In the course of my playing tennis in the last fifty years, I found that I got hurt in some way here and there. Of course I needed some time for my body to heal or I went to see chiropractor. In the former case, it is simple, I just take it easy with rest. Usually, it improves little the first week, then heal better and eventually recover completely. In the latter case, a chiropractor would perform some muscle manipulation and circulate my blood circulation nicely. Usually I feel better the first week, however, the second week, it sort of return to the original pain. So I just kept visiting him some more times. After 4 or 5 more times of visiting, eventually, I got the pain healed too. However, the tricky thing to ask is whether the healing is due to the chiropractor or just by natural healing as the case without visiting chiropractor. Since the time of healing between the two cases of healing is about the same, why should I go to see chiropractor? After all, the end result is about the same to my body. I always think life should be simpler the better. So eventually, I stick to the natural healing at home with some good rest.
However, in the last ten years, the time of healing was getting longer and longer. As we all know that when we are getting older, it takes longer to recover our pain or to heal. I lose the patience for this kind of wait for healing. I gradually develop a new way and procedure to handle the problem. Nothing is really a miracle, it is simply a way to work around to avoid the same kind of pain.
Several years ago, with my age getting over 65, I found that my backhand under-spin shot caused pain in my elbow. I waited for a few weeks and saw little improvement. I decided to change the stroke using both hands. With my tennis tutor machine, I practiced the new stroke for a few weeks and got a good handle of the trick. When time went by, I regained my record to match the old stroke. So I kept playing like this for sometime and satisfied my standing and performance on the court. One early morning, while I was chasing some fast pacing ball on my backhand, I just have to use one-hand under-spin stroke. Surprisingly, I could hit it nicely without feeling pain at all. After all, it might be that it just took such a long time to recover my previous pain. I suspect it may take shorter time to do it, but I didn't test or verify it, so I don't have valid data to prove my point. Anyway, nowadays I can perform my backhand with single or double-hand without problems. It is even better that I can choose whichever way I like at the moment to execute the stroke. I also found that with 50% time of single-hand and 50% time of double-hand, I can evenly distribute my muscle load to the body.
Good thing usually doesn't last long. Until one day, I found that my powerful forehand drive became weaker and eventually also caused muscle pain. It is really a frustrate thing that see your killer stroke going away. I know when we get older, our muscle shrinks further and so becomes weaker. But the pain in the elbow can not be the excuse. I did the same as before and in vain. So I did the good old trick, change the stroke or the method how I hit the ball. I started to learn the stroke of two-hand forehand. With the ball machine on the court for a few weeks, I got to the point that I can perform this stroke with some confidence. I just need to run a little bit faster to compensate the limitation of the stretch of arm. When I was ready to play the game on both-hand forehand and backhand, I become a new man, a new old man on the court. It is a new experience in my life. Not only I hit the ball easier, but also I distribute my load of hitting ball more evenly among my arm and muscle. I feel more eased and feel better with more evenly distributed load to my body. I used to have bigger right hand, but now my left hand gets a shot and exercise that it grows larger.
So far my tutor machine is doing nicely to me for the adaptation. I am not sure what else I need in the future. The machine is simple and costs not much for me to handle. The only drawback I get is that it somehow sometime got the ball stuck in the hole that holds up the whole thing. I have to stop the routine to manually clear up the problem and restart the machine. There are many different types of ball machines on the field. The 'Tennis Tutor Lite' is the one I use. It is light and easy to carry around with a price tag of about $800.
