The Stability Secret Behind the Pro Forehand

The forehand that we're going to be building today, it's not the fastest version of your forehand, it's not the heaviest version of your forehand, but it is stable, it is controllable, it is repeatable, and it is the foundation of the most explosive version of your stroke. So once you have this version, we call it your simplest effective forehand, you're going to be able to have fun, play matches, keep the ball in, and then intuitively work up to the more explosive throwing strokes from a foundation that is going to help you get there instead of holding you back. Number one, we are going to talk about stability because those throwing mechanics, those like explosive, you know, feelings to the shoulder, they only work when you are stable at your trunk and stable through the inside of the shoulder before you want kind of the outside of your arm to roll. I want you to watch as she's doing the stable version of her swing, the orientation of her hips and trunk, and how she has that little double bend where that back hip is a little bit bent right here instead of straight. Now that's going to activate your lower body in a way that makes it a lot more stable. This is what it looks like. For a lot of you guys, you're sitting all the time, you're very quad dominant, your body really wants to be here, and it is going to be much harder to get that stable connected feeling through the upper body if that hip trunk connection is unstable there. Now, you see the difference? She's trying to do the same thing with the arm. She's still not trying to hit it that hard. Her control here is not gone because she's swinging too fast, her control is gone because she has lost stability at that hip trunk connection. Okay, so now God forbid you have that instability and you do try to hit harder. The problem is, it's just going to send your torso. So if coaches are telling you, you know, don't pop up or don't over-rotate, driving through that unstable hip angle is sending her body up and around instead of giving her that small rotational pulse that just pulses through the stroke. Okay, so now we're going to have her go back to hitting normal, and I want you to watch that stable orientation of the hip and the trunk, which is what allows that really controlled activation from the lower body. Now, if she wants to hit ever so slightly harder, she's not going to lose complete control of her upper body because she has all that proximal stability. And so a lot of times when you see your favorite player's shoulder going crazy, it's because they have all these proximal things working for them, and the reason you try to imitate that at the arm and it doesn't work is because you're proximally too unstable. So a great drill to feel this stability is turn sideways, hips sideways, and I want you to imagine only rotating your upper body into your shot and not rotating your pelvis at all. Now, you might look at Alexa and be like, wait a minute, coach, isn't she rotating her pelvis? And the reason it looks like that is because just the desire to rotate your shoulder line is intuitively going to make you rotate your hip as much as you have to. And so if you imagine staying totally sideways with the hips and only going with the upper body, that is going to give you the right activation from your hips. For most players, if they intentionally try to pop this forward, you're going to get this hip coming past the trunk, unstable popping up position, which is going to turn the simple swing into a over-rotated popping up shank, which Alexa is exaggerating a bit, but this is, I'm sure you've seen this in your own swing. And so we'll just do these last three again, where she is imagining only the upper body is going, lower body pelvis is staying totally sideways, and the amount that that back hip is contributing here is the amount that is purely intuitive from trying to get the upper body to rotate on top of the hips. By the way, if you want to get OnCourt in person with us, link in the description. We're in New Jersey, but we travel. We'll be in Utah this winter. We're trying to go somewhere tropical this winter, and we're going to be in northern Hudson Valley on September 26th, if it doesn't rain. You can always check if there's a pinned comment with your location, and you can always fill out the form and let us know you're interested, even if you're not local, and if we travel to you, we'll let you know. Chest height feeds are a great way to practice because the diagonal rotational versions are a little bit more complex. When the ball is high, I still can't straighten everything like this. So if I straighten everything like this, even though I'm not trying to accelerate, it's just really hard to organize my shoulder here. What I want you to notice is my hip line is in front of my shoulders here. So even though that ball is high, if I keep my hips behind my shoulders, and because I'm not hitting that hard, I'm also not even really straightening them at all. I'm not even really popping the hips. I'm just turning the upper body above them. Now I've recovered all of my proximal stability, and so my brain is okay letting the arm be a little bit looser without feeling like I'm going to lose track of everything, whereas the second I unlock that hip stability, now, you know, I'm swinging slow, so I can still use my eyes and make the ball, but it's completely out of control, and obviously I would never be able to connect explosion to that version of the swing. So one way to feel your hips activate is to exaggerate this. Butt back, chest forward, knees straight. Now obviously you're going to play with a bit of knee flexion, but this is an exaggeration, turning off a lot of the knee and quad to force you to find your hips. Now you're trying to keep your back straight here. It's not trying to round, and so