Trying to develop procedural skills using declarative learning methods is very inefficient. I recently had a player who told me she was watching the tennis channel. I asked if she learned anything. She said yes and began to explain in some detail how the elbow was to move during the take back (this is an attempt to use declarative methods to teach a procedural skill). There is a serious fallacy in trying to train procedural skills with declarative methods: The two forms of learning are independent and unrelated and in different parts of the brain. The association pathways needed to make this work efficiently just do not exist. So she was beating her head on the wall, or as my graduate thesis professor would describe it: she was thrashing around in the bushes. The take back is dependent on player position, ball position, ball trajectory and dynamics and even player anatomy and physiology. To avoid falling into this hole, organize the stroke around results and efficiency leaving as many of the details to the player as possible. Declarative regimentation of any part of a stroke will reduce the player’s ability to adapt to the chaos of the tennis rally. (Ray Brown)