Stop Fixing Your Forehand Swing… Do THIS Instead (3 Hidden Forehand Fixes)

Feel like your forehand's inconsistent and you don't know why? Well, in this video I'm going to give you three tips that I think will probably make a huge difference. It's at least made a huge difference for my in-person clients and my online clients. So let's get started. The very first thing is when we think about forehands, most of the time we think about the swing too much. And this actually starts and generates so many issues that players try to fix everything just by the swing. We don't realize the forehand starts way before that. And so the very first thing we're going to talk about is rotation. This is a fundamental key thing that if you understand how to do better, this will fix so many problems. So let's talk about it. What does rotation mean? Really rotation means how can we use our body in a sense of a kinetic chain. If you've ever heard this term kinetic chain, it just simply means using different links or different muscles in a different sequence. Really simple. And so the first part about understanding rotation is what rotates? Because we're all like, oh, well something's got to rotate. Well, I like to start with understanding or teaching people about their hip sockets, meaning that I have two hip sockets right here. And if I balance out on this one leg, I can turn this hip socket from here to here. Now with that, that creates a range. And so what I mean by range is like there's a range. And so if I can, without moving this hip, like do that, if I just move this hip right here, boom, that's the range where it gets tight. Now I want you to notice something. When I come back to the middle where I'm standing, it feels very solid, very comfortable. I could stand like this for hours. But then we have the other range. The other range is about here and it gets really tight. So if we really think about it, when we're trying to rotate, what we're trying to do is load back to almost the edge of this and then hit in the middle. Okay. But what we don't generally want to do with our hip is reach all the way to here because the problem is we have to stop or slow down to rotate to meet the end of the range we have. So I want you to keep that in mind. And that happens on both hips. Now the other thing that can rotate is my shoulders and my obliques. And when I mean my, I guess my abs, I can rotate a little bit here, but mostly it's going to happen from my upper back right here. Okay. You can feel the difference between trying to rotate here. And so just like my hip sockets, I have a range. If I put my hands like this, this is the middle, which feels comfortable, feels strong. Okay. And I can rotate and notice I'm not really moving my hips. It might move a little bit, but I can rotate here. Boom. That's the edge here. Come back to the center and then here. Boom. Okay. So how does this help us? Well when we're trying to hit a ball, when we're trying to generate power force, what we really want to do is focus on rotation. Okay. So I can rotate just my upper half. You can already see how the racket's moving. But if we combine both my lower and upper half, that helps it even more. Think of like a slingshot. My lower half is loading that slingshot to then send the upper half to rotate. And so if we now break this up into what, you know, some coaches call separation is that I'm loading the lower half and then having the upper half go a little bit more. So now when I come out of that boom and I come back to that strong middle point, guess what keeps going? The upper half. So it's like a slingshot. Now one idea that's really important that I want you to understand. My toes, the way I'm standing right now, is what I call a strong but normal position. Now what we're trying to do is really rotate against that normal position and come back to it where I'm strong. If I rotate past it, what generally happens, I have everything move with it. Notice how my toes move so I move my center. That's where I'm going to be strongest. But what I don't want, and this is what a lot of players are doing, sometimes when they step into the ball, they rotate into the edge of the end and that feels really uncomfortable. You have to slow down. And so you have a couple different options. When we're rotating, I'm going to rotate down and push against the ground and load those hips and turn my back like I talked about and use it as a slingshot to send the racket forward. Really, if I hold my racket here and do this action, you can see how my lower half is acting like a slingshot. It's loading up and then throwing the upper half towards the ball. And so work on this because this is probably one of the biggest mistakes I work on with all my clients. Number two is understanding footwork. Now I talked about rotation first because this will definitely help you understand footwork. Footwork is about balance and rotation, meaning moving to a ball so you can stay balanced and rotate. So this is difficult because of what? We have so many different types of balls we get. What stance should we use? Well, we want to use the stance that allows us to rotate. Now there's three major stances and variations of that with the open stance. My feet are open or even with the baseline. There's the neutral stance. I'm stepping into the court. There's the semi-open stance. And there's even the closed stance. Now here's the thing I don't want you to think about, which is what I just told you, the stance. What I