we're kind of hitting almost as if we are doing a Romanian deadlift, and it's going to feel ridiculous, and you're going to notice, even though it feels ridiculous, because it is forcing me to activate my hips, my shoulder is actually working pretty naturally, and there's like right here a super natural lane to swing through, as opposed to when you're straight up and you're crashing into your trunk. Now I am keeping that kind of Romanian deadlift hip position through the whole swing. I am not opening, popping my chest up, or rotating. So this is an upper body rotation drill. Here's me straight up. That's my spine rotating like this. All I am doing is hinging and then rotating my spine here instead. And I say my spine, but of course the spine is just a reference. I mean all of the fascia through my trunk, muscles, obliques. What normally happens is players, instead of getting low like that, they go knees forward, chest up. And this kind of tricks you into thinking that it's a similar athletic ready position, but this is the one where, again, I can time it because I'm not swinging that fast, but my hips aren't contributing to shoulder stability. I'm really just hitting this ball with my forearm, and if I try to unlock my shoulder, it's just so unstable. See, I sprayed that one. I'm not even hitting fast. I hit the back fence because the shoulder, all this in here, needs support from the hips. So that knee bend is fine, but the reason we're taking away is to exaggerate feeling the hips engage. As long as I have the hips engaged now, some knee flexion is fine. It's pretty athletic. But the second I go back to straight up, torso in front of my shoulders here, even if I try to lean onto the balls of my feet, this is just not going to give me the stability I need to unlock the shoulder the way my hips behind me will. My hips are behind me here. Okay, so you've got that. I have drilled into you that you need an angle here, and you need to keep it and not pop up like this. If that still feels uncomfortable, here's what I want you to do. Take your toe and your knee and you leave them, or your toe and your hip, you leave them where they are and just feel out this range of motion of your knee. So stay over the ball of your foot and feel out thumb toe, pinky toe, thumb toe, pinky toe, and if you feel unbalanced, not powerful, not stable, you're rolling the knee out towards the outside of the ball of your foot rather than the inside of the ball of your foot. Another way to say it is you can kind of look on the bottom of your foot, where is the arch of my foot, and you are rolling your weight over the arch of your foot. So you're loading your arch, you're not loading that kind of inside flat feet over pronating part of the foot, you are loading the arch of your foot. And so here, I'm going to load the inside of my foot. And again, I feel that instability, even though I have the hip bend, even though I have the knee bend, it is just not as stable, and I'm working harder versus here. Now my shoulder is super connected to the upper body. You know, a lot of times, you know, we're always as coaches, we're telling you, you know, get your weight onto the ball of your feet, right? Lean in 60-40 going forward. A lot of that is going wrong, because if you're interpreting that, but you're still in this knees forward, knees inside, hips extended position, it's like, yes, I'm on the balls of my feet, and I'm 60-40. But it just isn't that real stable connection. Sorry, I'm turning my knee out to go for stability on habit. Okay, really got to keep the knee in unstable. Oh, that's so bad. So if you allow your weight to roll onto the entire ball of your foot as a first goal, ultimately, onto the outside of the ball of your foot, that is where you'll be able to really comfortably drive out of that in any direction. And this apparatus, so again, rolling here versus rolling here, this apparatus is going to really help the things we're gonna talk about next, which is engaging all this stability so that your shoulder and arm just effortlessly connects to your trunk. And then, you know, when you try to twist your upper body, I mean, the arm is just going to come right through with it. You're barely even going to have to think about the upper body parts of this. We are hiring. So right now I need someone for scheduling and client relations, roughly 10 to 15 hours a week, roughly 50 bucks an hour. I can give you specifics. Email us if you're interested. We'll be hiring probably for social media and Instagram and stuff like that in the future, preferably local for the scheduling, but outside New Jersey is okay too. Only hiring from the US right now could change in the future. Now, very often when you are practicing this really simple version of your forehand, it's going to feel really natural to step into the ball instead of just staying in place. And that's good. When you get a ball this slow, a little positive balance, a little positive weight transfer feels really good. The key to keeping that simple lower body activation, it's going to make the shoulder self-organized, finish balanced over your front foot. So you see when Alexa finishes this shot, her weight is over that front foot. She's so stable. She's not falling backwards. She's not falling off to her left. Sometimes I see even not as many, but players will under rotate and they'll be actually falling off to their right. And so all she's doing is gliding her weight through the swing onto that front foot. And because she's good at it, that just organizes the upper body for you and keeps that simplest effect of forehand. She's going to do a couple of demos and you're going to watch how things stop organizing when she's missing that front foot balance. So there, you know, she's falling off to her left there. You know, sometimes you end up pushing back through the foot by