Flat vs Topspin | The Truth About Groundstroke Consistency!

What do you do when your ground stroke starts spraying long? Well, a quick fix could be to start putting more spin on the ball. Your ball will shape more and it will be dragged down, giving you better chances of it landing inside the baseline. However, one of the biggest myths out there is that when you hit flat, that this is automatically a less consistent way to play tennis and that is absolutely not true. And the data proves this. You're going to be surprised to hear who had the most consistent two-handed backhand in 2024. You would think maybe it's Sinner, maybe it's Alcaraz. Those two guys ranked in the top two of the best backhands. Maybe it's Novak Djokovic. He was number three. How about Zverev? He was number four in shot quality on the two-handed backhand. It's none of those guys. It's the guy that came in number five, Danil Medvedev, who had the most consistent two-handed backhand in the world in 2024, while at the same time having the flattest backhand. So first of all, we have to understand that there is no such thing as a flat backhand or a flat forehand. All strokes that have a swing path that goes low to high will have topspin on them. There will be RPMs on the ball. Now in Medvedev's case, on the backhand, his RPMs are way lower than the tour average, and also the net clearance is way lower than the tour average. Now he is somewhere in the middle regarding speed, so he's not pushing the ball in. He's also not ripping it like Sinner and Alcaraz. He's right around tour average for speed. So how in the world does Danil Medvedev get the most backhands in? In 2024, he hit a little bit over 3,000 backhands, and he only missed a little bit over 300 backhands. So this guy barely misses any backhands despite having one of the flatter backhands on the entire tour. So while it is true that a lot of you guys listening will benefit from putting more spin on the ball, it doesn't mean that if you're an old-school player, possibly playing with more traditional grips, that this necessarily means that you have poor strokes. Not at all. If you have good timing, if you have good footwork, if you're meeting the ball at the correct place, the fact that your ball is more flat than a topspin ball doesn't mean that you're going to miss more. And I covered my strokes a lot in the past, and you guys know that I have flat ground strokes. So they have spin on them, but I execute strokes that I categorize as flat topspin. So there's a little bit of spin on there, but it's fairly flat. This is true on my forehand and my backhand. Now I can tell you that when you take my legs out of the equation, I can be very consistent. I can keep that ball in play forever. So the fact that I'm hitting the ball flatter is not causing me to miss more. Because we have to understand the causes of errors at all levels of the game, and especially at the recreational level, to understand why hitting flatter will not cause you to miss more. So one cause of errors when you're hitting your ground strokes is poor footwork. So it doesn't matter what technique you have. You could have the Carlos Alcaraz forehand, but if you're not in the correct place, if you're reaching forward to get the ball, reaching to the side, if you're getting all jammed up, if your elbow is way behind your body, if you're falling backwards as you're hitting the ball, it doesn't matter what technique you have, you're not going to be able to access your technique. So footwork is a very common cause of errors. Shot selection is another cause of error. So if you are in a poor position, you attempt to hit a very difficult shot, maybe you are way behind the baseline in a compromised position, and you try to hit that line right there and you're aiming for the baseline, this is poor shot selection, you're going to make very few shots out of 10 if you attempt that. Another cause of errors is your mental game. So if you're tight, even the perfect technique that you do have in practice, you're not going to be able to access it in the match because you're going to be all jammed up and stiff and cramped, and you're going to hit the ball very weak. Maybe you are overly excited and you are going for too much. And so the mental game can play tricks on you and cause a tremendous amount of errors. Now last but not least, your technique can also be a culprit when it comes to errors. And there are many technical flaws. I'm only going to touch up on a couple of them in today's video. But if you want to know in more detail about the most common problems at the recreational level, I recommend that you sign up for Intuitive Tennis Premium. I'm going to leave a link in the pinned comment. So one of the most common errors at the regular level, whether we're talking about a backhand or a forehand, is that players play with their arm in isolation. More specifically, is players try to play with their wrist. So if you are trying to execute any movement on the forehand with your wrist, you're going to be in a tremendous amount of trouble. So if you're slapping the ball, this is the worst wrist movement you can do. You're not going to be able to control the ball, and