Meeting Abstract
122.4 Tuesday, Jan. 7 14:15 The soft serve: What tennis players can tell us about optimal performance in vertebrates WILSON, R S*; BROWN, C; WHEATLEY, R; University of Qld; University of Qld; University of Qld r.wilson@uq.edu.au
Intuitively, we expect animals to use their maximum locomotor capabilities during key survival, reproductive and foraging behaviours – yet observations in the field show that animals rarely, if ever, use maximal efforts in nature. Why is this? Biomechanical constraints on movement make mistakes more likely to happen at high speeds – a natural trade-off between speed and control. In the wild, where mistakes can be fatal, movement speeds should therefore be based on a compromise between speed and control, even during extreme situations like escaping predation. In humans, we expect elite sportsmen and women to also balance the competing demands of speed and accuracy, optimizing their efforts for specific tasks and contexts in order to enhance outcomes. We tested this idea by examining the serving speeds of 53 male tennis players during more than 13,000 serves whilst competing in the 2013 Australian Open Tennis Championship. The tennis serve is ideal for such an investigation because it is a motor task that requires both speed and accuracy to maximize success – in this case, winning the point. We first developed an optimality model of serving speed that assumed there was an underlying trade-off between serve-speed and -accuracy. Our model predicted that players should serve at 90% and 75% of their maximum capabilities on the first and second serves, respectively. As expected, player serve-speed affected accuracy – greater serve speeds decreased the likelihood that the serve would land inside the service area. But greater serve speeds also improved the probability of winning the point when the serve did land in – clearly demonstrating the benefits of high serve speeds. We will discuss the relevance of these results for improving serve success in elite tennis players and the development of a similar optimality-based approach for understanding of performance efforts of other animals in natural environments.
