Tennis Strokes Based On Feel Instead Of Exact Technique

[Music] Hey Thomas from phield tennis let's start today's video in my office because first I'm going to show you something on the iPad we're going to do a quick video analysis of Novak jovic's forehands and backhands so the topic of today's video is the problem of obsessing over small technical details and what you should do instead so I will show you with Novak jovic example how technique has to constantly change and adapt to different situations and that's why uh focusing on small technical details obsessing about them is not a good idea because they will keep changing so what should you focus on instead uh you should focus on four major biomechanical principles or feels for ground strokes and those are Hep rotation and swinging and wrist leg and driving with the arms so they apply to forehands and backhands all the same and I'm going to show you later with my on court presentation how that looks like I'm going to point out all of them and I will also show you the eight most common mistakes that players do since we have four components and you can always either not do enough one of them or you can overdo it so see if you can recognize yourself in one or more of those and when you recognize yourself in one or more of those then you will also know how to work on your stroke all right so let's jump first into this short video analysis and then you will see my on court presentation so before I start with this Novak jovic analysis let me just mention that I already used this footage in one of my previous videos it was called holding your ground and uh I highly recommend that you watch it I will give you a link in the the description and in the card above because I go in much more detail on how strokes and footwork have to adapt so let's just focus on a few forehands that you see how they are different so this is a neutral stance forehand with a low contact point and the follow through looks something like this right so if you obsess about technical details and how you have to finish over the shoulder and you constantly force your body into that then your body is not able to adjust to a specific ball that you have to play so you have to adjust first how to the ball in terms of How It's coming towards you whether it's rising or falling and how you're going to send the ball away right are you going to send a faster lower ball or a more loopy higher ball right so all this your body has to execute and it has to keep adjusting to different situation so here we see Noak playing now open stance this is a much higher contact Point than before four uh so his hip of course is still rotating so that's what we're going to talk about later but his you see his follow through is again like this right so it's not over the shoulder so he his arm just had to do that because he visualized a certain ball trajectory of the ball that he received now we see another forehand and this one is again let's say not over the shoulder but close to the shoulder right so this is a different forehand follow through and slightly different position because now he's in semiopen stance so the first forehand if you remember he played in neutral stance the feet were one after another and this forehand he played in completely open stance the feet were parallel and this forehand he played in semiopen stance so the feet are at around 45° so similar like your Technique your feet also have to keep adjusting to different situations and you cannot just force a certain stance and say that it's the best stance and that it's the right one right so since technique has to constantly adjust uh hopefully that you understand now the problem of obsessing about small technical details so what should you do instead so I'm going to hit uh just a nice forehand I have my assistant K helping me out today again she's just throwing me balls I'm going to hit one nice forehand and I'll explain to What fields are there and then we're going to break them down so here's here's one forehand I'm just hitting a forehand what's going on here in this forehand if we don't focus on technique so technique means okay racket head is exactly here you know your elbow is exactly here and we leave those little details we put them to the side and we focus on biomechanics and feel so what am I doing if I go first from the big body parts my body is rotating my body is rotating and when I'm hitting the ball obviously body has a big mess I cannot move the body very fast and or if I try to I'm going to lose control of the shot because the ret here is going to go very fast so what is my body doing it's rotating but in terms of relation to the ball what am I doing I'm pushing my body my right hip is pushing into the ball if you pay attention to the my right hip it's a very steady continuous push through the ball what is my arm doing so my arm when the ball is nice my arm arm the whole arm my arm is swinging so I'm the lower the ball the more I can swing because it just goes down so I let go so if I get a low ball I get a low ball I swing more if I get a bit higher ball then I swing a bit less but there's an element of Swing so what is my arm doing in this part of the stroke it's swinging what is my arm doing through contact and a little bit onwards it's driving my arm is driving it's keeping in the direction so I'm driving here there's an element of push here I I I prefer to call it drive I drive the ball we say push for the arm it's a little bit too stiff usually but there is an