it's going to spray on you. You're going to make very few shots when the wrist is active around the contact. Now a lot of people believe that the forehand stroke is executed with the wrist. I made a lot of videos explaining that this is absolutely not the case. Yes, there are some shots that you see on the tour where players are executing isolated movements of the forearm when they're hitting the ball. Yes, that definitely happens, but it doesn't happen on the vast majority of hands, whether we're talking about ATP or WTA. The wrist is in a passive state and it's the entire system that's going up. And if you take a look at frames right after the moment of contact, the wrist is not changing position. Now as the racket gets closer to the body's core, now the wrist starts getting involved and it's actually not the wrist that's turning. Basically what we're dealing with is forearm pronation. So when you pronate your forearm like this, this is basically what happens on the forehand. It's a forearm pronation on a heavy topspin swing pad. So if you try to roll the wrist right around the moment of contact, a few of the things that can happen is that you start framing the ball and you'll lose a tremendous amount of power. You almost get too much spin on the ball and you start hitting the bottom of the net. You start hitting very short on the other side. And let me tell you the reason for this. In the intuitive tennis methodology on my website, where I have courses, I covered the intuitive zone in great detail. So let me give you just one piece of the intuitive zone regarding this subject. If you try to consciously execute a wrist movement, whether it be a slap or an upward rolling or pronation of the forearm right around the moment of contact, there's absolutely no way that you're going to be able to time this properly. Remember the contact when you strike your forehand at a normal speed is over between one and three milliseconds. Milliseconds. So what happens to players when they try to roll their wrist? Well, they slow their forehand down. Number one, that's why you see a loss of power on those strokes. And also they abruptly shorten this part of the stroke in order to be able to execute a wrist movement. So when you hear players talking about how they use the wrist, I know this is very confusing. I get a lot of messages. Hey, this guy said he uses the wrist and you said players don't. Well, I'm going to tell you that players have no idea whether they're using the wrist or not. They are not conscious of the intuitive zone. That part of the forehand in specific, that's over in a few milliseconds. They don't know what happened. They're going by feel and they're absolutely not using the wrist in isolation. The entire body is involved in the forehand. So one of the most common mistakes at the recreational level and even towards the more advanced levels is using the wrist. Maybe you're doing this yourself or you're being instructed to do so. This is something that you should absolutely avoid. Another common error on the forehand is adapting styles that don't suit you. So players try to copy all kinds of forehand swings. They try to copy center. Many players try to copy fetter and they just don't have quick enough acceleration in order to swing at the max speed where the racket has to cover such a big distance. So in other words, the racket is turned the wrong way. So to speak, this is a thinner position of the racket on the forehand and most players don't accelerate like the pros. And so they start like this and they simply can't turn the racket around fast enough. And now they're stuck with an insufficient lag and they don't get enough power on their forehand. So it would make more sense to have a natural take back and take it back as far as you need to. There's nothing wrong with having a longer take back on the forehand. So these are just two examples of causes of errors on the forehand more specifically, but there are so many more and all of those are going to be important for you to solve prior to start thinking about adding more spin. So remember, there's no such thing as a flat forehand if you're going low to high. That is your job. You're going to go low to high on your forehand whether that turns into a heavy topspin forehand like Carlos Alcaraz or whether it turns more into a flat topspin forehand like you see more in the WTA Tour. You don't worry about that and also you're not going to be conscious of that part on the forehand. It's in the intuitive zone. You are going to be worried about swinging low to high and finishing all the way. I don't care if you finish around your neck, around your shoulder, around your elbow, you just got to finish all the way on your forehand and make sure that the racket does go up before it goes down on the other side. And if in fact your ball naturally is more of a flat topspin ball, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not going to mean that you're necessarily going to make more mistakes. If you are making mistakes, there are all these other things that you have to solve first before you start thinking about adding more spin on your forehand and going in a more vertical swing path.