Forehand Progress

About a year ago, I bought a camcorder. I wasn't planning to make video of my kids since I don't have kids. I wasn't planning to make a movie, though the idea is certainly appealing. I wanted to record my tennis strokes.

Video isn't exactly new to tennis. Back in the 1970s, Vic Braden used to take high-speed videos of tennis players. He famously advocated that players use a very low toss for their serves much like Roscoe Tanner, the best server of his day. This was routinely ignored, especially in Europe, where the opposite occurred: extremely high ball tosses. Braden probably popularized the notion of wrist pronation vs. wrist snap, and that has been far more influential than the low ball toss.

But Braden had an expensive tennis facility and an expert making those videos, so it meant the average player couldn't look at his own strokes. You needed two things: low-cost camcorders and video software to slow down the action. Without being able to slow down your stroke, it's hard to notice where problems occur. While I don't have the benefit of high-speed high-def cameras, I don't really need them.

I use a mini-DV camera which is good enough (though not HD), and I use IMovie '09 to slow down the video. That is also good enough for me.

I first started modifying my forehand in probably October of 2007. At the time, I chose to model Novak Djokovic. I don't even recall why Djokovic, other than he was a rising star and that he was pretty funny. You have to understand that Djokovic had a huge breakout year in 2007. He literally came from nowhere and jumped to number 3. While people were distracted by epic Nadal-Federer finals, few noticed that, by Wimbledon, Djokovic had made his second consecutive semifinals, essentially matching Federer and Nadal, and made his first US Open final that same year.



The one problem with Djokovic's forehand, at least, at the time I decided to stop using his forehand as a model, was the following. Pause the above video. Notice that Novak's racquet face points behind him to the back "fence" (a wall, in pro events). He then lowers the racquet face down so it points down the the ground behind him (pause at 0:13), then turns the racquet face to the right tilted somewhat downwards (pause at 0:14), before pulling the racquet to contact.

To me, that seemed like a lot of excess motion, and I wanted a simpler model.

So I went to the forehand everyone said was the best, at least at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and that was Roger Federer.



At the beginning of this video, Roger's racquet face points to his right. Contrast that with Djokovic, who brings the racquet behind him. In fact, this pointing to the right was something I had a hard time doing because my body awareness wasn't so good. By body awareness, I mean I would point my arm in one direction, but think it was pointing in some other direction. So I would probably think I was pointing to my right, and was actually pointing behind me.

How could I make such a huge mistake? One reason was simple. I wasn't looking. I was focusing on the ball, so when I stuck my racquet behind me, I didn't really know where it was. I could have asked someone, but it never occurred to me that my mental model of where my arm was and reality diverged so much.

Video really helped me see this.

Now, it turns out, Federer also has some motions that add some complexity to his forehand.

Pause at 0:04, and you see his racquet face pointed face down, and the tip of his racquet head pointed to his right. If you were take an overhead view, lined up so the baseline is "west-east" and Roger is hitting "south", then his racquet face initially points west, the moves north, and indeed a little north-east.

By the time it's pointing north-east, (pause at 0:08), the racquet face points right and slightly down. This is the common racquet orientation for pretty much every modern player, and occurs when they are about to accelerate the racquet head to contact. Up to that point, players do all sorts of things. I would say, at least for the better players I see on public courts, that the Djokovic model seems the most popular. Why? I don't know.

I discovered, after watching videos of myself, that I kept my racquet face down a lot, that is, almost the entire swing to contact. I only open the face right when I hit it, but otherwise, it stays closed.

There were several reasons, but one huge reason was because I feed the ball too close to my body. Feeding yourself the ball means to drop the ball and hit it. Most people drop it near their right foot, and that it simply too close to the body. It should be tossed maybe 3 feet to your right. You want your arm to be out far to the right so it gets more of a full extension.

The other reason was the way I oriented my wrist. It's taken maybe 10 months to begin to train myself not to close my racquet face and to know which orientation my wrist should be at.

Ultimately, that became the reason I abandoned the Federer forehand. Federer closes his racquet face, then points it to the right. Since I couldn't tell whether I was closing my racquet face or not (despite thinking I was pointing it to the right, often numerous times), I felt trying to imitate Federer that closely was going to confuse me.