accident, falling off backwards like that one. So, you know, obviously if you're good through the hand, right, she's doing a good job compensating through the hand here. But all of a sudden, this is no longer the simplest effect of forehand. She's doing so many upper body compensations to make up for the fact that she's not able to transfer her weight cleanly onto that front foot. And so if we go back now, go ahead and you can do it normally. Once she is transferring her weight onto that front foot, look how simple the upper body gets. She doesn't have to do any more of that kind of fancy, okay, I got to save it with the trunk, save it with the hand, because her lower body is setting her upper body up to be simple. So you're trying, but you can't, right? It doesn't matter how hard I try. I can't get balance. I'm always missing it. A lot of that is the same thing we're talking about. This front hip anchor is landing open like this, and you're not getting that over the ball, the arch of the foot, you know, angle here, slight angle here, but really it's more important that your hips are engaged. So again, here's like the straight version. And that's much more difficult for me to find that balance because my weight is loading through the front heel with this hip extended in front of my shoulders position, as opposed to keep my hips behind me, and now it is so natural to finish over that front foot. Do one more, one more like that. See that? It's not actually that difficult to find your balance if this is loading properly. So I'm going to exaggerate the two different foot positions here. This is, I'm loading through the inside heel of that front foot. And when I load through the inside heel of that front foot, very hard, that one I didn't even want to swing at, it's very hard for me to to take my upper body and rotate it around on top of my hips, versus I'm loading through the outside ball of that front foot. And I can make the balance go wherever I want. I can a little more cross-court if I want. You know, I can finish with my weight going a little more down the line or wherever I want because I am hitting that front step with an anchor that is much more favorable. Now stability, it doesn't end at the hips, although it does start there. Once the hips and the trunk are stable, now we can stabilize the shoulder. And so if you watch Alexa's Simplest Effective Forehand here, see how that elbow is basically swinging along a table? Like yeah, it drops a little bit, but it is basically like she's imagining a table. And that elbow just swings nice and stable in a gentle semicircle around a table. That is because she is stabilizing with her back here. If she doesn't do that, and you might see this in your own strokes, even though she's trying to stabilize from the lower body and she's still trying to hit the ball over the net, it looks like this. You might look at this and it's like, oh that's kind of a topspin forehand, she's got some windshield wiper, but without that back stability piece, that arm is totally out of control. All right, so we'll go back to the actual Simplest Effective Forehand with the back stability, and now we are back here. And so Alexa's going to go to her prep for me, and I want to show you exactly what I mean when I say back stability. It's your back and your side. The first thing is, we don't want to shrug. So the upper traps here, you shrug up for me. If you are doing this, undo that shrug first. Undo that shrug. Okay, now the side here, and then the back here, imagining kind of attaching the shoulder down that way. When you have some isometric tone back there, and notice how she's got that activation of the hips, she's not all relaxed like here. Now when she rotates her upper body, that's going to feel really comfortable just bringing the arm with it. So watch a couple more of those with that in mind. That little bit of isometric tone, and now it really doesn't take any effort to have the hitting arm come through when she rotates her trunk over top of those nice stable hips. Now, why do we start with the hips? Well, if my hip is relaxed, it doesn't matter how much I try to organize my serratus and my mid traps, not upper traps, mid traps. I just can't really. I can try to get this locked in and attached. It is sometimes working, but it's just so challenging. Versus if I have this stable hip position, now my arm just slots right in to that scap. With the stable hip position, my shoulder is so attached, and it's like I feel like I can swing as hard as I want, and I know exactly where my arm's going to be. Now, it's not about swinging hard, but the point is that attachment. Stabilize the back, feel the serratus activate, feel the mid traps, feel your trunk kind of catch your arm and pull it forward so you don't really have to do anything. That attachment is so much easier to create from this hip activated trunk behind you, butt behind you, chest in front of you position than it is from this position. And we talk about pressing a lot, and the idea of pressing and feeling that pecs activation, it's the same thing. Very hard from this position to ever feel those pecs really activate in a way that's helping you versus from this position. Just I just turn forward and I feel my pecs activate to bring my arm with my trunk. One more way to kind of get that hitting side apparatus to turn on is actually to take the left leg and kind of squeeze this diagonal a little more when we hit. And so if you imagine not just hitting the ball, but also kneeing the ball with your left knee, you can take that activation we're going for, that kind of pecs activation, and get a little more out of it. And so, you know, it's going to feel a little weird at first, and you might have to work on your spacing and timing, but if you just knee the ball with that left hip, you're going to get that little drive