Scott and I were sitting on the court discussing the various considerations that must be taken into account when devising a sports-specific training program. As we were talking, a man from another court walked over to us, he was curious about the Clubbells and asked us what we were doing. We told him what they were and how we were going to use them to enhance tennis performance. Without hesitation, and I mean none whatsoever!, he picked up a Clubbell and started swinging it like a baseball bat with both arms. Scott informed him that you don't want to exactly mimic the sporting action because it will compete with the coordination you have developed to carry out that skill with precision. Next, he tried mimicking a serve and told us that it was difficult to do with both hands. Next, Scott told him that you don't swing a Clubbell with two hands. Armed with these two valuable pieces of training info from Coach Sonnon, and forgetting one of them, he tried to mimic the serving motion with the club. Yikes! Eventually he started to walk away. But before he could get away from me, I stopped him, and asked him for a few tennis balls… I forgot to bring my own and we would need them later!

This man's demonstration probably saved Scott about 10 minutes worth of explanations, so we moved onto the Clubbells. The first thing we worked on was the basic swing, a basic element of all of the drills we worked on later. My experience with kettlebells helped shorten the learning curve with this, however, there are a few key differences between a Kettlebell swing and a Clubbell swing. The first and most obvious difference is that the weight swings outside of the legs, rather than between them.

Our experiment to crank more juice out of my serve was the most interesting part of our meeting. The idea was to have me hit a few serves, do one rep of an exercise, and then hit a few more serves. I will not explain the intricacies of the drill I performed, because the video will do a much better job of putting an image to the terminology.

Anyways, I first cleaned the Clubbell to "order". I then brought it into the "back" position and took a side-step out and cast the bell into side pendulum, ending by parking it after the arm swing subsided. After performing this drill, I picked up my racket and hit a few serves. I noticed an increase in power after each set of the exercise, in fact, some of the later serves definitely would have been aces! One important note of the protocol we used is that it did not induce fatigue. It was not a "workout" and I did not break a sweat or even breathe heavily. The goal here was to optimize my muscle software for power. Since excessive fatigue contraindicates power, I stayed fresh for the entire duration of the experiment.

Another important thing to note, as our friend demonstrated to us earlier, is that the drill we performed did not attempt to mimic a real serve. Instead, it used movement patterns related to a serve. This was a much more sophisticated method than other "tennis-specific" workouts I have seen, which I will describe for comedic value only. This is the Weider principles in action: tricep kickbacks to simulate the snapping action of the elbow, wrist curls for a powerful flick of the wrist, the French press for moving your arm from behind to front, quarter squats because a real squat is too hard to teach, and of course a hundred crunches and side crunches. This idea of isolating each muscle group in the sporting action does absolutely nothing to contribute to the development of a whole-body, integrated movement. What I did today was integrated, total-body and sports specific. Another advantage of the Clubbell is its portability (a major advantage of the kettlebell as well). Imagine all of those Nautilus machines sitting on a tennis court…

Specific Physical Preparedness (SPP, also called Sports-specific) is one of the most misunderstood and confusing topics in the training world, but it is the holy grail of athletic preparation. The Russians were the first to capitalize on SPP, but fortunately pioneering trainers like Scott Sonnon, Pavel, Ethan Reeve, Coach Davies, Dick Hartzell, and a few others understand it and are bringing SPP to the people. The most advanced training of today is a blast from the past. It's a good time to be training.