At that point, I looked to a different model, which was probably the end of 2008, maybe around October or November. I had been trying the Federer forehand since probably March, or before I even started to video myself in May of 2008.

2008 turned out to be a big year for several players: Gilles Simon was ranked around 20 and moved to around 6 or 7 (but has slipped some since a big move to the top 10), Juan Martin del Potro's ascendancy has been more impressive, getting into the top 10 as well, and finally Andy Murray who started the year around 6, and moved up to a solid number 4, threatening to go to 3.

If you were to ask the experts looking at Murray's game what his best stroke was, well, they'd probably not point to his forehand. Indeed, his backhand is considered his stronger side. Still, that's just a relative comparison. That is, it treats his forehand and backhand separately. If you were to rank the top forehands, Murray's would be behind Federer, Djokovic, Verdasco, Gonzalez, probably Blake. It depends on what you think is important in a forehand. If you were to rank backhands, Murray might be 3 behind Nadal and Djokovic. Even so, most pros, have better forehands than backhands. One might argue this is true even for a player with as impressive a one-handed backhand as Richard Gasquet. Few people rip winners regularly from their backhands.



This is probably the best slow motion video of Andy Murray's forehand, despite the rather low quality of the video itself. It's about the only one that is shown from Andy's right, which you almost never see. Most videos are taken from the front, which is fine, but not to illustrate what I want to show.

In particular, since this video is from Andy's right, then when his racquet face points right, then it points to the camera. Pay attention to the entire swing path.

Starting at 0:12 to 0:17, the racquet face points right (i.e. to the camera, i.e., to you, the viewer) which is pretty much the start of his motion to just the instant before contact where he then, out of necessity (like every pro), points the racquet face to the ball.

Nowhere in that stroke does Murray point his racquet face down, which, if you recall from the earlier on, was my problem. I would close my face until just before impact.

Despite knowing this, it took a long time to understand several things. First, I had a tendency to point the racquet face behind me, a la Djokovic. I also had a huge looping motion behind me. I noticed most pros don't loop that big. They have a much milder motion that, in particular, doesn't get behind them.

I should say most male pros. Women pros, by and large, do get their racquet behind them, and hit it like some folks hit a one-handed backhand. There's only one male pro I know of that hits like that, which is Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy.



Watch at 2:16 (it's sad how bad Youtube video quality is--you can't watch tennis at all unless it's at least high quality, which is why it's nice that Youtube finally allowed better quality video to be uploaded). Chardy takes his racquet so that it is behind him (racquet face points to back fence), but unlike Djokovic, who has the racquet tip pointed up, Chardy's racquet tip points to the left. Most women pros (Safina, Sharapova, Ivanovic, etc) do this, but most male pros don't.

Think of your chest as a large infinite plane, much like the ones they teach in you in geometry. A plane divides 3-space into "half", which can be loosely termed as the half-space in front of you, and the half-space behind you. Now imagine your chest points to the right fence, thus you are sideways, relative to the net. This is the position you'd be in setting up for a righty forehand.

Most male pros keep their racquet head in the front half. Women pros, on the other hand, let the racquet head get behind them. This is so they can get a longer swing path. It mimics a one-handed backhand where the racquet face also gets behind you, but applies the same idea to the forehand. Men, perhaps needing less time to hit because they are physically stronger, don't do this.

In particular, if you watch the wrist and arm, it tends to go roughly straight back and drop and then the whole body rotates counter-clockwise. This would be much easier to illustrate if I had a video, but I don't.

To illustrate, imagine you are doing jumping jacks. Focus on your right arm. Jumping jacks have you swing your right arm at the plane of your torso. Basically, your racquet goes from being in front of you as you prepare to hit, to being maybe 45 degress pointing up in a jumping jack motion, to dropping your arm so it is maybe waist height (this is the part of the jumping jack motion where the arm descends down).

Notice the arm stays in that plane. My tendency was to pull my arm behind this plane and make my wrist move behind this plane in a loop motion.

OK, I'm being highly technical here. Clearly, women hit something like that, so why don't I?

Several reasons. One is silly. I'm a guy, I want to hit like other guy pros. Two, male pros have shorter strokes and so I think that's important so I don't get caught too late. Male pros already set up much quicker than I do, so they can afford to have longish stroke paths. Women pros are also quicker than me.

