Why Your Racket Doesn't Lag (with lesson examples)

One of the things I check for every player is whether their racket is pivoting here as they swing or whether it's pivoting at the butt cap here. Because so much of this lag, elusive lag action that players are chasing comes from pivoting it at the top of your hand. And if you pivot the racket at the bottom of your hand, you will never uncover that effortless, velocity, control, hitting slot feeling. And this is why the idea of a backswing is so confusing. You know, with the butt cap pivot at the bottom, the backswing, the racket goes back and the forward swing, it goes forward. But with the pivot at the top of the V, the V of your hand, the palm right here, now when I swing the tip of the racket back, the butt of the racket actually goes forward and out. And so that is the magic of how we get this equal and opposite racket flip effect as we play is because we are discovering feelings in our hand that let us feel how to pivot the racket here instead of here. And so this video, we're going to go through lessons that I've taught, how I've worked with this with players, and just some of the implications and the ways you can learn to feel this. It's going to fix your lag, you're going to be able to perceive your lag, and it's going to give you a feeling of a hitting slot where adding spin through that hitting slot comes naturally rather than always feeling like a process. Now a lot of the before footage we're watching here is mini tennis, because the truth is you can tell just when a player is playing mini tennis, whether they're pivoting the racket around the top of their hand or whether they're pivoting the racket around the bottom of their hand. And this kind of crisp hitting action, it gives you control and it gives you like fine grain control, and when you're hitting from the baseline, it's a lot easier to hit like kind of mediocre shots where you have so much margin from the bottom, but in mini tennis it really exposes it. And what you're going to see is that as we work through these lessons, all of these players are going to go from this more kind of pushing style to a real hit with the racket head, and they're going to develop velocity control and spin all at the same time. Every player is going to gain power and spin and control. So at the highest level, normally when everyone's already really good at swinging the racket, it's like I can choose to hit slower but be more in control of my swing. For you watching this, that is almost certainly not the case. There is a better way to swing the racket that will give you everything. Learning to feel the pivot here and to perceive how the racket is moving through the air through your hand is as close to a magic wand as it gets for making the swing better along every single dimension. Now, our first and most powerful tool for this is to take the bottom fingers off of the racket. And the reason is you need multiple haptic references as you play tennis. You need references that tell you where the bottom of the racket is and how it's moving, and references that tell you where the top of the racket is and how it's moving. And players who pivot off the bottom a lot of times have these top haptic references disengaged. Maybe they have gaps here, or even if the hand is all the way around, they just don't really know what's happening. Maybe it's loose against the skin and it kind of wiggles. And they fling the racket off of their bottom two fingers like this, and they feel like they're getting velocity and spin, and so they never realize there's anything wrong. So what we do is, by forcing you to play with only two fingers, I am removing all of your haptic information down here. And now I am forcing you to pivot here because you can't prevent it from pivoting there. You can't make it pivot at the butt cap anymore. You have to pivot it here. And so we're swinging here with two fingers only and learning how that racket momentum works. Now, this is not as easy as it looks. A lot of times you're going to hit the ball into the ground. That's okay. Work with it. Learn to feel this hitting action where the pivot in your hand here, whether you're perceiving it in your palm or in your V, that's up to you. This is a little bit more Eastern. This is a little more Western. That's not what matters. What matters is that you have perception in the top of your handle of your racket's momentum in this plane. So this hitting axis right here, this back to front hitting axis, pivoting at your palm at the V of your hand, perceiving that will fundamentally change your forehand. And everything else you've seen on this channel about pressing and scap control and stabilization, all of that has to connect to your racket through your hand. And if your racket hand interface isn't properly mapped, you can't perceive what's happening. Right now I am using my rotator cuff and my lats and my traps, my pecs as well, but I'm using all this muscle to control the shoulder girdle and create the hitting action that I want through a point in the air that I'm thinking about. But all of that is using all of this to do something with my racket. And if the part of your nervous system that communicates back to your brain what you're doing with your racket isn't mapped onto the racket, then you'll never be able to organize this because you're basically playing blind. You're trying