Brad Langevad
Sport Biometrics
Brad Langevad and Biomechanics
Tennis is Brad's primary passion and he played the professional circuit for a few years in his youth. Despite the best coaching at that time a couple of my strokes kept letting me down and this also led to painful injuries. Brad began to question the way tennis was being taught at senior coaching levels and within professional coaching associations.
After completing a science degree he began to explore the use of bio-statistics, physics and computer technology to examine the movements of the body and apply it to my tennis students. It became clear that conflicting body movements restrict a player’s ability to hit the ball fluently and equally important, causes significant injury.
So, to test my theories Brad analysed videos of hundreds of players, from top professionals to every day club players and realised that he was moving towards a biomechanical definition of each perfect shot. Not only were these shots strikingly consistent with the biomechanical theory he was developing but, most radically, they were very different to the coaching orthodoxy of the day.
Brad analysed still and moving images of all the top players, not just the top tennis players but also golfers, cricketers and footballers.
What he found was to help me define the coaching philosophy he has used for the last 20 years.
Slightly to Brad's surprise he found that the top player’s strokes had a great deal in common. Despite the idiosyncrasies that made them appear different, their strokes varied only marginally . They were all following the same biomechanical principles, naturally, and often in defiance of their coach’s methods.
From these studies took several years but from them, which took several years, Brad developed a range of what he considers to be the best strokes for each situation on court. Brad filmed the best exponents of that shot and these became the computer models on the computer against which he could compare students from beginners to professionals.
The spin principle describes the intention of the action
After completing a science degree he began to explore the use of bio-statistics, physics and computer technology to examine the movements of the body and apply it to my tennis students. It became clear that conflicting body movements restrict a player’s ability to hit the ball fluently and equally important, causes significant injury.
So, to test my theories Brad analysed videos of hundreds of players, from top professionals to every day club players and realised that he was moving towards a biomechanical definition of each perfect shot. Not only were these shots strikingly consistent with the biomechanical theory he was developing but, most radically, they were very different to the coaching orthodoxy of the day.
Brad analysed still and moving images of all the top players, not just the top tennis players but also golfers, cricketers and footballers.
What he found was to help me define the coaching philosophy he has used for the last 20 years.
Slightly to Brad's surprise he found that the top player’s strokes had a great deal in common. Despite the idiosyncrasies that made them appear different, their strokes varied only marginally . They were all following the same biomechanical principles, naturally, and often in defiance of their coach’s methods.
From these studies took several years but from them, which took several years, Brad developed a range of what he considers to be the best strokes for each situation on court. Brad filmed the best exponents of that shot and these became the computer models on the computer against which he could compare students from beginners to professionals.