Three, I want to make my body do what my mind is telling it to do. And that's really the biggest reason. The change I'm making may not improve my forehand much, but the process by which I get there will help me think about how I do things, how I get my body to make a certain motion. I didn't expect it to take me a year to master. It's still a work in progress, but I am slowly getting closer to what I want to do.

One key is that I can shadow-stroke the way I want to hit. Shadow-stroking is where you hit the ball without the ball. You would think that motion is enough. If I can shadow stroke, I can hit the ball that same way.

Untrue.

When I shadow-stroke, there's no ball. I don't react to a ball, so I can focus entirely on the swing. But once there's a ball, I have to react so I can hit the ball, and then muscle memory kicks in to try to adjust the swing to hit the ball, and that's where my problems come in. You just have to swing over and over to train the body not to do what it's been doing for a long time.

Now, a year is a pretty long time to obsess over hitting a forehand, especially since the motion isn't coming to me that quickly. But I enjoy the process of getting there. If it came easily, I would have missed too many other things, in particular, a better awareness of what my body is doing. That's been a weirdly valuable lesson.

Weird, only because it's not that critical for me to know what my body is doing when it hits a tennis ball, but valuable because I realize what I thought I was doing and what I do are different things, and that's an interesting lesson, that might apply to less physical activities.

Right now, the motion is kinda there, but I still take my racquet back too much, so I am trying to reduce that motion. If I were to have done this motion 6 months ago, I would have told you I am not even pointing my racquet behind me, but it's off to my right. I would have been wrong. That goes to show you how off my perception was.

So I still need to practice. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that a month more and I'll have it close to where I want it, but then I've been trying this for many months already, so if it's longer, I won't be surprised.

Backhand Thoughts

What's the difference between a blog and a webcam? Both are products of an Internet age, an age where privacy has given way to openness and sharing. Information, such as it is, is disseminated to those who care enough to pay attention.

The difference is a blog is a diary (at best). It is (or should be) an introspective perspective. It is a person talking about themselves, so you gain insight into how they think, how they feel, what's most important to them right at that moment. It is, by its nature, biased to the person presenting the information. Certain facts may be left out either by choice or lack of omniscient knowledge.

The webcam, were it situated in the same person's room, is a piece of technology that allows a viewer to see someone's life. Without sound, the day to day movements are broadcast and chronicled by those who choose to observe. Intention is lost. Thought process is lost. What seems like a person lying in repose on his bed may be someone wallowing in the depths of depression or deep in philosophic thought. The webcam reveals all and yet reveals nothing.

So it can be said of learning tennis. The tools that present itself is the equivalent of the webcam. It is the video recording of tennis professionals. It offers insight into how they do what they do. You can observe, and inspect, and scrutinize. But is it enough? Do you see enough? You can't feel what the players feel. How much information are you getting?

Lately, I've been thinking about the backhand again, and in particular, the one-handed backhand. This stroke seems sufficiently different from the two hander that the thought process doesn't seem the same.

It's very easy to perceive the one-hander has a motion that is initiated by the arm. The arm is the centerpiece in the action. For the casual observer, this feels very true. The arm is the most active part of the stroke.

And yet this hides the fact that it's better to think of the stroke from the shoulders and from the chest. Let it initiate the action. Let it be the source of the movement. By focusing on that part of your body, you involve the torso, so often called, the core, into the shot and let the arm do less work and therefore get less tired. The core, once involved, can assist the shot by providing mass.

Tennis is a game of momentum, but not the kind sportscasters talk about. It's not which team is playing well at the moment and capitalizing on play after play. It is momentum of the physics variety. Mass times velocity. The more you can incorporate the core, a difficult task because the human body isn't rigid, and even if it were rigid, it wouldn't help because the other component, velocity would be lost, the more mass comes to bear.

It is a delicate dance your body must go through, at once optimizing speed by letting your body be limber enough not to slow you down, and yet also working as a whole, so that mass is your friend.

If you understand how to initiate the action with the core, then you can decrease the amount of arm you need. This is a mistake many players make because they choose to re-invent the wheel. But what choice do they have? The information is not readily available. When you learn tennis, you often start from scratch, and despite the ubiquity of the Web and access to information, there's no easy way to find a definitive answer.

