A quick look at the many play and practice opportunities at our fingertips.
Note: each page of Getting Started has a multiple sections. Make sure to get to the HECS Guy button at the end of each section.
What are they exactly?
Patented balls made from special yarn, handmade in Canada, designed to be the perfect wall-practice training tool for racket sports. They're simple and unique, with a whole world of hidden potential for us to explore.
As we learn about what we can control and improve, there's nothing more simple than the Hand. After all, it's your direct connection to your racket.
How hard do you squeeze your grip? Do you use all your fingers? Can you move the racket easily? Can you smoothly change to the optimal grip? Two handed grip or one?
With HECS Balls, this connection will get stronger, smoother, more relaxed.
Your eyes are critical for reflexes, making good decisions, tracking moving targets, and so much more.
To use your vision effectively, we can train specific qualities, like how your head is turned to make use of your dominant eye, track fast shots with more efficiency, and trusting your vision to inform your brain and muscles to move you. Skills can become automatic faster when your eyes do their best.
With HECS Balls, your eyes will be tested in various ways, training the small muscles of the eye, but also how fast your brain makes sense of the game.
Though your Eye abilities are subtle, racket sports rely on vision, which makes this attribute incredibly powerful.
Whether you think you’re coordinated or not, we’ll be able to do incredible things with HECS Balls.
In racket sports, we must strike a balance between giving our best effort and being relaxed enough to move around smoothly. Better coordination means spending your energy only on what's important.
With HECS Balls, we can practice navigating tension levels with every shot. We can practice as intensely or as casually as we want, giving us the freedom to focus on details that are usually lost in the pressure of games and lessons.
When you build harmony between the two extremes of effort, skills easily transfer to the court for the next game session.
We can’t all be professional athletes, but that’s okay. It takes an unrealistic amount of time, money, focus, and energy to perfect your skills to achieve such a level. With HECS Balls, you gain.
Your skills can improve beyond the time you spend on the court. With 5 minutes per day and a consistent focus on small details, you won't even have to break a sweat to make real positive changes to your game. You can even learn something from a coach and practice it 1000 times immediately against a door if necessary.
You have potential for training skills, refining your best shots, and learning new ones. Even ‘bad habits’ you’ve had for years can be changed with a few minutes per day. There’s no downside to trying and exploring your limits.
As with most things, if you take care of them, they'll take care of you! Here are some quick tips and reminders to keep your HECS Balls in good shape.
DO NOT PULL on the strands. Your HECS Balls will last a VERY long time if they keep all of their material intact.
If they happen to be in need of a good clean, they can be washed by hand with some soapy water. If you accidentally let them wash and dry in a washing machine/dryer, they’ll be fine, but sometimes grab lint from clothes!
Always be mindful of your surroundings. Make sure there's nothing breakable like furniture, lights, or other things you'd like to avoid contacting.
HECS Balls are safe on most surfaces, but your racket is not. Be most careful with controlling your racket!
Before hitting them against the wall, get to know how the balls bounce and behave off of your racket.
Start with hits in the air.
With the three balls, you can get a completely different training experience by simply switching balls.
Whether you have a giant wall or a space the size of a poster on a door, HECS Balls will bounce back. Any limitations and constraints you have in a training environment can be used to your advantage to focus on specific elements. When we say 'practice anywhere', you're only limited by your imagination.
Start with controlled hits. You'll find the #1 and #2 easier against the wall. The #3 takes some getting used to, as it absorbs your power and requires strong hits or speed to maintain a rally. Take your time building up your control first, aiming the ball up, down, left, right. Add some power to shots to see how each ball bounces back.
Here's a quick video showing most of these things in action. (No need for sound to be ON)
Wall practice with HECS Balls is NOT the same as your sport. They are NOT replacements for shuttles and balls made for the full-court game. They don't bounce like pickleballs, don't spin like ping pong balls, etc. They behave in their own unique ways, with the emphasis on enabling practice of hand-eye coordination skills universal to all racket sports.
|
Definition: HECS Ball "Exercise" We'll refer to an 'exercise' as WHAT you do when you're hitting the ball. Later on, we'll look at HOW, but for now we can keep it simple. The first and most simple exercise is aptly called "Basic Hit", but there are dozens of exercises that cover all of our bases. For a more advanced exercise, see the "Block to Lunging Lift". |
After you've hit around for a bit, we'll take a look at what truly makes HECS Balls unique and extremely effective at improving your racket skills.
Now is a great time to go hit around, take a break, come back when you're ready to dive in