to create something, but you can't feel what you're creating when you do different things. And so not only that, but one of the things I actually see is that often players' scapular mechanics improve just by virtue of mastering their hand racket interface because they stop swinging like this because this pivots the racket around the butt cap. And they're like, huh, well, I have to make the racket do this somehow. And that naturally engages the back and the back of the rotator cuff because they're trying to get this pivot in the hitting action. And you're going to see that here where a lot of players are going to naturally have a way more stable hitting action, even though in these particular lessons, we didn't directly work on it. Now, it is great to directly work on it. Once you have your hand interface mapped, getting feelings through here gives you a lot of free velocity without losing control. So it's great to work on your scap mechanics. It's just that they are upstream physically of the hand, but they are downstream neurologically. So neurologically, I have a sense of how I want the racket to hit the ball, how I want it to roll through the ball, and then that has to map onto a haptic sensation through the hand. If I don't have a haptic sensation through the hand here, then everything I do up here isn't really connected to anything. I do something random. I hit the ball. I hope it goes where I want. Versus I feel with at least two references, if I only have one reference, it's harder to perceive velocity. Whereas with two references, take something like spin. With two references, I can perceive the pivot here and I can perceive that my fingers on the bottom being here versus here. So I can really perceive the difference between a flat shot where those references are staying at the same height and a rolling shot where this reference is lowering relative to the other reference. So ultimately, you want to create as much contact between hand and handle as you can and kind of just feel like you're hitting with your entire hand. But to start out, just kind of innervate the spots on your hand one at a time. Start with this. This is the most important for control, for perceiving momentum. And then as we put our hand back on, as we kind of move off the two-finger thing and put our hand back on, we're trying to innervate either the bottom of the palm here or the front two fingers here so that now we feel like we're using our entire hand to hit the ball. And that's where you start to get that real, I literally can't miss feeling because it doesn't feel so novel anymore. It's just like, wow, I am using my entire hand to hit the ball. Of course I can't miss. I mean, I know how this works. I've had this hand my whole life. This is the novel part. And so mapping this interface is where the really fast kind of magic wand style winds come from. Now, if you're watching Yifan drill these short forehands and you're like, wow, I would like that level of command over my contact, you know, definitely reach out and we can work together. If you're in New Jersey, we can work together in person. There's a survey you can fill in the description. And then online, we help people with this too. We have a digital library, which is a bunch of bite-sized drills and explanations explaining this in like tons of detail. What I do when I'm on court with a student is I basically take them through our online program just with the real-time guidance. And online, I review your videos and give you asynchronous guidance. When you sign up, your confusion will end. You watch the videos, you'll be like, oh, this is how the forehand works. We'll chat about your footage and make sure you're on the right track, that you're understanding things properly. And you will finally be linearly getting better towards the stroke you've always wanted basically forever. Now, another thing that's really important with this, and one of the reasons we start with two fingers is when I use my bottom fingers, I can cheat the momentum of my racket head. So even if my racket had wanted to hit the ball into the ground, like let's say I take a swing like this, well, my hitting slot there is here into the ground. But if I have my bottom fingers around, I can cheat it and like wrist it up at the last second. Whereas with only two fingers, I can't cheat anymore. So I have to perceive the racket's momentum, perceive how the racket head wants to move, and then use my proximal links, my chest, my abs, my hips, and my kind of rotation to kind of be the power's humble guide here. I can't force it. And then, even though I could now manipulate it, and if I'm in an emergency situation, I will yank it with my hand, which by the way, you only get five or 10 of those a match before your hand starts to hurt. So you don't want to be doing that. But now that I have that feeling, specifically those sensations mapped up here of what it feels like to be the racket's humble guide, well, now I hold on to that feeling as I'm adding the sensations from the bottom of the hand. And now, you know, instead of the racket doing this now, now I'm creating stretch. These fingers are gaining tension, preventing this as I load into the swing, but I'm not using that to take over the momentum. I'm simply using that synergistically with the way that the racket already wanted to move. And again, I can remove all of my hand