basically have a racquet, a ball, and some version of a net or backboard. You learn to strike the ball from your forehand side, from your backhand side, from high, and low.
Racquet sports are lifelong sports. You don’t need a whole team to play them. One other person will generally suffice. They are games that you can play at any level from basic to elite.
Tennis is arguably the most difficult and complex. Then you have squash and padel. Then perhaps Pickleball. Finally ping-pong. If you have mobility issues, or a fear of falling, you can move to a simpler and less demanding version of racquet sport while still enjoying the benefits it brings.
If you haven’t already figured this out, I am a huge tennis fan. I love watching the sport, and I love playing it. I find it to be one of the most beautiful games that exist. At a high level adult competitive level, and I’m still astonished by the degree to which there are levels so far above my own as to be almost in comprehensible.
I recently was thoroughly trounced by a 17 year year-old with a national ranking. He was good humored about our match, which was not even close. At the end, I was sort of laughing about this when he pointed out that the way that he beat me about how badly he would be beaten by pros on the tour.
If you watch tennis in television at home, because the camera angles capturing the court are so high up it does no justice to the actual velocity of a 120 mph serve, or a 95 mph forehand. To play at this level requires lightning reflexes and exquisite timing. And since the ANS is responsible for the fine-tuning of musculature, elite tennis players have to master a very refined autonomic dance. They must be able to move with speed and agility (mobilized), while mantaining exquisite ball control (connection system). And so racquet sports also provide a forum for precisely refining Autonomic calibration. That’s a lot of benefit from a single sport.
Related Practices:
Movement practices, such as Soccer, Bicycling, Rollerskating, skateboarding, and surfing. Hand-based practices, such as painting, calligraphy, sculpting. As well as Qi gong and Stretching and Dance.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.