The Ultimate Forehand Power & Consistency Lesson - Tennis Lessons

Hey guys Simon and Alex here from Top Tennis Training and welcome to video number one from our forehand blueprint course. In this video we're going to help you improve the power and improve the consistency on your forehand. And we'll give you one great drill, one great tip that you can use, so keep watching to the end. So Alex, in your everyday coaching, day to day, you're out there working with players of all levels, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see on the forehand from most players? Well, I'd say they're mainly two. The first one being when a player actually doesn't keep their head still enough during contact which causes them not to see the ball well enough when they hit, they end up not hitting it on the sweet spot of the racket, so they end up hitting the ball not in the direction that they want. Also their power will struggle because they actually end up coming off the ball rather than staying with it and allowing all their body weight to transition through the shot. So that head being still and being able to see the oncoming object is very important on your shots. Now the second common mistake that I see a lot, and this happens to I'd say 90% of all the players that I coach, is actually the player that's not using their binding mechanics, so their kinetic chain correctly, they're not rotating through the shot enough, so their shoulders are not hitting the shot, it's their arm that's hitting the shot. It's not their rotation, it's not their hip, but it's their arm. So in this case, both your consistency and your power is going to struggle. Now if you watch Simon when he hits that shot, as you can see, his arm is generating the power, he's going through, but because the right shoulder stays behind the left, he's now not able to extend as far as he could if he put that shoulder forward. So if he puts it forward, he's able to extend and let that racket come over the shoulder, whereas now it comes over straight away because he almost runs out of arm because he can't go any further because the shoulder is still in that position. So a very important thing for you to try and remember is to always keep pushing that shoulder forward during contact. Now there was a study done on most of the players, the top ATP pros, and it's something that we can use in our tennis and club level and any level, juniors can start using it, is during contact the right shoulder should actually be 10 degrees in front of the left shoulder. So actually during contact, if Simon's going to demonstrate, the right shoulder is actually in front of the left. Now get into a neutral position and do exactly the same. Now as you can see, in order for Simon to get into this position, the right shoulder is now in front of the left, he's had to release his heel. Now if you don't release the heel, you're going to struggle, even though you're going to want to put that shoulder far forward. Now it's very difficult for him to do so because that heel is on the floor, it's not allowing his hip to come through and then it's restricting his shoulder movement and again it's going to create that problem of hitting with your arm. So as we can see, it all starts from the ground. Now if we start using the tiptoe first, so we go onto the tiptoe, lift the heel, bend the knee, then the hip, then the shoulder and then that followed by the arm. Now if we think about the arm and the wrist as being quite small muscles, even though you might feel like you're getting a lot of control, a lot of power because you're closest to contact with that segment, you're actually not using the bigger muscle groups. It's equivalent of me throwing a tennis ball and just trying to throw it with my fingers. You're never going to do that, you're always going to try and throw from your body first and then your arm is almost like the last segment, the last thing that comes into play just to give you that direction and that looseness, the snap on the throw or as we're doing here on the forehand. So let's try it and run through it again. Now Simon's going to start the move by lifting the heel and rotating it, he's going to put his hip forward, his shoulder then comes forward, his arm extends and then he goes over his shoulder. Now this is a continuous move and it allows for the most power and the most consistency. Now if you think about the consistency part, if I'm not putting the shoulder forward, if I'm just doing this with my arm and I'm running out of the length of arm so I'm having to finish here, I actually end up doing something called the semi-circle swing. So as I'm hitting it, my path of the racket becomes a semi-circle, so if I was to draw a line on the court, it would go around me like this as I follow that path. Now if I'm doing this and I'm trying to hit the ball into the direction, say a down a line shot, for me to hit that shot down a line, I'd only have this small moment, this small hitting zone in order to make contact and hit it into the down a line position. Anywhere else my racket travels, the ball now goes cross court, further, further, further and that's when you see a lot of players when they hit, they actually end up pulling the shot a lot to the side and they struggle with that direction of the shot because they have that semi-circle swing. Now in order to fix that, we actually by rotating, by putting that shoulder forward, now Simon's going to demonstrate, we're now able to, if Simon puts his racket out here, I can draw that line in line so now as he's putting his shoulder forward, he's able to keep the racket in line for longer before he comes off the line in order to finish the swing. What he doesn't want to do is recreate that semi-circle move because then you're only going to have a very short space of time to hit the ball into the correct distance. Now when he does the down a line move, go for the down a line again Simon, as you can see his hitting zone actually becomes quite big because he can hit down a line here, he can hit here, he can hit here, he can still hit here even and then he goes over