It's taken me a while to fully appreciate this, and only because I read it in a forum where someone whose life has mostly been devoted to teaching tennis made the point clear. The torso initiates the one-handed backhand and for much of the hitting, the arm is just along for the ride. It does, of course, play an increasingly important role the closer you get to actually hitting the ball, but again, that interplay between torso and arm, when does one end, and the other begin?

I use words when a visual would be helpful, something that, in effect combines the blog and the webcam. The two together offering not only insight, but a visual illustration.

Given the time challenges of making a video, I will now use words, as paltry a substitute as this may be, like Velveeta for Brie, a travesty, but the best we can do under the circumstances.

Stand in the ready position, and form a U with your upper arm making one side of the U, the forearm the bottom part of the U, and the racquet pointing up, the other side of the U. Turn your body to the left, enough so that eventually your back begins to point to the net.

Using your left arm, lift the racquet so your forearm eventually gets to shoulder height. Use your left hand to lower the racquet behind you, until the racquet head points to the right side of the court (were you facing the fence, it would be to your left). The racquet is nearly completely behind you from the perspective of your opponent.

Rotate your body so the racquet travels 180 degrees around and strike the ball, then lift your arm up as if you are holding a torch for the Olympics way up high.

There are other factors to consider. How high is the ball? If it's low, you bend your knee more and stay down more. If it's high, you lift up your leg and get on your tiptoes. Different situations demand different setup.

This is what makes tennis challenging. There are many situations to take care of under the name "backhand". This is why hitting thousands of balls is needed, so the body learns how to cope with such variety. But behind all of that is the basis for the shot, the skeletal framework by which all variation sprouts from. And this is what you often need in sage advice so you make the move that the pros do, not the one that is easy to see from the eye, but the one that is felt from within.

The Shadow Knows

I remember reading about an old time radio show called The Shadow. Old time radio shows, at least American ones, were influenced, I believe, by old time stage acting, which wasn't particularly good. People spoke a certain way that didn't feel at all natural. Acting was wooden, the characters boring. The Shadow fit this mold. The catch phrase was The Shadow Knows!.

If memory serves, it was a show about some guy who was trained in Asia, who could hide in shadows and track down bad guys. He used hypnotism to cloud men's minds.

Anyway, this is really an article about tennis. One big complaint I have about learning tennis is the lack of immediate feedback. I can't see how I hit right away. I have a camcorder to record my shots, but there's a delay as I rewind and watch it again.

I usually hit against a wall when I practice. My ideal setup would be a large (very large) television screen that sits about 10 feet above the ground, protected with some plexiglass like they have in racquetball courts. There would be a camera pointed at me, and so as I swing, I can watch myself as it happens. Another variation would be hitting against a mirror with a plexiglass protection. The problem with a mirror is that I would be rather far away so I'd find it hard to see details, but since I know what I'm looking for, it would be good enough.

Yesterday or so, I wanted to add one thing to my forehand that I've not been paying attention to lately. My non-dominant hand. Bad tennis players, which is nearly everyone you see playing (well, at least half), primarily use their dominant hand/arm to hit the ball. For a right hander, it is their right hand/arm. For now, let's assume I'm talking about righties.

If you watch a bad player, you generally see several problems with their game. First, they use their arm too much, and don't rotate their torso. One way to see this easily is to pay attention to their shoulders. The less it moves when hitting, the worse a player they are. I have this problem, so I end up using more arm than I should.

Second, they don't use any spin or if they do, it's underspin on both forehands and backhands. It's especially considered a weakness on the forehand to hit only slice forehands, although some crafty guys hit it to good effect.

Third, they have little follow-through. The follow-through is the part of the tennis stroke after the ball is hit. If you ever watch football, you'll see someone trying to tackle (knock down) the quarterback. Many times, the quarterback takes one or two steps and the defensive guy runs right past him. Why? Because that guy is so intent on running so fast and hard so he can really hit the quarterback hard. Pain is a part of football, and defensive guys are taught to inflict pain. The defensive guy can't stop himself because he has so much momentum built up.

Same thing with the follow through. When you are hitting the follow through, your arm should literally wrap around your waist or neck. That's how fast your swing should be. It's not intuitive because most players don't think about hitting the shot that hard that it would require the arm to be wrapped around themselves. But it's needed to provide pace.