control if I need to really learn how the racket wants to behave. One of the things I struggle with a lot with students, but we work through it, is when they put their full hand back on, now, so with two fingers, it's very hard to resist the racket's momentum. You can, but with two fingers, normally you're going to do a good job of letting the racket go in the backswing and really just feeling out the momentum of how that racket wants to hit. But once I put my hand back on, now it's like very easy to break everything that's happening back here. So number one, the wrist needs to be relaxed enough to bend backwards. Because if I have tension here, now I go here and now the racket doesn't keep its momentum and I swing forward and I don't get anything. Now there's two kind of cues for this. One is, make sure that the wrist is allowed to bend. And now the racket will move in that same momentum as it was moving before. However, another great cue is just to feel for the same haptic signal that you got with the two finger. So, okay, so I nestled the racket on my two finger and I'm feeling this on the two finger. Well, if I don't let my wrist go back, it now feels different up here. So just the desire to feel that same sense signal through the hand will also cue you into relaxing your wrist. Now it's the same thing with the bottom two fingers here. If I like squeeze these bottom two fingers to like keep pushing the racket forward, I can really mess up the swing. So let's say I'm here and now I'm going to squeeze with the bottom two fingers and now I'm not using my momentum handoff and elastic energy anymore. Now I'm like actively hitting with slow twitch flexion of the wrist. So that's the other thing that can happen is tension here too early. Tension here should be passive. You should go here, feel the momentum through the swing. And then as you start to accelerate, you're going to feel your fingers squeeze because they are preventing this, they're preventing the handle from coming out and they're preventing the handle from slipping out. So you're going to feel tension increase and your grip is actually going to be very firm at contact. But you, you want to passively let that happen just with a desire not to drop the racket. So it's very paradoxical because people say relax and, but like relax, but then let yourself grab. Like as you swing fast, you're going to have to grab, otherwise you're going to throw your racket all over the place. So when we say relax, what we really mean is relax this and then allow the tension to build. Don't, don't try to make the tension build. And again, a lot of this comes from the mental map of, I am the racket's momentum, this humble guide. So my goal on the swing, when I'm trying to hit the ball, I'm not trying to like take my hand and like use my fingers to hit the ball. I'm trying to use my fingers as sensory organs that let me use proximal mechanics to perceive the racket's momentum and then hit the ball with the racket's momentum. Because you know, the hardest I can hit the ball without injuring myself with my hand is like this. So I could run around and go like this and then run around and go like that. And like, I wouldn't hurt myself, but that's it. Only this stuff is strong enough to actually play tennis. And so that's why you need to use it as a hinge and just a elastic stretch release. And so we start with a two finger drill to map both what the racket's momentum feels like unrestricted and also to map the haptic reference at the top to make sure I'm actually connecting my nervous system to the tool in my hand. And then as I put my hand back on, now we make sure that the bottom fingers and the wrist are not restricting the same momentum I was using. One more thing I want to talk about, which is really fun, is if you go watch some of the best players in slow-mo, watch Federer, watch Sinner, watch Alcaraz, they will go like this before many, many of their forehands. Maybe not if they're playing at like max speed, but any practice video, even Sam Querrey, there was like a Winston Do video recently, and you can watch Sam Querrey before every forehand he goes here and then he wraps his hands around. And what I suspect this is, because I've seen it happen intuitively in my students and I've watched my own video and I sometimes do it without really noticing, is the swing always starts with the grip. So let's say the racket is here. Obviously, I have to hold it to hit the ball, but it's more than that. It's not that I have to hold the racket, it's that I have to innervate the racket. It's that I have to imagine my nervous system fanning out into the handle and connecting the racket directly into my brain. That's what the grip is. And so if I'm here in ready position, like my hands kind of loose around it so I can go both ways, the first step to any forehand, first step of preparation, it's not a unit turn, it is innervate the racket with the hand. And like we're just talking about, the top haptic reference is what gives you this momentum signal that lets you actually find your hitting slot. And so the very first step of any forehand is to innervate the top haptic reference, which is why you see Sinner, Alcaraz, Federer often starting here and then wrapping their fingers around, because the very first thing they're fishing for is that nestle the racket into the palm or nestle the racket into the V