You Can Be a Pro

Lately, given my resurgent interest in tennis, I've gone back to studying how pros his their strokes. Tennis is one of those few sports where people look to the best current players and learn lessons from them. Much of that is due to changing ideas on how to hit strokes.

Tennis "experts" then write books on how to hit the ball, how to strategize, and so forth. But, these books get terribly outdated. They need to take lessons from the computer industry and understand books that are more than ten years old (even more than five years old) are old.

I don't need a book that shows me Edberg, Sampras, and then a series of lesser known players like Cedric Pioline, Richard Krajicek, and Gustavo Kuerten. If you want to appeal to today's players, you need to have Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Andy Roddick, and James Blake. In five years, you need a new crew to emulate.

I've been watching the series On Court with the USPTA, which can be annoying, at times, because of its incessant advertising. However, at the very least, they pay attention to the latest pros. Oddly enough, they show only a smattering of Roger Federer, and almost never show Nadal. Hewitt, who's ranking has fallen is popular, as is Tommy Haas.

In any case, I've been trying to retool my forehand since maybe November of last year. I had been modeling my stroke after Djokovic until about January, when I felt his stroke motion was just a little complex.

Then, I decided to model it after Federer. Federer doesn't seem to be the hardest hitter on the tour, but he hits the best shot under defensive pressure. Nadal's stroke seemed a bit too muscular, too much effort. Federer's stroke seemed economical, yet modern. (Krickstein, for example, has a very compact stroke, but I would rather emulate Federer).

I've seen Federer hit his forehand in slow-motion dozens of time, but I began to realize that it's really hard to pick up all the nuances of his forehand. If you watch his forehand, at some point, his wrist will accelerate forward, and the racquet head will follow behind. Then, the racquet whips until its square, then once hitting, he flips the racquet over.

I had been trying to imitate this, but my arm was pretty rigid, and tensed up. I saw a lesson on how to keep the arm loose and worked on that.

But then I found what, to me, was tennis gold.

Here's the article on Federer's forehand.

What struck me as an epiphany was the idea of dragging the racquet behind. Rather than maintain the angle rigidly, I'm holding it loose and thinking of accelerating my arm. Once I get near the ball I make a rainbow arc, and that imparts topspin.

Note the players shoulders are nearly parallel with the net, as the arm is catching up, and the racquet head is trailing behind.

I gave this a try last night, and it felt pretty good. So good that I ended up not using the "sit and lift" idea I had mentioned earlier.

I do need to modify that shot, because I need the racquet face to point down at the start of the motion, and to incorporate the sit-and-lift idea (for rotation acceleration).

I know I'm trying to describe a physical motion in words, and thus it's a poor substitute for video.

I had been hitting my forehand using more forearm, with the elbow as the pivot point. However, I've been working a few months to swing with the entire arm, getting it a bit looser.

The side effect is that it's helped my serve some. I've turned my body more, and I felt my serve was kicking even more than usual. I still get little pace, but overall, it felt decently good.