How The Best Tennis Pro Create Forehand Racquet Whip…(drills included)

If you're looking for smooth, effortless power in your forehand, then it really comes down to managing your energy. The buzzword generally around tennis right now is how can I lag, how not can I lag, and create more lag on your forehand to get more power, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. The real complete piece is how do you create lag that creates whip. Whip is where you can get massive amounts of racket at speed just by learning how to use your body the right way, because at the end I'm going to show you the secret booster, the secret booster of making sure that after you understand how to whip the ball and create more power and more energy blowing through your racket, this is going to be the money, the big daddy that's going to take it to the next level. The problem is many players are focusing on lag or even trying to swing harder when they're not even using the energy they have available that well. In this video, I'm going to show you how lag should turn into whip, which means that lag stores the energy, but then whip delivers the energy. You see every forehand you see on TV, whether it be men or women, they're only doing one thing very well. Once you learn how to do this, it changes the game for your entire game, which is managing energy. Basically, we take energy from the ground and shift that energy up through our legs, to our torso, to our arm, and then boom, we have it come out through the racket, but most players don't know how to do this. They might even feel like, hey, if I get into this position, but they're missing the point. If you want to crack a whip, you've got to be loose, and that's the very first thing we're going to discuss. To start using your energy, especially when we're just isolating our hand and our arm, it comes down to learning how to be loose. Which one's going to move faster? If you have a baseball bat and you just do like this, just like this, how fast is it going to move? If you have a whip and you snap it, bang, how fast does that move? That's the whip effect. Now, here's the deal. First thing we have to discuss is how relaxed we have to be. Here's the very first drill I want you to start. You can do this anywhere. Take your racket and start just like this. First of all, I'm going to show you two tenths. If I move my racket back and forth, what you see is my hand and the racket moving at the same rate. I don't get anything extra. I don't get really a lot of energy working through the racket. It's actually getting caught up, I feel it in my wrist, because I'm too tight. This is where most players are at. What we want to start doing is learning to create this lag and whip effect. What happens right now is I want you to be too loose. Out of a scale of one to 10, where I was probably like a nine or 10, now I'm going to be like a one or a two. Now if I move, look what happens. If you look carefully, my hand moves independent of the racket. If I add a little bit more tension and go back and forth, what will happen is I go back, my hand here via my arm is going to move forward. If you watch that forward movement, what just happened? Lag. What I mean by lag is, boom, this action here. Here's the deal. I'm holding it here just so you can see this. I don't want you actually doing this when we're hitting shots. I'm holding it here. As I do this action and pull my hand forward, it lags the racket behind. It just stays behind. Guess what? If I then pull forward and then stop this hand, look what happens. Did you see that little action where the racket starts moving faster in the hand? All that energy gets returned back into the racket face. This is exactly what we want to start creating more racket at speed. If I do this, yes, you can create racket at speed, but if I learn how to do this and use that in my forehand, guess what? That creates a massive amount of racket at speed. All I'm doing is basically taking the energy that I'm using right now from my shoulder and transferring it to the racket tip, like a lagging snap or lagging whip. Now that you understand relaxation, we have to add some level of control because this just thing gets out of whack and there's no way you're going to be able to control a forehand swing like that. Well, we need to understand exactly how much we want our wrist to move. Think of your wrist like a door hinge. My analogy is this. This is the door closed. This is the door open, and people walk through. Okay? So if you can see it, door closed, door open. And so now, when I pull my hand back and I pull forward, as I pull forward, the racket lags, or my hand lags, and that creates the opening of the door. So we can see it here, door closed, door open, and now if I pull it forward, boom, the door is open. Again, I'm freezing it here just so you can see. Now as I pull it forward, what I want to do is have where my wrist goes where the door is closed. Generally, a neutral racket position, or a neutral position for my wrist. And so if I go from the door open to door closed and stop, I'm going to add some tension to stop it just for this drill, so you can see this, boom, okay? And now, what you don't get is the wrist going past and flexing. We don't want that. That causes a lot of injury because we're now pushing our wrist to its point where it can't flex anymore. What we want to start practicing is almost if you think this is the stopping point, I'm going to go here, boom, boom. When I'm here, my wrist is going to be in a very neutral position, okay? And all I'm really doing if I relax, boom, I'm relaxing and I'm adding some tension just to stop it here for a second. Adding some tension just to stop it here. And so, you could even do this if you had a wall here. I'm just going to pull the racket forward just like this and boom, I'm adding some tension. But now, I'm only adding tension at the end, meaning letting the door close and then I'm going to stop it from rolling all the way forward. So it'll look like this. Because this level of lag can start creating a lot of racket at speed. Right now, you can see I'm barely moving, but obviously, you have all the energy build