“I wish they had chosen a right-hander to demonstrate. I had a little trouble identifying with these videos.”
“Why did you use a left-hander for your videos? It really throws me off.”
Just a couple of the responses from our members to our decision to use a left-handed tennis player in our instructional videos.
This conundrum really got us thinking at intosport.com HQ.
The player in question, Lucy Fletcher, is seriously good at tennis and extremely competent in the skills she is demonstrating. However, some of our right-handed members have really struggled to learn from the videos in which she appears.
What to do?!
A little research into this matter would suggest that our right-handed members have a genuine grievance.
There are a number of different learning styles, but it is generally agreed that when it comes to learning a new skill, particularly a complicated sporting one, ‘visual’ learning is key.
A rather famous psychologist in the 1960’s named Albert Bandura formulated the ‘Social Learning Theory’, part of which can be summed up with this concise quote from the man himself:
“Most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling. From observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed.”
Mr Bandura makes an excellent point. When trying to learn something new, it makes perfect sense to view complicated skills, such as the topspin forehand, exactly as you would like to perform it yourself.
This visual learning of the ‘whole skill’ is then reinforced by the audio instruction, freeze frames and diagrams in our videos.
The solution?
Our extremely clever production team have managed to ‘flip’ the left-handed Lucy Fletcher so that she now miraculously becomes right-handed- clever stuff! We really hope that this coaching innovation will help our right-handed members, and enhance their learning experience.
Do not fear though lefties, the original videos will remain on intosport.com and on our YouTube channel. You are just as important as the right-handed masses!
Best Wishes,
The intosport.com Team