from the right side to activate a little bit more. And you've actually probably seen similar versions of this, maybe not this exaggerated, but similar versions of this when you watch TV, where that left hip is coming up as the shoulder goes forward. And the reason is because it creates kind of that diagonal tension line through the trunk and helps you get that pulse from the right side. There is a spacing element to this where even if you're stabilized, your hips are stabilized, your shoulders stabilize, you probably need to push the ball farther away from yourself than you think to make this work. So if we look at when Alexa's hips and shoulder are stabilized, there is a swinging lane right here. So that chest over hips, it creates this swinging lane. If we look laterally, that's actually pretty far to her right. Whereas if I were to put the ball here, notice she can't use that swinging lane and see what she has to do now. You guys probably feel like this on your swing sometimes, you end up jamming yourself like this. And I actually had a student in the online program recently where the whole prep and everything looked stable and controlled, and then the wrong spacing was what was forcing the bad version of the swing. But then with just the better spacing, his body was actually organizing really well. That's actually really common. And if you want to join that program, by the way, link in description. When you are in this hip extended position, kind of the natural swinging lane is that push. It is that kind of push through the ball. You very often will find yourself getting super open, super early to try to make that work. Even if you try to stay sideways, though, that can make it marginally better, but it's still not really going to create that same swinging lane. And so the thing is, if you're open, right, you know, she's making the ball, she's lifting, she's pushing. So once we stabilize now, if she tries to use that same contact point, she's not in the new swinging lane. So, you know, as we stabilize the trunk, and as we get the shoulder attached, you're going to have to keep that ball much farther away to your right, or to your left if you're left handed, in order to get the racket to be able to pass through that swinging lane, and then the ball to actually be in that lane when the racket goes through. So the last piece, if you're getting all of that, and it still feels totally out of control, your grip might be wrong. So here's a good example where my whole proximal chain is in great control here, and yet I'm still not able to control the ball, and here I am using a 0 out of 10 grip tension. So here's what we need to test. When your hand is about to do the forehand, even before you go to swing, if you twist the racket, if you push the racket, it can't slide in your hand. Your whole hand has to move with the handle, and you want to engineer a grip so you can do that while holding as loose as possible, but for right now, just bump it up to a 5 or a 6 out of 10 if it feels totally out of control, instead of more like the 3 that we really want when you're starting, because then, you know, we're not hitting that fast, you're not going to hurt yourself, then at least if you do things right from your trunk, and from with your back, you are not going to lose control of the ball. And I see a lot of you guys with, you have gaps in your grip, and the racket's going like this, or you're holding so loose that you can't, you can't like perceive the racket like this, it's always like micro-twisting like this, or some of you guys just change it so infrequently that even though your grip is fine, it's just slipping in there a little bit, and if we want to be able to do this, and I'm kind of really just playing the ball with my trunk and letting my hitting arm go, I need to feel where the racket is through my handle. So while I'm doing this, I do need to feel the racket through the handle, and when the arm moves, when the trunk moves the arm, and when the shoulder rolls, the racket has to do the same thing. So if the grip is slipping out of your hand and stuff, then the racket is not going to do the same thing. Get the racket, use your left hand, I'm right-handed, so use the left hand, gently push it all the way into your palm, or all the way into the V, depending on how eastern or western you are, but gently push it all the way back, and then wrap your fingers all the way around, create as much skin to handle contact as you can, and that way you're not going to have to grip as tightly to keep the whole thing moving, the hand and the racket moving as a unit, and try to get the gaps out of your grip. And now the last thing with the grip here is, you want to think of the last link in your kinetic chain as your hitting arm. So it's not the racket, so we're not doing this, where like we're trying to have the last thing moving be just the racket, we are using our trunk to accelerate the hitting arm as the system which hits the ball. And you might say, well coach, don't I want a feeling of a hit through my hand? Yes, and this is where it's a little counterintuitive. I absolutely want you to feel the hit through your hand, but you are creating that by using your stability to accelerate your entire hitting arm. So the hand is a sensory organ which is helping you time the upstream stuff, right? When I feel like I felt there, oh that contact didn't feel that good. Why? Because I actually felt back a little bit on that one, it wasn't that stable, or I had the spacing wrong, or whatever. So the hand, the grip, it's a sensory organ. If it's slipping, it doesn't work. So it's a sensory unit that's telling you what to do, but then what you are physically doing is you are using the big strong muscles in the hips and the trunk to accelerate your entire hitting arm, and that will make the swing feel a lot smoother.