Tennis Drills | Improve your Forehand | Tennis Lesson for Intermediate/Advanced Players

Hey guys, welcome to Supreme Tennis. Today Charlie's with us and we're going to be working on maximizing his strength, which like many of us is the forehand. So let's go straight into drill number one. So the first drill here is just to accelerate from the service line and by that I mean just accelerate as much as you would normally from the baseline, only obviously you will need to add more topspin to keep the ball in. But that's not the main idea here, the main purpose here is to focus on the legs and you will notice that Charlie has to get really low to the ball by bending his knees and this links to drill number two because what I want Charlie to do more of on his forehand is to utilize more leg drive to get more power. Now here's the progression from drill number one and whilst on the service line in the previous drill I asked Charlie to stay low, this time now he's going to get that knee bend, he's going to get low but try to explode on his way up as he hits the ball. And I asked him to just really exaggerate this by imagining that on his way up into the ball that he's pushing the ground away from him, which is obviously physically impossible but it just reinforces that idea of leg drive going up into the shot, which in turn is just going to give him a heavier forehand. So yeah guys if you aren't using your legs you're definitely losing out. This drill here involves two shots and the main focus is the second shot, so the short ball and most of the time you're going to use a neutral stance. So as you can see Charlie is hitting off his front foot, his left, but the coaching point here is to actually bring your back leg through. Hitting off your front foot and then landing on your back foot you will see here it just really allows you to shift all of your weight forwards into the shot and just get that full rotation. The next one here is all about giving yourself better opportunities to use your strength, so basically building the rally and earning the short ball to finish off the point with your big forehand. And this is the only drill here where you will actually see Charlie hit a few backhands as well. So the idea is to punish the weakness and of course for most players out there in fact a large majority of us is of course going to be the backhand and you may just be able to see I've placed an orange sort of traffic cone in the backhand corner of where that would be for a right-handed player. Of course you would repeat this on the other side just so you practice for lefties too, but yeah of course as I said to Charlie the idea is to punish the weakness of your opponent to earn a weak response and allow more opportunities for you to use your strength. This one again very similar to the previous drill in that you're attempting to build the point by getting a weak response from your opponent but it also allows you to open up space on the other side of the court and you're going to achieve this by going for a sharp angle with your forehand. Now I did mention to Charlie here that he's going to have to drop the pace of his shot and add a bit more topspin as he was over hitting and missing quite a few but eventually he got the hang of it and started to find that sharp angle a lot more consistently and even managed to hit the cone a couple of times. Now taking the ball early is something you can apply to really take your game to that next level and here you're probably wondering why on earth I'm getting Charlie to hit the ball after two bounces. Well basically Charlie is attempting to hit the ball on the rise and doing it off the second bounce just allows him to get the timing get the feel and rhythm of taking the ball early and this is particularly a good drill to start off with if you are just beginning to incorporate this into your game. And here you can see the progression of that drill where Charlie is now taking the ball on the rise after one bounce and because of what we've done beforehand he's able to get that timing and he's really making full effect of this shot and the plus side of taking the ball early the plus side of taking the ball as it's rising is you're able to get so much more power but also another bonus is you take plenty of time away from your opponent which just puts them under more pressure. Drill number seven here is one you may have seen some of the pros do and it's all about maximizing racket head speed and of course the more racket head speed you get the more you're going to be able to rip that forehand and of course it's great if you can get all of these in court but the main purpose of this exercise is to focus on accelerating through contact as quickly as you physically can. The last drill here is great for when you are playing against big hitters or big servers or both. Having an abbreviated swing means you are less likely to hit late and you will find it easier to use the incoming pace by keeping your contact out in front of you. I did have to mention the charlie here to avoid leaning back on a few of these shots. So there you have it guys that was just a lesson I had with charlie that I wanted to share with you on how to maximize your forehand. I hope you guys can benefit from this video don't forget to like comment and subscribe and yeah hope to see you in the next video take care guys