feeling. And then they wrap their fingers around. And the reason it works in that sequence is this is the haptic reference that does most of the work early. And then the fingers, they're really, they're quite loose at the beginning and they build tension late as the proximal links contribute velocity to the swing. And so that pattern where you find your grip here and then here, or even you see it on one handers, the guys will find their grip here and then here, and they might even have the index finger off and tell the swing. All of that is connecting the hand to the handle so you can perceive the momentum signals that you need to actually have your body self-organized into a controllable, spinnable, powerful swing. Okay. Lastly, I want to talk about velocity creation. Velocity is created proximally, proximal meaning close to the spine. If you try to get velocity by hitting harder from here, that is going to break your signaling and it can even get you hurt. The reason that's so important is if you are struggling with velocity, often your brain will move your reference down the handle for more leverage. So if I'm swinging like this, but I have no great sense of my scap, my shoulder, my rotation, and I'm pushing the racket through like this, okay, great control using this top haptic reference here. And now it's like, okay, well now I'm trying to swing harder. Well, in order to swing harder, we have to learn proximal mechanics because if we don't and we try to swing harder, I'm going to start going like this. And what I'm doing now is I am now swinging the racket from the bottom of the handle. And so then I'm going to lose access to the hitting slot that, you know, the lag, the effortless topspin, the effortless power, the effortless pop, the control over where the ball goes. All of that is lost when we move the reference, the rotation point down to the handle. And so we need the rotation point to stay here, which means if we want more velocity, we don't go to leverage here to get more velocity. Instead we go to proximal mechanics and this is where we get into the rest of our videos. This is where this video is going to end, but things like pressing with the chest, engaging the scapula, the back of the rotator cuff, holding the elbow stable out here. And then of course, you know, activation through your trunk and through your hips. It's all connected though. If, if you don't have basic hand eye coordination, you're not going to be good. Then you have to innervate the racket. Then you have to get this stable so that when you rotate, that energy actually passes through your shoulder and into the arm and then ultimately into the hand. And then of course, now I'm totally comfortable keeping my pivot at the top because I can feel how fast the racket is going. Even with my pivot up here, I don't need the extra leverage from the pivot down here. Now we're going to close the video watching Kevin's one-hander. And you know, Kevin didn't start with this one-hander. We've worked on it for about two hours now. What I want to point out here, first of all, it's all the same progressions we're using. We map the handle, we find a grip where he can actually perceive the hitting action. And that is the starting point for everything that we do on the stroke. If you learn the game this way, if you learn the game the right way where you can perceive the racket in your hand, you can use it to hit the ball. It gets really, really fun, really, really fast. I mean, Kevin was smiling. I was smiling with how good the one-handers looked and how good they felt. Like this is a real shot he's got here. He's creating some real drive through the ball, some real hit using these exact same progressions just on the one-handed backhand. The two-hander is actually a little interesting where, you know, I think players use different pivots like Medvedev splits his hands, whereas other players' hands are closer to the bottom. So it's the same high-level principle. You find a pivot that works for you that's not at the butt cap, and then you use your hands to innervate it. But anyway, the one-hander is almost directly the same as the forehand. You pivot it, you know, somewhere around the V, and you've got to feel the racket's motion in your hand. You've got to feel your hitting slot. And if you do that, again, like really, really quickly, you can get to a point where tennis is really, really fun, where it's not so confusing. It's like even though Kevin is occasionally missing shots here, he has command over the contact. He has command over his body. And when you watch the way he's adjusting, the way he's contacting the ball, like he looks like a good player, and he looks like, and this is the case, if he just practices this and makes this more habitual and hits thousands of balls like this, he will get linearly better. And that's really the key when you're able to innervate your racket, is practice makes you better, rather than the practice being kind of confusing, where the stroke feels the one way, one way, one day, and then the different way the next day. When you learn the stroke in this way, then all you have to do is practice, and then you can even see his quality is just going up and up and up as he hits more balls here. You know, that one is a miss, but he's got a signal through his hand, so he's immediately going to be able to correct for it on the next ball.