element of push so I'm kind of swinging and pushing if you want to control the ball what is my wrist doing so my wrist has a lag here and in terms of feel what do I feel when I'm hitting the ball I'm slapping it so when I put all this together for the forehand stroke and this applies to all ground strokes not to slice shots so voles and slices are a little bit different but all ground strokes two-handed back and one-handed back and they all have the same components so again if I put the stroke together what am I doing with my body I'm pushing in the back I'm swinging my wrist legs and I'm slapping the ball and then I'm driving the ball if it's just a normal if it's just a normal forehead okay so let me show you some examples you might recognize yourself in one of them or maybe multiple of them we're going to do one part of the body so biomechanically or feel based we're going to do it wrong so starting with the body I said body is pushing rotating through the contact on a normal shot how does the stroke look like when there is no body rotation and no pushing so it's something like this so the hip will tend to stay back so it's going to look something like this now what happens when the player emphasizes the body rotation too much and they kind of neglect the other parts then they're kind of pushing like this so they're just exaggerating body inside the back foot TS to come forward like this or in open stance if they're like open kind of like this okay okay the next one is Swing so how does the stroke look like when the player doesn't feel the swing so they just kind of go back and forward so the arm is very stiff back and forward so no swing the wreckage is kind of stops here so what happens when the player swings too much if they swing then they lose control they have too much swing and the arm goes like this they have no control of the follow through so they're swinging but the ball is flying all over the place right so they might be rotating they might have a wrist leg and they're swinging too much and their ball is spraying around just a quick note I offer a free course on the topic of the forehand which focuses exactly on the same things that we're discussing today how to better feel hip rotation the swing the wrist action or wrist lag and shoulder rotation that helps with the arm drive so this course is free of charge you just enter your email and you will receive one video per day showing you specific drills so it's not just Theory there's specific drills on how you can improve your hip rotation swinging wrist leg and shoulder rotation that is going to help you drive the ball better so once again the course is free of charge and the link is in the description the next one is arm what happens when the arm is not driving it's very similar so I said the arm is driving here at contact when when I hit the ball the arm drives or there's a little element of push so if the arm doesn't drive then there stroke is kind of like this as soon as the player hits the ball they let go so they hit the ball like baseball so they picture just contact like baseball boom and the moment they hit the ball they let go because to their logic it means the ball is flying I don't have control of the ball anymore so why should I be doing here something so they're hitting the ball kind of baseball like and if the arm is driving and pushing too much then it looks similar like to the first one then I said so the arm is kind of pushing like this that's the stroke then kind of looks like this so the player is very very controlled like they're very afraid to miss and they're really pushing the arm here through so it's similar like no swing so now this is just arm driving and hip tense to stay back now we come to the wrist what happens when players don't have a good wrist leg so from the back view I show from here then you're going to see the racket head on the inside of my hand of my wrist here so that's a good wrist leg so if I go into forehand it's like this and the when the player doesn't use the wrist leg they're going to have the racket head on the right side for right handers from back view they're going to have the racket on the right side of the hand and so then they're hitting like this and they cannot slap the ball so that tends to be a very pushy motion even if the player has a swing some players have swing but they don't have any wrist leg they don't slap the ball then the stroke is a little bit better they have quite good control but they cannot really spin or accelerate and when the player over does the wrist leg and they slap too much it's then it's similar to B ball they're losing control of the ball so they have good power but very poor control so they feel good power and they just keep slapping the ball because they feel power but again the components are not synchronized they're lacking the drive and push of the body and so on so this is like just a quick kind of overview of four major biomechanics techical components of the stroke or if you want to call them felds because my body should be pushing the arm should be swinging here behind so that it brings me swing effortless power the wrist should lag so that I can slap the ball here at contact and the arm needs to drive the ball through contact so that I have good directional control otherwise the ball is just spraying around

Channel: Feel Tennis Instruction

Views: 19,512

Keywords: tennis forehand, tennis feel, tennis mistakes

Id: uxFviqqm5z0

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024