IMPROVING COURT SENSE: PROPRIOCEPTION DRILLS
Learning to SEE and Move Like David Chapman
By Boak Ferris, Independent Researcher in Neuroscience and Sports Science
CONTEXTS
If you wish, or are in a hurry, you can move straight to the drills, below. In the meantime, for those who have interest, here follows some background about why this article became necessary. In elite sports, when coaches and athletes spend so much time on preparing for competitions around the corner, they have little time left to catch up with the most recent sciences. After reviewing coaching and athletes’ practices in court-sports around the United States, England, Ireland, and France, I have found little to no mention of proprioception, outside of specialists’ papers and articles, though it is the fundamental ability by which elite athletes triumph in a prescribed competition space.
Proprioception-science is already over 100 years old! First proposed in 1906, and then proven and modified between 1906 and the 1950’s, the science integrates—and continues to evolve—findings from sports-science, kinesiology, neuroscience, and child-development fields.
“Proprioception” in human beings integrates three systems of “sensing” required by elite athletes: the “sensorimotor,” the “somatosensory,” and the “kinesthetic” into one holistic sensory system, by which all sub-systems integrate [These three are expanded a bit and defined below]. By developing proprioception, the very best athletes reach a peak-understanding of how their bodies move and execute within a four-dimensional evolving space. It can be improved and developed by dedicated skills, drills, and practices, some of which are included below, and many of which you can invent, create, and apply, as you get the hang of it.
A HANDBALL ROLE MODEL of PROPRIOCEPTION MASTERY: DAVID CHAPMAN
Before progressing to THE drills, may I mention that we do have an outstanding role model to emulate, and from whom we can “borrow” skills and disciplines: TGO, David Chapman.
With the recent passing of Lew Morales, David Chapman’s beloved coach, I was led to recall how Lew used to say, “David sees and understands the court in a way no one else can see it. He never made a move without a purpose to it. And he always knew where you were. He always took the shortest path to the ball. And he always knew what you were going to hit.” Then Lew closed with, “He may have been slow of foot, but he was fastest to the dominant court-position.”
I once asked Lew Morales how David had acquired these skills, and Lew had a simple answer: he said, “David started so very young, and, as a kid mapped the court into his brain. He also read his opponents, once he saw them play, and mapped their speed and skills into the court, too, without having to waste energy. He knew right where his body was relative to the ball, the court, and the opponents.” Just as easy as that, for Lew to see and understand. Without being familiar with the formal neuroscientific term for these integrated skills, Lew knew that David’s mind had a superior 4D evolving brain-map of the competition space, relative to his own handball shots and body. Lew even often talked about “controlling time” as one of David’s elite skills, to change tempos, and/or to lull the opponent into changing tempos.
As a skill, proprioception is most easily developed by learning any relevant kinetic activity at three, four, or five years old, as did David.
THE NEUROSCIENCE
Now, those of us who today study brain development have learned that when infants and children receive early and repeated experience moving their bodies in a prescribed space, they develop superior balance, coordination, perspectives, and abilities in that same defined space, as their brains wire and integrate their entire musculoskeletal, sensory, and nervous systems to manage that same space with enormous conservation of energy and resources.
The three systems involved include first, the sensorimotor, or the internal brain-to-nervous-system connections with nerves, to muscles, and to bones, incorporating actions of the musculoskeletal system; second, the somatosensory, whereby the six-senses integrate to connect and understand why the body experiences sensations in a prescribed exterior space, via the tactile, the auditory, the visual, the olfactory, the gustatory, “mood”; and finally the chrono-kinesthetic, the timed delivery of a set of physical skills within the prescribed space, with the utmost conservation of energy. To external observers, who watch such elite athletes exhibiting their mastery, such full integration of proprioception can appear supernatural. Please allow me to offer the following accessible exemplar. Anyone who has studied martial arts, or more precisely, let’s say, jiu-jitsu, knows that a 65-year-old master can engage a less-experienced, and even considerably younger, student with eyes closed, and grapple-with and throw the lesser-experienced practitioner, simply by using all engaged senses to feel, map, and anticipate the opponent in the space. Ka-Boom!
