How do paradoxical interventions and learning from „mistakes“ work in tennis training? In older posts we already talked about “paradoxical interventions”. For example, players are given observation tasks or movement tasks that at first glance seem completely absurd (throwing the ball by the coach from the player’s back, i.e. with a trajectory that goes away from the player or during service training that prompts the player to only use his „free“ arm to look out for)

I found a fine example of the effectiveness of such interventions with behavioral scientist Milton Erickson: “How do you get a cow into the barn? Two possibilities come to mind spontaneously: I pull the collar or I push it from behind. But what if both don’t work because the cow is fighting back? Milton Erickson had an idea: He pulled the cow (paradoxically) by the tail and immediately she ran in the other direction, straight into the barn. „