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Introducing RacquetFit: The Body-Tennis Connection
For almost as long as TPI has been around, coaches, fitness professionals and medical practitioners have been using the screen to evaluate athletes in striking, throwing and rotational sports outside of golf. Whether in baseball, tennis, hockey or cricket, understanding how an athlete moves can better inform our coaching, training and treatement.
Though the TPI screen and training principles are extemely useful for programming and gaining insight into a rotational athlete's movement capabilities, the system isn't specific to an athlete's technique in sports outside of golf nor does it comprehensively evaluate every movement pattern that is unique to those sports.
A sport like tennis has a number of similarities to golf, but there hasn't been a way to evaluate movements that are specific to tennis. Until now.
Introducing RacquetFit and the Body-Tennis Connection.
In 2015, Dr. Rose was approached by U.S. Professional Tennis Association (USPTA) CEO John Embree about creating screening and training protocol that were specific to tennis. Working with some of the leading minds in tennis and sports performance, Dr. Rose and the team of RacquetFit advisors created the Body-Tennis Connection.
Like TPI, RacquetFit studies how the body moves in Tennis and assesses an athlete's physical ability to perform movement patterns specific to the sport.
Though there is some shared leadership, RacquetFit and TPI are independent companies with a shared mission: to study how the human body functions in relation to their sport so athletes can perform better for more years.
To give you an example of how RacquetFit screen illuminates the Body-Tennis connection, here's Dr. Rose discussing the physical parameters related to Early Racquet Drop, a common characteristic in the tennis serve.
RacquetFit offers two seminars: a Level 1 seminar which covers the 13 tennis serve characteristics and teaches 15 tennis-specific screens. The Level 2 seminar focuses on the 16 characteristics related to ground strokes.
Additional information on RacquetFit Certification seminars can be found on the RacquetFit site.