It's 12 minutes before 8, Vic Braden is one of the best known and most respected tennis

coaches in the world.

He teaches all kinds of players right from the beginners all the way up to the top professionals.

But Vic has always had a dream, a dream of using modern science to help athletes reach

their full potential.

Well not just tennis players though, but golfers and runners all kinds of athletes and now

that dream is becoming a reality, at least at Vic's Tennis College near Laguna Beach

in Southern California, recently David Hartman visited this unique institution to see what

Vic is up to.

Sports records are made to be broken and even though every year we see faster speeds, longer

jumps, more excellence in all sports, one mystery remains and that is why an athlete

on a given day can perform better than ever before.

In the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Bob Beaman made a jump that's been called the greatest

single feat in the history of recorded athletics.

It fell to him like his regular long jump, but it was almost two feet farther than the

world record.

There is now a kind of analysis that can tell us specifically why Beaman's jump was so

good.

It uses high speed films and computers.

Just like say Jimmy Connors have been studied to see millisecond by millisecond what speeds

and forces are in play when they are at their best.

The CODO Research Center in Southern California is one of the few places in the world where

this kind of research is being done.

It's run by Gideon Arielle, a former Olympic athlete and pioneer in this kind of work,

and by Vic Braden, he's a sports psychologist.

He's coached some of the best tennis players in the world.

They have found ways to help not only world class athletes, but those of us hackers who

just like to get out and do our best on the weekends.

To find out how the process works, I ran through my paces, such as they were, for the

cameras.

And then I asked Vic to explain what was going on.

First we take high speed films because we have to because the human eye can't record

all the movement, so the movement.

So the first thing is to get high speed films on the performance.

That's slow motion.

Right.

Then we go to our exercise physiologist, Ann Penny, who then goes on the screen with

a sonar pin and she touches all the joint centers and then the computer connects them

and it comes out in a stick figure.

And then what are you doing?

Then we go to the computer and with Dr. Gideon Arielle, our computer scientist and the man

who really devised all of these methodologies with the computer and put all that software

together, he now takes all those forces and gives you all that intricate kind of data

as to where those forces vectors and everything else are.

Gideon, how does my running style, if you will, compare with Bill Rogers?

See yourself running against Bill Rogers a little bit faster than you even knew both

lost a lot of weight, but if you look at new pattern of running, you see that you're running

up and down, up and down where Bill Rogers is very, very smooth.

So if I keep my upper body flat, straight and keep the legs going, I'll use less energy,

get there sooner and I won't pound my knees and my back, right?

That's correct and it will be safe away offline because the way you run now, you transmit

a lot of forces into your body.

How's my golf swing?

As you see, your golf swing looks very nice, the only thing that I see that you don't

use the most efficient way is that your front knee is moving forward.

What's wrong with that?

By moving forward the front knee, you're losing energy, it's like trying to throw something,

you always try to stop the legs in order to transmit energy to the arms, but in your

case, you're just moving it very smoothly and you can't accelerate the club as much

as if you would stop the front knee.

So the energy is going out of my leg when it should be up in my hands and in the club?

That's correct and if you would stop abruptly before the impact you need, this energy would

be transmitted into the club.

Gideon are the things that I could do to improve my body physically to make me a better athlete.

Well, let's go upstairs and I'll show you a new intelligent exercise machine that

has a computer in it that actually will exercise you at the proper way to develop your muscles

in the shoulders and in your arm.

Whenever you're ready, let's get ready, you'll push it as hard as you can and the computer

will monitor your level of force and assign you the proper amount of force for you, David

Hartmann.

Ready?

Go.

As hard as you can.

Down, let's go down and again, you did 99 pounds, that's an average.

Let's push as hard as you can and on the way down, that was 91, you get a little bit tired

and the next one, 86, which is normal and when I look on the fourth scale, you're strong

in the beginning, 160 pounds, until the end, you're getting weaker.

Right.

So I'm going to assign, you know, a proper exercise that will actually exercise you where

you're weak and at the area where you were weak, as you remember, it was around here

and you see the little arrow here, it will stop for two seconds.

At that point, you will have to push as hard as possible, even though the bar stop on you,

you continue to push.

That was fake on me at that point.

At that particular point, where you're weak, there's no other machine that has this intelligent.

Ready?

Go.

Go.

You know, Newton and Galileo got there before all of us.

Physics dictates what happens to a ball, a football or anything and what we're going

to try to do is take a simple language and help explain sports, but it's all based upon

physics and if we can give you all that complicated data in simple terms, then everybody's going

to be the most efficient and what's so fun about that, David, all the people around

the world, imagine 260 million people in this country finding out that they can be much

more efficient in joy sports and they could be much better not thinking they're uncoordinated

and all of a sudden maybe they're going to head for Wembley.

Maybe they're just going to be the best player in the block.

If I do everything you tell me to do to improve athletically, how good could I get?

Well, I say that where you really belong is as a host of Good Morning American.

Well, second pet, what an incredible machinery.

Right now it's five minutes before...