The Secret to Powerful Volleys (Took Me 25 Years to Learn)

Today we're going to be talking about the volley. I'm going to show you how to put more power on your volleys like the pros do when you're putting away the volley. Or even on your regular volleys, how to generate more pace. It took me about 25 years to figure this out because I've been taught the beginner way to how to hit volleys. And as I was coaching these top players, I was figuring out it's very different from the volleys that you learn from the beginners. So I'm going to teach you how to hit more powerful volleys that took 25 years for me to figure out. I'm going to teach you in 5 to 10 minutes. Now realizing how to do it is more important because if you know how to do it, then you put the reps in and you just get better. That's the direction that you're moving into. If you have no direction and you're just practicing however you want or however you think is right, it's going to take forever to get better. But if you have the correct way of hitting or the next step that you need to work on, that's going to take you further and that's going to take you where you want to go faster. Now I want to talk about how volleys are learned at first. A lot of coaches tell you to turn on the volleys. When you turn on the volleys, it's very hard to keep the racket out in front and turn at the same time. A lot of coaches make this mistake of having you turn and trying to volley at the same time but they always tell you not to take the racket back. So how do you not take the racket back without turning? It's almost impossible. Now at first, it's okay if you're taught that way but if you're going into the intermediate level, advanced level, and the elite level, you don't want to take the racket back. So what you do is you only cock your wrist back and then your elbow cock your elbow back too. I'm going to go into more detail of how to do this for reflex volleys, regular volleys, and put away volleys but for now today, I'm just going to show you how to generate more power and it took 25 years to figure this out and to do it, it's very easy. You want to lock your wrist back. Now as you're hitting the ball, instead of you turning before and then turning after as you're hitting the ball, what you want to do is you don't want to turn on the racket back and then you turn as you hit the ball. That's why your eyes and your head is on the contact and not only that, your racket face and your racket path is on the same path as where you're hitting the ball. So you're turning as you're hitting the ball so the racket path is on the way to the ball path. For example, if you're going this way and you're turning, you almost have to swing if you're turning back. You can't be like here and then go like this. So it's a very awkward movement. As you're turning and then trying to get the racket to move in the direction that you want to hit to, it's always moving in some different way because your body's going with it. So what I'm trying to say is you want to turn on the hit, not before when you're preparing to hit the ball. I'll show you. Now this works for both forehand volley and backhand volley, but I'm going to do just forehand volley first today and backhand volley in the next video. So when you're volleying, you want to stay turned as you're hitting the ball. Let me see if I could time this right. So as you're turning, the racket almost stops. You could keep your hands soft, but the thing is you almost want to turn as you're hitting rather than turn and hit like this. So that's what a lot of players try to do. They try to go here, turn, racket's too far back. Oh shoot. And then you hit too long. So racket stays out in front and then you want to turn as you hit and the hand goes forward, okay? That way your body's slightly turned and your contact, your face, your head is facing towards the contact rather than trying to follow the ball like this. It also limits the arm to go too far out in front. If you're turning with it, your arm is very free, but if you turn as you hit, the arm stays in place and it doesn't allow you to go too far because the range of motion wouldn't allow it. Now, one of the most important things while you do this is actually the footwork, but I'm going to show you that in the next couple of videos. I just showed you how to put more power onto the forehand volleys. Now try it yourself. It does take a while to kind of get used to because you're moving differently, but the thing is when you start to get this right, you'll start feeling the pop on your volleys too. Pop on the volleys, more power, more consistency and you're going to hit your targets better because you're staying within the line of the shot. Now in the next video, I'll show you the backhand volley.