up and it snaps into the ball, but we don't just want to stop our stroke like this. There's an element of roll. Basically, we're rolling, boom, the energy around so it doesn't go and bend my wrist. Because if I just continue to let that energy go forward, what would happen? My wrist would snap and do this. Stretching my wrist and flexing it forward, causing a lot of injury. But we can still let that energy flow. And the way we let that energy flow is we make contact and what we're going to do is roll through our forearm or sometimes our shoulder, depending on if you're straight or if you're bent. I'm going to roll that energy around. And so, when I roll that energy around, guess what? The energy never goes into my wrist to hurt my wrist. And so now, here's the next drill. We're going to, boom, you're going to stop it and then all I want you to do is roll. Now, if you really do this and start to put it together, what you notice is this kind of looks like the windshield wiper forehand. And I have nothing against the windshield wiper forehand, but I think too many times players use it the wrong way. They actually interrupt the energy they're building. So get this. If I do this and then suddenly I'm doing this, what just happened? I took all the energy just going forward and then I used my wrist to stop it and bend it over this way. When we see the windshield wiper forehand, what we generally see is this. We see rackets flying into the ball. It goes through the ball and the racket tip goes forward more as it rolls over. Now, if they're hitting a heavier ball, what they do is they then change the path of the swing. So now I start pulling up. So the racket still, the energy is going forward and doing the exact same thing. But we're not going, because literally you just took the energy you built up and you redirected it against the energy, the flow of the energy. We don't want to do that. We always want to go with the flow. So now that you have this idea, we can start melding these things together. So instead of just stopping here and rolling, we're going to put it together. And so now you can see how I'm barely swinging and get a lot of racket at speed. Now a couple of mistakes you might be making is actually rolling too soon. You're trying to roll through the contact. We actually want to make the contact. The racket's going to keep going forward to our neutral position and that's when we roll. We're trying to prevent the racket from starting to bend and hurt our wrist. Now the next thing is this, when we do this, you may feel like, Hey, this isn't working for me. And generally it doesn't work is because we don't have that transition of power. And so what the transition of power is simply when we were doing this drill before, my hand has to slow down or stop. So if I stop, boom, definitely comes around. But also if I slow down, I'm speeding up and slowing down. That's what creates it. If my hand never slows down, we never get that burst of energy. Now to say one is wrong and one's right. No, one's just more efficient about creating power and one's not. And so I could swing like this, which is sometimes a great teaching tool in the beginning. But honestly, if I feel and work on relaxing, the racket does the follow through on its own. Basically, after I start the racket and make contact, the energy then carries my arm around and that's what I want. And so you can incorporate this in your stroke. In a second, I'm going to show you how the ATB tour and a lot of ladies on the WTA tour do the exact same thing. And so with this type of stroke, I can swing like this and then I'm letting my racket do a lot of the work. You can see how I can still let the racket come around, but you're saying that's probably not the same forehand that you see on TV. What are they doing? Why is their elbow up? Well, let's talk about that. Think about skipping a rock for a second. How would you skip a rock? You take the rock and oh, your elbow goes up and we do the same thing. It's the same thing. It just looks a little different. So before we had our elbow where we're actually swinging from my shoulder and my elbow. If you actually watch a little bit closer, when I do this, boom, my elbow is going to lead internally. And so what I mean by that is when I have my racket here, my racket's already set out where my elbow, the edge of my elbow is pointing this way. And so what the pros are doing, instead of having the racket like this, they lift their elbow and this action starts to build more energy, meaning that I lead with my elbow and this whole action here, you can try this right now. And if you're throwing a rock, what happens at the end? All the energy goes, boom, thrown into the ball. And so now to accentuate this and exaggerate it, if I go from here and lift my elbow, a lot of times that'll close my racket face. And so we're paying attention to closing racket face, but really the attention should be here in the elbow and the shoulder, which now in this position, as we start throwing that rock with our body on our elbow, boom, it puts us into this stretch position and also this leverage position with my butt of the racket. And so now if I start moving this racket and slow it down, it creates even more speed. So it looks like this. You'll see pros with the racket face generally closed and the closure of the racket will basically depend on the grip. But if I start skipping rocks, and so you already know what should happen. If I pull the racket into contact, I make contact, boom, and I come around. So now we can start skipping rocks. You can practice skipping a rock, skipping a rock. And so now I can do that same action and you can see how I can create a lot of racket at speed because now basically by lifting my elbow, I've created now a whipping action that now sends more energy through my hand down to the racket tip. Now the key when you're thinking of skipping a rock, because most players get into this, is avoiding tension. If you have any sort of tension right here, it's just not going to work. And so as far as relaxation, your hand is probably like a two or three in the beginning. We want it super loose because if I set my racket like