The fourth mistake, and this is usually the one you see the most often, is failure to use the left hand. All pros and good players use their left hand. It's used to assist taking back the racquet, to help rotate the shoulders properly. The problem? It's really hard to use the left hand on the forehand.



Watch former number 1, Roger Federer's left hand. It's in front of his body. Typically players will do this, and then as they rotate their bodies, their left arm will pull into their body, as if they were doing a bicep curl with their left arm (but more lazy). The only major player to not do this is John McEnroe who had to have the laziest looking strokes ever. He just leaves his left arm hanging down and never does anything with it on his forehand. Otherwise, unless the player is rushed, they use their left hand to set up both their forehand, and if they hit a one-handed backhand or a slice.

The left hand is used primarily to get the racquet back quickly, but also as a way to change grips although most pros can change grips by simply flipping their racquet. This is why you see players with the nervous habit of spinning their racquets with one hand. They've learned to spin it and "catch" it with the right grip.

I've always found it difficult to use my left hand on my forehand. First, you end up moving your left hand about parallel to the baseline, basically pointing to the left, much like the picture with Federer above. This is, plainly put, awkward. Then, as the ball comes close, you are supposed to point to the ball with your left hand.

At this point, you are rotating your body very fast to the left, and like a figure skater spinning, you pull your left arm close to the body, typically left hand near your left nipple (there, I said it!) while the right arm and body twists fully around.

It's a complex motion, more complex than the backhand. You can see why so few recreational players learn to use their left hand.

However, even if you can't do all those things with your left hand, there is one thing most players can manage to do.



As you lift your racquet, you can hold it with the left hand as Federer does in the picture above. This makes it easier to control the racquet as you take it back.

I decided to add that part to my game today, after watching a Federer slow motion video. Here's such a video:



In particular, pay attention to his left hand. He keeps it on his racquet a long time before letting it go. He uses it to rotate the racquet and help rotate his shoulders (really, he rotates his shoulders to his right, which causes the arm and racquet to rotate right too).

Finally, due to watching some videos, I noticed I would take my racquet back so it pointed to the back fence. To be honest, this is not a real problem. So many players do this, including world number 3, Novak Djokovic, that I shouldn't worry if I do it.


But I don't want to do it!

I mean, Federer doesn't do it, so I'm trying not to do it. It's this d**n muscle memory. I have no problem shadow stroking the shot I want to hit (shadow stroking is when you swing without hitting a ball). But when it comes time to hit the ball, the muscles react a certain way, and voila, I find myself taking the racquet back a la Djokovic.

That's when I discovered something.

Oh yes.

Today was partly cloudy, but at an opportune moment, the sun peeked its head out. This cast a shadow of me on the court. I could then see myself hit by watching the shadow on the ground. I do this from time to time. Since I can't easily see myself hit the stroke (it goes too fast, the angle is not right to see it), seeing the shadow is a decent substitute.

What I realized was I need to swing forward as the racquet barely drops. I tend to drop the racquet a bit, and it goes behind me. By abbreviating the stroke, and moving the racquet forward as it drops, I find I can hit harder, and closer to the way I want to hit. Not perfect, but at least in the right vicinity.

That was good, because the last 2-3 weeks, I had lost some of the power I had hitting the ball. Much of this loss of power came from trying to fix the way I was setting up on my takeback. I had been trying to hit it like Roger Federer (again). But I recently found a video of Scot, Andy Murray. I used to want to hit the way he hits although at the time, I had no idea Murray hit like this. It was pure happenstance that I was looking at his video recently, mostly due to his recent success.



While watching this video, pay attention to the racquet face. As he takes it back, you can see it point to you. If Murray were holding a large hand mirror with the racquet face being the mirror, you could see your face nearly the whole time. Many players, including Federer, end up pointing the racquet face down when the racquet goes back as far as it will go. Murray doesn't do that, and it keeps his racquet motion simple on setup.

At first, I was planning to emulate more of Federer, because I felt Federer deliberately gets his racquet face down, before lifting it up, but that was more quirky to hit than I expected. So although I do that even when I don't intend to, I just think I'm hitting like Murray does, and it simplifies how I think of my forehand.

