My TOP 5 Tennis Forehand Tips That Give You Laser Guided Accuracy

Hey, Tomas from Feel Tennis. Are you looking for tennis forehand tips so that you can play with better control and accuracy? I've put together five of my most effective tips to help you improve your forehand's consistency and I'm going to use at least two camera angles to show you all the tips and in one instance we'll even look at the drone footage of my forehand to give you a better perspective on the body rotation. We'll cover the importance of a stable wrist and how to achieve it without sacrificing power. We'll look at the body rotation from the top view like I mentioned and why it's crucial for good ball control and power and we'll cover three more tips on balance, the role of the non-dominant arm and how to better control the ball's direction. So let's get started. We're going to cover these forehand tips in the order they happen so I'm going to start with the preparation, I'm going to talk about the first tip, second tip and so on and the last tip will be what happens the last when we hit one forehand. So the first thing that happens when we're starting a forehand is of course the preparation and here's where the first thing can go wrong and the first thing that can go wrong is that the player doesn't have a stable wrist when they're preparing the forehand so whatever their shape is, whether they go in a more loopy shape or a more linear shape, if they go with the wrist like this, maybe you see pros going like this, then the wrist is not very stable as you accelerate forward and the racket can flail around too much and that's why you lose control of the ball. So the tip I want to share that helps you stabilize the wrist is that as soon as you start preparing the forehand, you create a little wrist bend or a little wrist extension so you do it with your non-dominant hand which will be the second tip I'm going to talk about, about the role of the non-dominant hand and the racket awareness but the first tip is about making sure that the first move that you do when you're preparing the forehand is slight wrist, gentle wrist extension, right? So you don't have to get stuck here and be very tight but just your first move is here so my assistant Kaj is going to throw me a couple of balls and I will show you here and later on I will also zoom in here to my wrist that you will see clearly that the first move I do when I'm starting my forehand is this slight wrist bend and then I continue into the forehand. So right now I'm receiving very nice balls but as you can see I can immediately create a nice wrist bend and that keeps my racket very calm and stable through the shot. Just a quick shout out to Ian Westerman from Essential Tennis for letting me use the pro footage for this video, if you wanna watch more pro footage in super slow motion and of course get tons of practical tips from Ian, go check out his channel. Now when I'm preparing the wrist like this with the first bend it doesn't mean that you have to be like this vertical with the racket or it doesn't mean that you have to drop the racket on the edge, you can also go more on the racket face but you can see that my wrist is still bent so it's not good to come like this with the wrist in the preparation, the racket flails around too much so I can also prepare like this, you see I have some angle of the racket and yet my wrist is a little bit bent, I don't want to prepare like this or like this with a flat wrist position because then it's gonna flail around too much or it's gonna be too stiff, that's the other bad thing about this position, the wrist becomes very stiff, players want too much control and then we don't get any wrist lag and any wrist slap because here if the wrist is nicely lagging behind then I can hit the ball with this movement, of course I don't snap through so I don't go like in baseball, I don't go through but I do apply some power through my hand into the ball and then the wrist is gonna go this way so I'm going to tame it that way, so I want to use this when I'm hitting a forehand in my whole forehand, inside the forehand I have this little slap of the wrist and that's why I need wrist extension before that and then I go a little bit into flexion and I control the wrist. Another reason why you may not be controlling your forehand well is because you might not have good racket head awareness and by that I mean the angles of the racket in space, so when you take a swing for the forehand you're getting signals through your hand into your brain that tells your brain, your awareness how the racket is oriented in space, now you might not know that you can also help with your left hand get that awareness and one of the common problems or mistakes that players do when they're preparing their forehand is either not helping long enough with their left hand and not giving yourself, your brain enough long enough awareness of the racket face or you're holding the racket like this by the handle and you're just holding like something round and also you don't get good sensation of how the racket is oriented in space, so I'm gonna do a little exaggerations that you understand what I mean, so if you hold the racket like this with both hands on the handle you can try that just at home in your living room and you orient the racket a little bit differently you will realize that you have very good racket head awareness because you're getting awareness of the racket angles in space through both hands, so what we wanna do when we're preparing the forehand we wanna use the left hand in such a way or the non-dominant hand that we're also still getting the awareness or the orientation of the racket into our mind and so when you hold the racket like this just with your fingers here you're holding you feel you're holding