For interested readers out there, other accessible examples include not only the five-year-old David Chapman, but also 3-year-old children who study ballet, boys and girls; or Balinese children, enrolled in Balinese dance from their first days walking; or Sikh boys, who learn very eclectic and specialized Sikh martial arts from ages 3 and onward, and so on.
Similarly and arguably, three-year-old Amadeus Mozart learned piano and composition, with rapid almost instant keyboard mastery, even being able to demonstrate playing while underneath the keyboard or blindfolded, or both, while also exhibiting supernaturally rapid music-notation and sight-reading.
While such children, upon becoming adults, may have intimidating advantages over the rest of us common practitioners in the defined spaces, we can still learn from them. Imagine improving your handball or tennis-ball or opponent’s movements’ “reading” speed 600 %, just by drilling with a few exercises, allowing you to accelerate your ability to anticipate during on-court action!
Fortunately, modern neuroscience proves the aging brain remains plastic, so we all, at any age, can improve our proprioception and rewire our brains by practicing special drills and exercises! These recommended drills below are introductory, and follow no special order, but they do sub-classify into on-court drills, and off-court drills. Yes, you can improve proprioception off the court!
On-Court Proprioception Drills
1A) Stand two arms’ length away from the back wall facing the backwall near the left rear corner if a righty, and near the right rear corner if a lefty. (Corners are labeled from the POV of facing the front wall.) With your dominant hand, drop the ball next to your strong-side leg, and drop it so it rises to about mid-thigh. Let it bounce twice, so it arrives to a comfortable height relative to your waist and hand.
Now, lift your dominant hand up next to your cheek, and strike down on the back of the ball with your palm in such a way as to loft or hit the ball to the front wall (behind you) so that the ball contacts near or in the front wall same-side corner. Aim in your mind to hit the front wall about one foot to two feet up. As the ball leaves your hand, you CAN pivot around slowly to see how accurate you were, but do not rush this little pivot. Note, however, that it is even better for the drill, if you don’t look at all at how effective your shot was, and instead, simply hear and judge where it contacts the front wall, and next sidestep to where you think this ball will return to, still facing the backwall, and keeping your back to the front wall the whole time. After each hit, see how closely you can move to retrieve the ball, on its return. After ten ball-drops, from one corner, repeat this drill with your non-dominant hand from the opposite corner.
This drill teaches you to see the full court with your mind, and not with your eyes, while measuring the dimensions of the court with your mind, and not with your eyes. It also teaches you to judge the passage of time in the court-space in a counterintuitive manner, measuring time with your body and feet, rather than with your eyes as you judge the ball flight! It especially teaches your ears to judge dimension from sound, echo, reverberation, and anticipation.
1B) Once you groove in drill 1A, and can always hit the front wall, straight-in, near your target corner, judging by the sound, and by how the ball returns up the same side from where you hit, let’s now tweak the drill. You will now hit a two-wall V-pass, front wall-opposite sidewall, from the same starting position, keeping your back turned the entire time. Similarly, judge your accuracy, by back-stepping or sidestepping to where the ball should arrive after your strike, based on the height and angle you hit the pass as the ball leaves your hand.
2) For this next drill, in your mind, divide the front line into three equal line-segments, numbering from left to right. Now stand at the right-most juncture of segments two and three if a righty, or at the left-most juncture of segments one and two if a lefty. Your job from here is to drop the ball in front of you, and hit it up, underhanded, as a perfect mystery shot, up to left-center high on the front wall, then to the front-court opposite-side-wall, so that the ball that travels about twelve-fourteen feet high over imaginary opponents’ heads, (go ahead and visualize them not being able to reach the ball above their heads), and contacts the rear-court same-side wall on the same side as your starting position.