this, it's on the edge here facing on the outside of my body. And then when I start pulling, boom, that happens not because I'm taking my wrist back, but it actually naturally happens. If I take my elbow, watch, if I just pull my elbow and I'm relaxed, that elbow pulling action is going to put my racket in this position and create more lag. And so the bigger I start to pull, the more lag it creates and stores energy that I can And then, boom, release into the ball. Now the key to this is when we're in this position, you have to recognize the differential between the racket and the ball. If generally you're right here, you can pull, but you want to make sure the butt of the racket is below the ball so we can pull up to the ball. So it looks like this. I'll push it down. And you can see how my racket's going up to the ball. Push it down. But I still have that same loose action. And what you're going to find is this, the racket does the work for you. The racket's coming around. You don't have to do anything. My biggest thing that I have when I show clients this is that most of the time, they're in the way. They're trying to manufacture. They're too tight. They're too tense. And so this never happens. They get stuck. They start to trust a little bit. Then they go, ah, I got to hold on to it. And they shut down the very energy they're trying to create. So make sure you're not doing that. So if you're wondering what are the next levels of it, you see variations of what? The elbow height. They call it sometimes the next generation where you see the elbow really high like a Nick Kyrgios and a lot of players because basically they're trying to accentuate this. And a lot of times you'll even see like with players, they start to really push that racket back because they're really trying to create more whip. And this is hugely important if you want to start creating more racket at speed. Understanding there is lag, but you want the whip on the end. So I did promise you what? At the end I'm going to show you the big daddy. Well guess what? We're talking about how the more I send energy down that whip, the more I crack the whip, the more energy gets sent to the tip of the racket. And so we've been basically doing all the cracking the whip with my shoulder here. Basically just my shoulder, which can generate a lot of power. But guess what? If we leverage the ground on our legs, we can generate even more force. And this is what you see the pros doing. They load up their back leg and they push into the ground. And when they push in the ground, they use something called the kinetic chain. The kinetic chain is a sequence of movements that allows you to actually create more energy that you can send down to your racket. And so what that is, is pushing against the ground by bending your knees. You're going to push out of the ground and the ground's going to push back. But when we push out of the ground, we're not pushing up. We don't want our energy to go up. We want it to go forward. So this means we're going to take our hip and we're going to push my hip forward. When we turn our hips, it's going to turn my torso, my upper half. Guess what's attached to my torso? My arm. And so guess what happens? Boom. We get this huge lag effect and then we can learn how to whip it. So you have to understand the secret weapon is making sure you have a great kinetic chain. Yes. Can you do this just with your arm and your shoulder? Yeah. I can get a ton of pace. This is how pros get pace on the run, hitting shots when they don't get their feet in position. But the biggest forehands, the best forehands, do it because they're using their legs to do this. And they're cracking that whip. Now most players are used to making contact back here, especially if you don't have the right mix of kinetic chain to make sure you're out here. And so what this means is when we crack the whip, think about this. If I crack the whip here, the whip hasn't had a chance to crack the tip of the whip, right? The tip of the whip is going to crack out in front of you. You see the best players when they're hitting the forehand, they hit it way out in front because that's going to be the moment where that tip of the racket comes around and cracks and then we can turn it over. As you're learning to start to create more whip, you might be wondering, like, how do I control where the racket goes? Maybe it flies on you. The key is making sure that when you come out of this lag, boom, your racket is vertical. And this can be accomplished by when you pull the racket and you get it low enough, you can then decide how up you're going to pull your arm. The more up you pull your arm, the more actually you're going to open the racket face. So we want to start pulling up and forward to get the racket face to be vertical or slightly closed. And this is the key to making sure you can hit the ball consistently where you want it to make sure that the racket face at the end of that whip is at the right place. Now, here's the deal. Even though I'm telling you, hey, we need the racket face to be here, you're only barely guiding it with your wrist, meaning that I'm not going and getting tight. I'm going here and feeling how it feels to get there. I'm very loose now. And so if I practice this action, I can stop. But then I can also let it go, making sure that I'm hitting that spot every time. Now, if you watch how I can consistently hit the ball at the same height is because I'm consistently achieving the same racket face at contact. And so practice your whip and freeze for one second. Now, do I want you to freeze in a match? No, but it's a great way to see where the racket face. If you start whipping and the racket's open, that's not where we want. And so we need to have practice here. Once you feel like you got it a couple of times, start whipping, boom, and making sure that you're imagining that you're hitting that spot, boom, at contact without having to stop. So if you like this video and you want to use this stuff to start cracking the whip, it's great, but you still need that key, key item, which is the kinetic chain. And if you don't understand that, you got to go watch this video.