something round and you don't know how the racket is oriented in space but when you slide your non-dominant hand like this down so if you picture this like a sandwich the first sandwich you still wanna feel your racket like in a sandwich except that your hands are now like this so this one is here and this one is here on the handle so eastern or semi-western grips are very good for that they will give you very good racket head awareness, angle awareness because your palm more or less aligns with this back bevel so this back bevel is aligned with the racket face and when you put your hand here you have very good awareness that the racket is more or less oriented like your hand and you can help with your left hand when you hold here by the throat or by the heart how some people call it you hold by the throat and you're preparing the racket like this you have very long time of very good racket head awareness because through your left hand you also realizing or knowing or feeling how the racket is angled in space and so it's very important that when you're preparing the racket first of all to stay long on the racket enough so here to the for about 90 degrees that you come to about here with the racket on the handle and secondly that your hand is like this on the throat of the racket because you will still be getting the feeling of orientation of the racket face so I'm gonna hit a few forehands and see if you can observe that the first forehand tip I'd like to share has to do with body rotation so you might have a lot of problems with ball control on your forehand if you don't put enough body rotation or enough of your body mass into the ball so when you do it incorrectly I'm gonna demonstrate incorrectly so when the ball comes you're hitting the ball and usually the hips are staying back like your main the whole body is not rotating your usually you are coming into the ball with your shoulders but your body is not connected you're not rotating fully into the ball right now I'm hitting neutral stance forehand so again this would be kind of incorrect and this would be correct but I can also hit open stance and put my hips and body rotation into the ball and players might also hit sometimes like this and keep the hip backwards and when the body is not connected and you're not putting enough mass into the ball you will have very poor control on the forehand side because your arm will try to compensate for the lack of power and when it tries to compensate it engages too much it becomes very tense and that starts to change racket angles and then you can't control the ball well so right now I want to show you first a little exaggeration of how I can put body weight into the ball or body rotation into the ball next we're going to talk about balance which is very important that this rotation doesn't throw you off but for now we're in tennis forehand tip number three so we're staying in the body rotation so if I do a little exaggeration just in neutral stance and I hit the ball like this you can see that I'm hitting a pretty good ball and I just turn into the ball like a robot so I do have a relaxed hand and then when the ball comes I turn into the ball so if you have a mental image that you have to hit the ball and finish over the shoulder then in most cases your body mass body rotation is not coming into the ball so I'm giving you a little exaggeration first that you see that I can hit a really good ball just with body rotation and for the second clip we're going to take a look at the drone footage that I recorded some time ago and when you watch the drone footage you can see that you can see my shoulders my upper body rotating really well into the ball so you see that I'm not hitting with my arm and like finishing over the shoulder but that I'm rotating into the ball and this rotation of the body mass into the ball gives my hand a lot of stability when I'm hitting the ball the hand is very stable then the racket is very stable because my hand when I'm hitting the ball and then making contact with the ball there's impact into the racket and I feel very stable when my body is pushing through the contact with rotation and so body rotation is critical for both control of the ball and also for power so by the way I have a whole mini course on the forehand where I talk about sources of power if you haven't seen that one I will put the link in the description and a card above and I will show you drills for each segment of the forehand for hip rotation for swinging for wrist leg and for shoulder rotation so you want more power on the forehand check out the free course so I'm gonna show you a few more forehands I also put the camera there behind so that you can see my assistant Kai feeding me ball so I'm getting a bit more realistic ball and I will just turn kind of into the ball a bit like like a robot without doing any special follow-through and I want you to see from the back view how you know how easily the ball is flying and how my main source of power is body rotation whether I stay more open stance or if I stop step into the ball like this I'm always using body rotation there of course I can add acceleration into topspin if I want but I want to use of course I can accelerate here but I always use body rotation as the foundation of the forehand it helps me both with stabilizing the contact and also with power forehand tip number four is something that is often so overlooked whether it comes to forehands or backhands or backhand slice ground strokes and that's the importance of balance there is just too much focus and emphasis on what the arm is doing that we lose sight of the big picture and the logic behind what I'm explaining to you is that if you cannot control your body in space you cannot control the ball so if I show you a few incorrect forehands