Ideally, in your visualization, the ball should hit the second rear-court same-side sidewall about one to two feet up from the floor. Two secrets exist for this drill. First, you want to see how close to the center of the front wall you can hit the ball with upward clockwise loft, if righty, using a pendulum (under-armed) swing, to achieve a best final result. (Or a counterclockwise spin if lefty.) Second, you do not want to pivot fast to judge the accuracy of the shot, when it contacts the third wall, but watch the loft as it contacts the front wall and then the first front-court sidewall, and then pivot slowly, so that you observe the ball travel overhead and then watch it hit the rear sidewall just as it arrives. This drill teaches you the shape and dimension of the court with your body and mind, from a front-court perspective. It’s not far from this drill to learn to hit perfect speed shots during rallies, from center court, since your inner map of the mental distances from front to back and side walls will become more and more refined. Tweak this drill, by repeating it, but now, by never watching the result, but just by listening for where the ball contacts the third wall, and then where it next bounces on the court.
3) For drill three, stand at the restraining line, facing the front wall, in the center of the court, arms out to the sides parallel to the floor. (Mirror this drill, depending on your dominant hand, as the description here is for a righty—though all should do the drill to both sides.) We will be doing a crossover-footwork drill. Still aiming the center of your torso forward, toss the ball directly toward the right side wall so that it bounces twice before contacting the right side wall. You can turn your head to watch the bounce. Now, keeping your right foot on the same spot, pivot 90 degrees to the right on that right foot, so that you can bring your left leg in front of and around your right standing leg, striding with your left foot directly toward the right wall and toward the bounced ball. This biomechanic, known as a crossover step, is the fastest way to move laterally on any court, a fact TGO knew.
Your next job is to hit the ball, after it returns gently from the sidewall, to now hit it straight up the right side-wall. Keep your back to the front wall, because when you stride like this, the center of your torso points kind of toward the rear right corner to achieve a closed-stance “Trophy Position”: when you strike the ball, your left foot points right at the right side-wall. Your right foot is still back near center court where you started, though maybe you had to pull it toward the right wall a bit. At ball-contact, the line drawn from your left toe to your rear right toe is parallel to both the front and the back walls. If you cannot reach the ball to hit it, during this drill, you may need to add a stutter or drag step, where you pull your back foot a bit more toward the right wall, but, nonetheless, you want to contact the ball right near the top of your left foot, or just behind your front shin, with an underhanded or pendulum swing, to draw the ball right back up the sidewall so that the ball travels between you and the right side-wall. To keep the ball-return aligned up the right, backswing behind your butt a little bit more, if need be, and follow-through assertively with your hitting arm right up the right wall.
Now, here’s the difficult part: do not watch or judge your shot! To judge whether you hit the ball up the wall, wait in this trophy pose until the ball comes back to your left foot from the front wall. Just enjoy the burn in your front quads. If the ball doesn’t return to your left foot, or between you and the right side-wall, stay positive and keep practicing. You can improve this drill, best, by simply looking for a spot on the ball during the strike, which your hand must caress “upward” in order to draw the shot right back up the side-wall from this “closed position.” This spot on the ball, is just like the right spot on a cue-ball to hit with the cue, and corresponds directly to a target spot on the front wall, and you are trying to caress this spot with a smooth pendulum and underhanded stroke, with a follow-through parallel to the right side-wall. You don’t need to see the front wall target spot when you shoot, as it is always “diagrammed” on the back of the ball like an invisible hologram!
This drill trains your body and mind about how to hit the best shot in handball, the up-the-line-pass, with the correct biomechanics. It’s about improving awareness of your body in the space. But, it’s also about time-management. You must teach your brain how much time you have—or don’t—to close your position, prior to hitting any shot, which this drill reinforces! A closed-position shot is ALWAYS harder for the opponent to anticipate, for obvious reasons, related to disguising the shot, and screening the hand-contact, (I think!) While it also yields consistently way more leverage and accuracy than the majority of open-position shots. TGO always tried to finish a front step toward the intended target when he struck the ball.