and finishes the shot. So that gives him almost like half a meter of hitting zone where the ball is going to travel into your desired direction. That said, he's also going to get more power because he's rotating. Both of those things combined and you have yourself a much better shot so try it out yourself, try and avoid that semi-circle move, try and get your shoulder forward by releasing the tiptoe and using your kinetic chain in the correct way in order to increase the power and the consistency on your shot. So Alex, you also mentioned lifting off the ball and this is something that happens to a lot of players. How can we fix that? What's a great tip for players to fix that coming off the ball too early? Well sometimes it's not even just coming off the ball up, you can also be rotating to the side so it becomes almost an over rotation. If I don't keep my head still, my body then doesn't know the limit of my reach. Because I'm rotating, I can keep going here, here, here, here, it then becomes very difficult for me to actually hit into the right direction and actually my power, the power of my direction, so the velocity that I'm sending the ball with, it's actually going to struggle. So a great way for us to keep the head is something that I teach a lot of my students is to visualise putting your chin, it's not even visualising, it's actually doing it, you're going to put your chin onto your left shoulder, so this one creates a great unit turn, right? So from here, if I put my chin onto my left shoulder, now it's impossible for me not to be turned, right? Because here, I can't put unless I'm going to look away. So if I turn and I'm looking at the ball and I've turned, I can now put my chin onto my left shoulder. Now from here, when I hit the ball, during contact, obviously my right shoulder is going to be in front because I've released my heel, as we said earlier in the video, and now I'm going to finish, but now my chin is going to finish on the right shoulder. So I haven't moved my head, but I've moved the body underneath my head. So my head stays still, my body is rotating. Now this allows me to keep my eyes constantly on the ball. And a great visual, something I tell my students, and it's a great video to see, is an owl. An owl is one of the most sophisticated predators out there. It's able to find prey, find the little mice that it gets from very high up, because it's able to manoeuvre its body, and what it does very well is, as it flies, it keeps its head, its eyes, on the target, firmly locked in on the target. And that's exactly what we need to do when we're playing tennis. Now owls, they are binocular, so just like people, both of their eyes are in the front of their head, and they're able to see an object coming to them in depth, in width, in height, so they're able to judge the distance to an object a lot better than if, for example, if you were just looking with one eye. Now there are many things that you can go into about your left or right eye dominance, which eye you actually prefer seeing a little bit more of, because naturally your head is not going to be always perfect, so you're going to prefer one of the eyes, but it's another video that we can go into. But just for now, we're going to just focus on keeping that head still, to try and get both of their eyes locked in on the target, and for us as humans, we have, I think it's something like a 140 degree angle of binocular vision, is what we have, compared to something like an owl, which is, I think they have 70, or something like that, I think 110 for humans and 70 for owls, so they have to be even more locked into their target, because they only have that small space of binocular vision where they can see the target in all their dimensions, whereas for us humans, we obviously have a little bit more, but it will help us a lot to judge a fast oncoming object, like a tennis ball, a lot better if we keep that head still. So a great drill for you again, left shoulder, so my chin is on the left shoulder, here my chin is on the right shoulder, left shoulder, right shoulder, just like the owl. So now let's have a look at that rotation with the body, so again here I'm going to be using my big segments, not the small segments, the big segments of rotation, and also me keeping that chin, left shoulder to right shoulder, without moving my head too much, and see if that improves my consistency and my power. And that actually felt really good, because as I'm hitting the shot, I'm feeling really stable, I'm not coming off the ball, and it actually improves the shot and actually the consistency of all those balls, I know you can't see and I'm going to say it, but they all went in. So you have to try and imagine your body is almost like a whip, so the end of the whip is very fast, it travels fast through the air, it gets a nice snap onto the contact, so this is exactly what we want on our tennis shot, because we want that fast contact with a loose arm, what we don't want to do is be really stiff through the contact, where ok we're generating the power, but then it's not easy power. If you think about the whip travelling really fast at the end, if you turn the whip into a stick, so say if my racket was really loose before, now it's become a racket, now it travels a lot slower than if the bottom of the racket went first and then the top caught up with it. And that's exactly what we try and do when we do this move of releasing the hip, releasing the foot first, hip, then shoulder, then arm, so it's all continuous where the racket is released last, therefore creating that whip action at the end, hopefully accelerating your racket at the end, giving you a better contact, and if you did keep your head in line, it will also go into the direction that you want. Thanks for watching the video, we hope you've enjoyed it, we hope you've learnt something new, leave a comment down below, if you haven't already, subscribe to the channel, and make sure that you're also on our email list, so you'll get video number 2 as soon as we send it out. Thanks for watching and see you soon, all the best guys.