Athletic skills in tennis
If you’ve been enjoying Wimbledon in the last few days, you’ll have noticed that tennis requires an amazing combination of athletic skills. Agility, strength, balance, co-ordination, a focused mind, stamina, peak performance… and the list goes on.
Tennis performance research
You might be interested to find out that as far back as 1990, research was being conducted to examine the benefits of floatation on tennis.
A group of male and female tennis players took part in an experiment.
The group participated in a series of floatation sessions before and after taking part in a tennis competition. At the same time they received an ‘imagery message’. This means that the players were exposed to images of different tennis skills, while they visualised themselves making optimal shots.
A second group received just the imagery message.
Interesting research results
Pre- and post-treatment athletic performance was measured during the competition.
Post-treatment results indicated that subjects who received floatation with the imagery message performed significantly better than those exposed to imagery only, in terms of first service accuracy.
Enhanced performance
This suggested at the very least that floatation can be used to enhance the performance of a well-learned skill by athletes of high ability. Read the full details of the tennis floatation research here.
Since that time, floatation has been used by many different types of athletes for sports rehabilitation, recovery and visualisation.
Fun too
But you don’t have to be an athlete – tennis or otherwise – to enjoy and gain many benefits from floating….
… as with the strawberries at Wimbledon, there’s always room for pleasure too!