The other thing I started to do, to gain back power was to rotate my body. Basically, to get power in a tennis stroke, you think of yourself like a baseball player. A baseball player does a great deal of body rotation to generate power. Indeed, they user their whole body, legs, body rotation, etc. It's not simply swinging the bat with the arms. This allows a baseball player to generate a lot of power.

Similarly, you can think of golfers. Golfers also learn to rotate their entire torso. They turn their body away, then rotate into the shot. This is what you want to do in tennis too. Let the torso initiate the body rotation. Without this torso rotation (also called the core), it's hard to get power. Finally, you have to be pretty loose.

One part of my forehand that's turned out reasonably well is the follow through. I used to follow through in front of my body. When I learned to hit a windshield wiper motion, I'd think of it like a windshield wiper, that is occuring on the plane of the windshield.

However, the windshield wiper really requires rotating the arm so the elbow sticks out more, and you finish the wiper to the left of your body, not in front of you. I had been working on the follow through a great deal, and while I did that, I completely forgot about the technique on the setup of my forehand. If I were to break up the forehand, I'd say it's the takeback (the part of the strokes from seeing the ball, to getting the racquet back roughly pointing to the fence), then the swing forward, then the follow-through. The swing forward is the swing from the furthest back point up to hitting the ball. The follow through is the swing after hitting the ball.

There are several things I want to work on. First, I want to use my left hand more in setup. I have an idea how to do this, watching Federer. Second, I want to get the Andy Murray motion down a bit smoother. Third, I need to keep reminding myself to accelerate the racquet forward sooner than I expect, and not to take back the racquet as far back as I think I should. Basically, as the racquet begins to drop, I need to start accelerating forward. Ironically, all that abbreviated motion seems to create more power than my longer strokes.

The other thing I need to do is hit that same stroke much slower. I find the exercise of hitting hard, then slowing it down helps me to smooth out the stroke. If I just power the shot, I get too tense and too tired as a result.

Indeed, I've noticed, as a result of my physical therapy, that I clench my shoulder too much when I swing. I'll need to consciously remind myself to relax that shoulder. One thing good about physical therapy is that it's made me more body aware. I wish I knew about this earlier and that it didn't take an injury to make me learn about my body from a tennis point of view. I've been told I'm too tensed up when I play, but without enough body awareness, I didn't know how to relax properly. I'm still not there yet, but at least I'm more in tune with my body tensing up.

All in all, given that I thought my stroke was completely awful this morning, I ended up the day feeling a lot better about the motion. Now it's a matter of repetition and making sure I don't fall into bad habits.

That's mostly what writing this blog entry is about.

Here's a summary:

• Don't take the racquet back as far as you think
  
• Use the left hand to set up the racquet on takeback
  
• Think of a windshield wiper motion in the takeback to emulate a Murray setup. Try to maintain the correct grip.
  
• As the racquet drops down, begin to accelerate forward.
  
• Rotate the body quickly as the racquet drops. This initiates the forehand.
  
• End up with the elbow in front and the racquet off to the side and behind
  
• Pull the left arm as you rotate
  
• Don't tense the right shoulder on racquet acceleration in the swing forward stage.
  

Tennis Update--Forehand

This is one of those posts that you can quickly check out on. While blogs have been compared to diaries, they are clearly different. The obvious public nature of a blog means that entries that are generally of little interest to anyone except the author would not likely see the light of day. Even so, blogs record content, so it does satisfy the need to have it etched somewhere semi-permanent. And you never know, someone might actually care enough to read it.

Basically, I've been trying to revamp my forehand, with some success. The first clue I was doing something "majorly" wrong occurred end of May when I finally made a video of me hitting tennis balls (I want to say "videotaped", and technically, I am using tape, mini DV to be precise, but I wish there were a better verb than this. The best one I've thought of is video'ed or video recorded).

In particular, I've generally fed the ball (that is dropped it in front of me so I could hit it) very near my right foot. This was because it was easy and convenient. However, because it's convenient, it was leading to a bad habit. In particular, I would get cramped hitting my forehand. Now, I never noticed this, not knowing any better.

