Best Tips for Deep Tennis Volleys and Accurate Placement

So the next volley tip I want to share is going to help you with precision of your volleys. I've placed another camera there and you can see I place the balls like this so there's like an alley leading towards the camera and I'm going to try and hit into that alley and so what helps with the precision of your volleys is that you have a long more linear follow-through in the direction of the target. So what players tend to do when they volley is they relax the arm too quickly. They volley the ball and then they just tend to swing through like this. So I'm going to demonstrate incorrect first. So players tend to move the arm like this. It goes too much across and then they wonder why they can't hit the target and their racket and their arm are moving more like diagonally circular in a circular way. So if I want to hit into that target area then I'm going to move my racket long time in the direction of that target and that's going to help me increase my precision. So my body still moves in the ball like we discussed in the previous tip. So my body weight goes in the ball and my arm goes towards the target and I want to keep a long linear movement in the direction of the target. So when you watch from that camera I'll zoom in a little bit you can see that my strings are pointing still in the direction of the target area. So this again might not be the most intuitive thing to do because you do feel that you can punch the ball here with the wrist. So if I show one example you do feel that this can give you a lot of power. I was a bit lucky with this one but you feel power and then you don't have good directional control so you do have to control your wrist at the end of the volley on the forehand side so that the strings point long time in the direction of the target and that's going to help you a lot with precision of your volleys. Before we jump on to the backhand volley let me show you also down the line. I just remembered someone is for sure going to ask me how does the down the line forehand volley look like when you want to go very precise so Kai is feeding me the ball from cross court and I'm trying to keep the racket long time in the direction of the target area. Yeah you see got very precise even though I'm moving through the ball so I'm still applying the same principle unless the ball goes too much into me so I'm moving this way and I'm keeping the racket head as much as I can in the direction of the target area and that helps me a lot with very precise volleys. So how should your backhand volley follow through look like if you want to hit very precise volleys into the target so you see again place the camera over there there's this corridor of balls that make this lane or alley and I'm going to try and hit there and so the way I'm going to hit there is that I'm going to extend long in that direction and keep the strings pointed in that direction so I will first show what players tend to do when they volley back and they kind of swing like this they can get lucky I got lucky on this one but more more likely what's going to happen is they're going to have very poor control of the direction so what you need to do is that you need to guide the racket long time in the direction of the alley and get it so here it is so when you watch this yeah I'm close when you're gonna watch this from that camera you will see that you can see my strings also at the end of my follow through so I am controlling my follow through direction yeah 10 points I'm controlling direction of the follow through you can see the strings and that's why I'm very accurate in that direction so try to keep that in mind don't just kind of swing without control through the volley control your follow through and you will also control the ball better so how does the backhand volley when hitting down the line look like how does my follow through look like so I'm trying to control that direction you can see from that camera far away how my strings are pointing towards the target and helping me control the ball even if the ball is further away I control the racket instead of just kind of swinging through and losing control of the racket so players tend to swing like this and they lose so try to really keep that direction that way I was just a split second late here okay just a little bit too long direction is right and that's how you adjust your angles for the precision of the volley and I have one more tip for precision coming up I have another tip that's a little bit more advanced that's going to help you with precision and the idea is that when the ball is coming and you're you've prepared your volley is that you start approaching the ball gently gently in a slower way and then when you're just about to hit the ball you accelerate and give it power so what players do incorrectly is that they prepare even if they prepare correctly and then from the start they immediately go very fast and that makes it very difficult to hit the ball very clean on the racket so I will try to demonstrate I will just volley cross court and so players tend to go from the preparation and they go very fast and they don't hit the ball cleanly so and they end up also very tight so the idea is first I will exaggerate a little bit and I have the camera here also on the side so that you can watch carefully I will play both footages that you can watch carefully what I'm doing so if I exaggerate a little bit I want to approach the ball more slowly and to approach more slowly and then I accelerate or I push more towards the end I'm going more gently and then I accelerate rather than from the beginning so that's going to give you a much better precision of the racket head better precision of your movements because if you go very tight from the beginning you will kind of lock yourself into position and you cannot make small necessary adjustments depending on the ball flight so when you're approaching the ball in a more gentle way you're still moving forward but you're not going at full speed yet you're going to find the ball better in space and once you feel you have the ball in space then you give it power so it looks something like this so I will also try to use slow motion from the side camera so that you can try and see this in reality how it's happening or in slow motion so here's the same principle on the forehand side so again what we're talking about is approaching the ball in a more slower manner more gently and then accelerating almost from the contact point onward so when the players do this incorrectly they're basically going at full speed from the beginning so I will try to demonstrate that first kind of like maximum acceleration you see I kind of get late because my arm is stiff it doesn't have it doesn't have good maneuverability I don't have good flexibility if I tense up and I try to go with full power from the beginning so I want to go more with the softer arm towards the ball find the ball in space I want to find the ball in space so I can show you first without accelerating that I'm just kind of finding the ball and I have very clean contact and once I have this I go the same and then I accelerate so this one was just a few inches over the baseline so that means I have very good power and I have good precision so I'm starting more gently and then I'm accelerating more towards the end or almost at contact so that's going to help you a lot with precision of your volleys and here's the last volley tip I want to share with you I know you've heard it before but it's worth repeating it is very very important you have to watch the ball you have to try and watch the ball you're not going to get very far with your net game if you're volleying something like this where your face is going to be there and the ball is going to be here so I'll try and demonstrate the incorrect way when players are kind of volleying something like this they see the ball here and then they start to look or they start to look before so game of tennis is very challenging do your best do the best you can and try and track the ball to your strings or as far as you can and then you move your head away and that's gonna contribute a lot to your timing your power and your precision and since you're interested in tennis volley tips and other information about playing at the net then I recommend you check out one of my two volley videos that go much more in depth into the volley technique the forehand volley technique and the backhand volley technique so that you will be on the right track to mastering the net game thanks for watching and I'll see you next time