4) Here are two, kind of silly but, enormously effective, drills. Stand at the front line and toss the ball underhanded up to the front wall, so that the ball arcs directly back to you, over your head, and you can catch it behind your back, by reaching back with your hand. Once you can do this consistently, with your dominant hand, switch to your non-dominant hand. Next, move to the short line and try these. Then to the restraining line. This drill reinforces your brain’s body-map as it connects to the 3D space. For the second drill, go on the court, and simply kick the ball around the court, chasing it. Aim to kick kill shots, or pass shots, or high shots. This drill reinforces your musculo-skeletal and nervous-system connections, as the brain maps BOTH hand/arm-foot/leg movements together as a holistic unit, when developing proprioception.
5) And we will finish today with a cool backwall proprioception drill, whereby we focus entirely on back-pedaling and body-positioning relative to a ball caroming off the backwall. Approach the back-wall to practice backwall shots. Now, toss the ball, or bounce the ball, into the backwall, and immediately back-pedal toward the front wall so that the caroming ball will arrive dropping to your solar plexus or to your navel.
If you’re a righty, strive to back-pedal left-right-left, and always keep it simple to just three steps, to time it so the ball arrives in front of, and slightly below your navel, at about a half-arm’s length away, right on the third step. That third step will be a partial back-pedal, partial
Now, swing both arms and shoulders back and the forward, together toward the front wall, so that you can bowl the ball with your dominant hand with an underhanded motion, in front of your navel, so that the bowled ball hits near or in the front right corner, if righty, or into the front left corner if you’re a lefty. Bowl it by deliberately letting it roll through your palm and fingers. Once you feel the balance and timing involved, next teak this drill as almost exactly the same, except, this time, let the ball drop to just behind and in front of your front heel as you finish your third step, before bowling it into the same-side corner. You might need to take a wider final third step, if need be, to keep your balance, all so you can lower your arm and hand to the floor. This is not a side-armed shot. Then immediately, after finishing your strike off the backwall setup, take two to three steps toward front center court. Always add the move to center after this drill, as a necessary part of it. Here, you learn David Chapman’s smooth timing on his nonpareil backwall secret.
Off-Court, At-Home Proprioception Drills
1) Daily, practice navigating your dwelling entirely with your eyes closed. Judge distances using only memory, or with hearing for reflected echoes, or listening for and knowing the sounds the house or dwelling makes. Or by detecting smells that change through sections of the house or dwelling. It’s OK to protect yourself with your feet and hands, or to touch things as you navigate around. Until you can do it, hands-free.
2) Consider any routine task, like making your coffee, or washing dishes, or loading the dishwasher, and do the entire task with your eyes closed.
3) If you have stairs nearby, great! Climb and descend them, only going backward. Hold the banister, and watch your feet. Feel the different muscles used. Once you can do this without needing to hold the banister, or without needing to see, now go up and down, backward, with eyes closed.
4) Use a handball or a soft juggling ball indoors for this drill. Toss the ball up, and then catch it behind your back. Or toss the ball up, and then kick it with the soles of your feet. A handball might break nearby objects, so a soft practice-juggling ball, or hackey-sack, may sufice.
5) Spend twenty minutes a day, crawling around on the floor. Especially watch your hands as you place them down, while crawling around the house. Experts in infantile neurodevelopment have identified prolonged infantile crawling as the baseline kinetic activity that accelerates human proprioception, and also accelerates language-acquisition, and rapid reading comprehension. The science is too long and involved for inclusion here–please take my word for it. And you can crawl even as an adult to improve your language and reading speeds, and these speeds will cross apply to other activity-areas where you have to judge space, distance, and time relative to where your body is. And by the way, when family ask what you are doing, simply reply, “I am evolving my Proprioception!”
*References available on request.