You’ve Seen This Before
A beginner steps onto the tennis court.
Their movements are stiff, awkward, robotic.
They grip the racket tightly. Their swing looks forced. Their footwork is hesitant.
And the coach steps in with:
“Relax your arm!”
“Loosen up!”
“You need to flow more!”
But what if that stiffness wasn’t a problem to fix?
What if it was part of the learning process?
Enter the Degrees of Freedom Problem
In the 1930s, Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein introduced a concept that remains central to motor learning: the degrees of freedom problem (Bernstein, 1967).
How does the human body control all the possible joint and muscle movements to perform coordinated, skilful actions?
The human body has over 600 muscles and more than 200 joints. Each joint can move in multiple directions, meaning the number of possible movement combinations is enormous. Coordinating all of these in a smooth, intentional movement, especially in a dynamic sport like tennis….. is a major challenge.
When learning a new skill, the body doesn’t yet know how to control all these variables efficiently. So it simplifies.
It freezes degrees of freedom, restricting movement in certain joints to reduce complexity and increase control.
Why Beginner Movement Looks Stiff
That robotic look you see in a beginner isn’t a mistake. It’s a smart adaptation. By limiting the number of joints in play, the learner simplifies the coordination problem. This allows for:
- Greater attentional focus on the outcome
- Fewer opportunities for failure
- A foundation of stability upon which more flexible movement can later emerge
This stage is known as the freezing phase in Bernstein’s three-stage model of skill learning:
- Freezing – reduce available movement to gain control
- Releasing – gradually allow more joints to participate
- Exploiting – use the full dynamics of the body to optimise performance (Bernstein, 1967)
When coaches mislabel early coordination as “bad technique,” they risk disrupting this adaptive process.
Why Traditional Corrections Can Backfire
Traditional instruction often focuses on correcting movement from the outside in:
- “Bend your knees more!”
- “Keep your elbow up!”
- “Swing through the line of the ball!”
But these instructions don’t respect the learner’s internal coordination process.
They also:
- Increase cognitive load
- Create dependency on verbal cues
- Undermine self-organisation
Research by Chow et al. (2007) and Davids et al. (2008) highlights how over-coaching disrupts the learner’s ability to discover functional movement patterns. Instead, coaches should design environments that guide learners toward solutions without prescribing every movement detail.
A Better Coaching Approach
So what should a coach do instead?
✅ Set clear task intentions
Give players meaningful problems to solve:
“Land the serve deeper in the box.”
“Can you create space and recover to the middle?”
✅ Design representative environments
Create activities that preserve perception-action coupling and present real affordances:
- Use live balls, not static feeds
- Introduce opponents or targets
- Include scoring or decision-making elements
✅ Allow time for coordination to stabilise
Repetition without repetition — repeating the problem, not the movement, is key (Renshaw et al., 2019).
As the system becomes more attuned to the environment and task demands, players naturally begin to:
- Unfreeze more joints
- Move with better timing and efficiency
- Develop adaptable, functional skills
The Broader Implications for Tennis Coaching
This understanding challenges many traditional tennis development pathways that:
- Emphasise technical modelling too early
- Rely on isolated basket feeding
- Reward appearance over adaptability
By contrast, an Ecological Dynamics approach:
- Recognises variability as essential to learning
- Views movement as emergent from interaction with constraints
- Encourages coaches to shape rather than instruct
As Seifert et al. (2013) explain, skilled movement emerges through the interaction of individual, task, and environmental constraints, not from copying idealised models.
Final Thoughts: Let It Emerge
When you see stiff movement in a beginner:
- Don’t rush to correct it
- Don’t confuse freezing with failure
- Don’t rob the player of the opportunity to self-organise
Instead, understand it as the first step in a natural progression.
Because coordination isn’t given….. it’s discovered.
And real learning doesn’t come from eliminating stiffness.
It comes from exploring, adapting, and emerging through action.
References
- Bernstein, N. A. (1967). The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., Button, C., & Renshaw, I. (2007). Nonlinear pedagogy in skill acquisition: An introduction. Routledge.
- Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. (2008). Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: A Constraints-led Approach. Human Kinetics.
- Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Newcombe, D., & Roberts, W. (2019). The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design. Routledge.
- Seifert, L., Button, C., & Davids, K. (2013). Key properties of expert movement systems in sport: An ecological dynamics perspective. Sports Medicine, 43(3), 167–178.
#TennisCoaching #SkillAcquisition #EcologicalDynamics #Bernstein #MotorLearning #PlayerDevelopment #ConstraintsLedApproach #MovementScience