with poor balance that's when players are hitting the forehand but they're kind of always falling off so could be open stance neutral stance doesn't matter whatever they're doing they're falling off oftentimes even like this they're spinning too much on their front foot like this they're spinning around and so on there are many variations of how players are losing balance of course when we play in difficult situations we have to improvise and move in various ways but still we need to maintain dynamic balance but as a foundation of tennis when we're receiving a nice ball in a neutral stance the foot needs to stay down so the heel is not coming up which is a very common mistake for players and so they have very poor balance they have to balance their whole body on just half of the foot and so that's that's not going to end up well for these small minute angles here of the racket because when you're leaning and turning around and losing balance the racket angle also changes and that's why you lose control of the shot so what you want to do in order to work on balance is to rally nicely have a ball machine even practice on the wall and try to hold balance for a second so in neutral stance I'm going to show a neutral stance and two variations of the open stance so in neutral stance we want to keep the heel down so if the ball comes nice and you're hitting a forehand you're doing your body rotation and you just hold for a second and you keep the heel down and then you recover and you move and you do your split step and then here I keep the heel down and I move on that is the way to practice holding good balance and when you have good balance you will also have very good consistency of the forehand now if I play open stance there are two variations that might happen one is that I set up on the right leg I have very good stability on the right leg and I'm going to transfer to my left leg so for me right hander and I will feel very good balance on the left leg when I finish so if the ball comes really nice to me I'm going to do this type of open stance forehand so I will go from right to left so I feel very stable here and then I feel very stable here or if I have to move if I have to move a bit to the right a bit more there Kaja if I have to move a bit to the right and sometimes I'm going to hold a bit on the right leg and then I'm going to recover so I want to exaggerate a bit the stability like this I'm hitting a good forehand and you can see how stable I am and I'm also applying tip number three put body rotation in the ball and I feel very stable very controlled forehands the last forehand tip I want to share with you has to do with control of the direction so the first four were just about general ball control on the forehand and now we go a little bit more specific how do you control accuracy of your cross-court and down the line shots what you don't want to do is you don't want to do that with your hand with your wrist while hitting the ball at the same contact point that is often the problem so I will try to demonstrate here so players tend to hit the ball down the line maybe in the right contact point so they're hitting down the line a little bit here and when they want to hit cross-court they're thinking they have to do this so they're hitting at the same late contact point and they're just trying to angle the ball that way with the racket face or with the racket angle in their hand and that's not good because your wrist starts to lose the stability that it has here at contact so instead of you trying to angle the racket differently with your hand you need to hit a different contact point where your racket and your wrist are still stable so they're not fully laid back the wrist is coming out already like I mentioned we want to slap the ball but it's still quite in a quite stable position and then it's going to go this way so the best way to control direction of the ball is not through your hand but through a different contact point so I've placed the camera here right on the baseline so it's right parallel to the baseline so I will try to show you I will ask Kaya to feed me perfectly exactly the same ball a few times so two times in a row so same Wow yeah same ball very good and I will hit the ball in different directions yeah perfect I will hit the ball in different directions while not moving much here's Murphy's Law so while not yeah perfect and I want to show you from the side angle that you will see that I'm basically if I want to go cross-court I'm hitting the ball here and if I'm going down the line I'm hitting the ball a little bit later so I'm gonna find two very nice forehands there from the side view I'm gonna put them in slow motion so that you see the difference and I will also use the back view camera because from the back view camera you will also realize that when I'm hitting down the line I'm hitting slightly further from my body because if I want to hit a automatically means that the contact point for me for the right-hander is a little bit more to the left because I'm rotating so I'm hitting the ball here so you have to make two small changes in your timing you have to come closer to the ball when you're hitting cross-court and you hit it more in front and you have the same hand body arm wrist position for the contact which gives you very good stability of the shot. If you're still with me and you found this video valuable I would appreciate if you smash the like button and subscribe to the channel and the video I recommend you watch next is the one I mentioned before and that's the drone footage of my forehand where I recorded neutral stance forehand open stance forehand forehands on the move and even a forehand slice so go over there check out that video and thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one