You know what, I thought about this a different way. I'm not hung up on this either.
Let's say the amount of time a ball is in contact with a blade is always between .1ms and 1ms. Always way faster than something you can feel. Now I'm okay with the idea that the amount of time that the ball is on the rubber and blade face may ALWAYS be too short a time for us to ACCURATELY feel it.
So, here is the scenario: regardless of that, with a blade that allows you to feel "the ball contact" better, YOU CAN feel the difference between good contact and bad contact. You can feel the difference between smack and brush, between thin brush and and deeper brush, between crunch and pop (crunch = loopdrive with spin and deep contact; and pop = corking sound from heavy topspin on a counterloop vs an incoming ball that also has heavy topspin).
Now I don't care if what I feel....if what the vibrations from the blade to my hand to my brain represent exactly what is actually happening. And anyone who tries to tell you that during a stroke you can feel bad contact and change it to better contact is just fooling themselves. Because that is just nonsense. You can't change the contact mid-stroke.
But over time feeling those sensations helps your neuromuscular system sort out how to make more refined contact.
Our brains and our nervous systems are nothing short of amazing.
And part of how we know that good contact is good and bad contact is bad, is that, as we feel the sensation of bad contact, our shot is invariably a mishit or a weakly hit ball and not the shot we were attempting. And when we feel good contact, we also see a good quality shot.
Now I am going to talk about something else for a moment and get back to wrapping up what I am saying even though, perhaps you can see where I am going. I like stories.
So, Since I started playing at 44 I can remember some of those fundamental skills not being there and then kind of magically appearing. I can remember not being able to see sidespin and somehow magically missing the ball and feeling like it went right through a hole in my racket. I can remember starting to be able to block heavy sidespin loops and thinking, "wow, I got my racket on the ball." And I can remember starting to see sidespin right off contact and having a pretty decent idea of where the ball would end up as it was being hit. Then I also remember a point where to return those sidespin loops I had to return with inside out spin or I couldn't control them. And then I remember getting the feel of returning a sidespin loop with even more sidespin. All these things occurred on a subcortical level. I had no idea the development was occurring. And somehow, my brain put the pieces of the puzzle together without my conscious knowledge or understanding. It simply happened over time.
I also remember hitting with a friend who is lefty. I train with this guy a decent amount. His lefty hook is pretty good. I remember just not being able to see the ball right. It was a very odd and frustrating experience. My brain just couldn't piece together where the darn ball was. Now, I should qualify this. When I was hitting with my BH I was fine. But when I was trying to take his hook with my FH, it was like the ball was a phantom. I saw it. But I really just couldn't judge at all where it was in space. AT ALL!!!!
With this one too, I remember my brain at a certain point pieced the puzzle together and just started to know what to do with a lefty hook. I got good enough at handling lefty hooks that at a certain point, when I hit with DTran--he is a lefty who is a 2400-2500 player--I didn't have much trouble reading and counterlooping his loops....to the point where he was impressed because he knows my level and he knows guy's way higher level then me who had more trouble with them than I did.
Anyway, what is all this stuff about? Our neuromuscular system is pretty cool. When you think about it, just the fact that you can contact a ball in a way where you only touch the tiniest part of the edge of the ball while it is coming at you pretty fast, from a short distance away, with a curve, arc and kick from the spin on the ball, and you can move to it and make that kind of precise contact is pretty amazing.
And in spite of the length of time that the ball is in contact with the racket, I am willing to put money on it that the vibrations you feel from the contact last longer the the contact. And since we do feel something even with a blade that has things like carbon which block much of the vibrations, with one of those rackets we STILL FEEL SOMETHING when we hit the ball. There is, in fact something that you feel in your hand from the racket that roughly corresponds to the racket hitting the ball. Part of what that means is the vibrations from the contact last considerably longer than the contact.
I think I should say that again: the vibrations from the racket hitting the ball last longer than the time the ball is in contact with the racket.
If this was not true, based on the awesome information Baal has presented about us not being able to feel something that lasts under 10 milliseconds would mean that when you hit the ball, no matter how you hit the ball, no matter what kind of quality of contact you make, YOU WOULD NOT FEEL ANYTHING because the contact is too short for us to feel it.
And the fact is, you can feel, you can feel different kinds of contact. And even if you are NOT paying attention to the feeling, on a subcortical level, some part of your brain actually registers the stimulus and your neuromuscular system will, over time, adjust and you will find yourself with better contact, more refined contact, better touch, timing, ability to adjust to the placement of an incoming ball. Just like how I couldn't see or figure out where the ball was in space against those lefty hook shots and, over time, my brain just started piecing things together. I was looking and couldn't figure it out, couldn't see it, my brain could not process what my eyes were seeing, and, in stages, I started seeing what was actually happening and understanding it more accurately.
This is one of the values of a 5 ply, all wood blade with the extra feeling. Without you realizing it is happening, it helps you refine your contact and touch.
Sent from the Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy
