Why Fewer Pictures for Tennis
Pictures are powerful. They’re quick to absorb, visually engaging, and—as the saying goes—“worth a thousand words.” In tennis, we’re used to seeing pages filled with photo sequences: shoulder turns, follow-throughs, picture-perfect stances frozen in time. While these images have value, they tell only a fraction of the whole story.
Michael Meng
9/10/20252 min read
This website does include some illustrations—mainly where STEM concepts like angles, leverage, and momentum are easier to grasp visually. Think of these as blueprints. A blueprint can outline a structure, but it can’t capture the loads of people walking through a building.
So the complete design books typically include blueprints and calculation manuals: the blueprints include plan views and structure detail drawings; the calculation manuals include load analysis and structural strength calculations. Without the calculation manuals, the blueprints can not become reality.
In the same way, still images for some special action can highlight some positions, but they can’t reveal the internal forces of the action like tennis groundstroke..
Likewise, the real essence of tennis—not only the internal forces, but timing of motion, velocity, and the dynamic sequencing of the body—can’t be captured in snapshots alone. A camera can freeze a frame of a forehand at impact, but it can’t show the wave of force that is created by your body’s dynamic skeleton structure of legs, hips, torso and arm with the racket. It can’t show how your brain calculated and controlled motion timing or how your eyes tracked the ball and communicated with your feet and hands.
These are invisible dynamics — happening in real-time—and good tennis players require more than just visual cues to understand, they live beyond the reach of a camera lens, so they have to feel, explore, and internalize.
True tennis learning begins in the mind. Your brain isn’t just a filing cabinet for techniques—it’s a simulator, a physics engine, a problem-solver. It processes sensation, feedback, and motion, building models that allow you to generate power, control timing, and adapt under pressure.
That’s why this book emphasizes concepts, mental models, and mechanical awareness rather than endless photo sequences. Because to truly elevate your game, you must train more than your body— train your mind to feel, analyze, and direct the dynamic skeleton at play.
The most powerful image in tennis isn’t the pictures on pages—it’s the imagination you create in your head: living, evolving mental images of dynamic skeleton structure, balance of forces, and control on moving. Unlike a static photograph, your mind’s eye can replay, adjust, and perfect that image until it becomes part of your game.
We need dynamic 3D images in mind with feeling of forces, not static pictures.