Furthermore, I would have a few other bad habits. Rather than turn my shoulders, I tended to just reach back with my arm. To get a sense of this, raise both arms to you side, until you look a bit like a cross. Now, with one arm or the other reach back behind you as far as you can. You might manage 30 degrees or so.

In general, you should never have to reach back at all. Your arms should be roughly to your side, and instead of reaching back, you should turn your shoulders.

I'd also flip my grip in a funny way. Normally, as you take the racquet back (for a righty), the side of the racquet you hit the ball on will face to the right fence (the right fence is the fence to your right as you stare at the net). If you were to open your fist, your palm would face to the right fence.

Instead, I manage to contort my arm so my racquet face was aimed at the left fence. To imagine this, stand with your arms to your side like a cross. Have your right palm facing forwards, with your thumb up. Your fingers on the right hand should point to the right fence. There should be be no bend in your wrist.

Now bend your wrist backwards so that the fingers now point to the back fence and your palm now faces the right fence. Your hand and forearm now form a 90 degree angle.

Now (and this will be a little challenging). flip your hand upside down so the thumb points down. The back of your hand will now face the right fence, and the palm to the left. This is awkward, but easier if you begin to reach your arm behind your back.

This pretzel move is what I had discovered I was doing, and it came naturally after years of ingrained practice. Originally, my fix for it was to repeat the correct motion over and over.

While it worked whenever I wasn't hitting a ball, it failed miserably when I tried to hit the ball. Then I realize my hand orients the racquet, so I just had to think about the orientation of my hand. Even so, this was not a natural adjustment, and I would frequently have to think of my hand, palm faced outwards to the right fence.

Anyway, a week or so ago, I thought I had fixed this issue, and was working on a different problem I noticed.

My follow-through.

When you swing a tennis racquet, there is several phases. There is the takeback where you prepare and then ultimately bring your racquet back to point to the back fence behind you. Then, there is the swing until contact. That is when the racquet makes forward progress to hit the ball.

Finally, there is the follow-through. This is after hitting the ball until the racquet's momentum stops typically over the shoulder or with the arm wrapped around your other arm's biceps.

Although there are three phases to talk about, the entire swing consisting of threee parts should be one fluid motion throughout.

I had spent a fair bit of time on the takeback. This involved two or three things. First, I needed to stop pulling my arm behind my back. Second, I needed to orient my palm outwards and not flip the racquet. Third, I needed to rotate my shoulders more (which is related to the first point). The second part was the hardest to achieve.

When I swing, I often let muscle memory take over, and just focus on hitting, but when you're trying to retrain the mind to do something else, you have to consciously think (or in this case, consciously feel) the change. And it takes lots of repetition, and so far it hasn't felt completely natural.

I felt I had made progress on this, and was starting to focus on the follow-through, rather than the takeback. My follow-through has a bit of a herky-jerky movement, mostly due to the result of how fast I hit my windshield wiper forehand.

A windshield wiper forehand is a style of hitting the forehand where the trajectory of the racquet head (and the forearm) in the leadup to hitting the ball and follow-through looks like a windshield wiper, where the elbow acts as the base of the wiper.

The problem with that analogy are several. First, the elbow should not be stationary. This is more like a two-part windshield wiper. Imagine your windshield wiper is not a straight arm but has a bend in the middle (i.e., like your elbow).

There are two moving parts. The elbow serves as the base of the wiper (in a sense), and the shoulder moves the entire arm, including the elbow. It's tempting to just hit the ball with the forearm and leave the rest of the arm stationary.

Furthermore, people view the windshield wiper as symmetric. The path that starts the windshield wiper (at least, up until the racquet points face up) is mirrored on the way down. That is untrue.

The motion on the way down is complicated by the elbow also moving (to the left). Furthermore, once the racquet has moved so that the wrist straightens out (it starts at a 90 degree angle), then the wrist, more or less, stays straight. This is really hard to describe without a picture.

The result, in any case, is that most pros finish the follow-through to the left of their body (for a righty). In a sense, it's much like a comet whose path around the sun is severe near the sun, but elongated at other parts of the orbit. The follow through is most arced at the beginning, and the arc stretches out at the end.

I was working on that (somewhat unsuccessfully) when I noticed the takeback had broken down and I had regressed to hitting my old forehand.

Alas, it's disappointing, but at least I am aware of it.