really want you to focus on is what makes it easiest to stay balanced and rotate. So let's go back to us talking about rotation. If I'm moving to a ball and it's coming really fast and I step like this, okay, we're going to wind up and can't rotate, can't rotate towards my racket. So now I just have to use my arm. That presents a huge problem. So look at how my stance was. It prevented me from rotating. Now if the ball's coming really fast and I step this way and it's coming really deep, what can I now do? I can load those hips up and boom. I can use that slingshot to throw my arm basically at my target. That's a much better stance. Now let's say I have a little bit more time and I step forward. Now if I step like this, okay, you're saying that's correct, right? Ball's in front of me. But watch what happens when I shift my weight forward, boom, and I try to rotate. That doesn't feel good there. But we can fix that. If I turn my toe out like this, guess where? That's that middle we talked about. So here I can then rotate into it. I fixed my problem. So we're always trying to figure out how can we rotate our body or basically load that slingshot up so I can throw my arm forward. And so, just to give you a couple different demos of stances, if the ball's very deep, I can load here, works, here. Notice how my toe's pointing so I can rotate into that. That feels very comfortable. Now what I don't want to do again, we don't want to rotate like this. That feels super tight here because the middle for that was here. It'd actually be better, instead of hitting the ball that way, I would hit the ball this way. You'll feel the difference. And so again, our footwork is all about making sure we do what? We can get to the ball and we're balanced and we can rotate. Because now if I step like this, I can't rotate and I'm going to probably lose my balance, which means it's going to change the racket face angle, which means inconsistent forehands. So now that we understand rotation and balance, this is a huge part that basically if you had your racket here and just ran around and loaded up, you could hit great forehands. The last major problem that I see that players have is understanding range of their arm. So let me explain that to you without going to a ton of detail about how you swing. Our arm has a range too. So if I put my arm out like here, and you can see it probably from this camera, my arm's on the side of my body. Now can I go back? Yeah, but it starts to get tight. So I'm going to start right around here. Now if I move it from the shoulder here, look what's going to happen. Boom, my arm can go right about there and stuck. Now you're saying, but you can go further. Yeah, but I have to bend my elbow, not for my shoulder. And so here is my range. Most players, when they struggle with their forehand, make contact at the end of the range. This is look or feel familiar where you're making contact at the end of your range. And so now you have to kind of like your arm, then instead of having that slingshot we're doing this, you have the opposite. Basically where your arm is now pulling your body forward and you feel tight, it slows down because basically there's no more range. So you're making contact and you're muscling it super tight. What we want to do and what you see the pros doing is making contact closer, just like we did on the forehand or on the hip at the beginning of the range. So if I now put my arm out and I turn my hips, I don't move my arm. Look how much range my racket has to travel. So if I do it like this, you can see how the racket has so much more range because when I get to the ball, it can do this. And again, if we look at the middle of the range, it's probably right around here where I'm going to be strongest. Think about push-ups. Where do you want to generally do push-ups? Your arm's going to be stronger. So I believe that when you hit, you want to hit and make contact where your body's in the strongest position. So what we want to do is practice this action. When I'm swinging, I want to turn or think about turning my chest but keeping that range versus I have a lot of clients that when they swing, they're doing this action. So already look at the range. Or maybe they're here. So there's still not a lot of range and so they get really tight and muscled. Or they do this, they trick themselves and they go this. So really, I didn't have any range so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my finish and that kind of turns my body and you can get a bunch of balls over. But you're never going to really realize your true potential of creating racket at speed using your body and your rotation. So what we now want to do is practice the right way. And what the right way is this. I'm turning. Boom. Notice how I'm prepping to hit the ball but look how much range I have. I'll drop the ball and here. So now what happens if I go here, I can then have that racket travel which means it can really speed up and it's plenty of room to slow down. If I'm making contact here again, there's no room to speed up because I'm already having to slow down against my body. And so now what you want to do is practice that with an oncoming ball. So now when I use the ball machine, you're going to see how I can generate way more racket at speed because my arm now has more range to speed up, hit the ball on the strong point and then has all this room to slow down after I speed it up. So I can actually let it create more speed through the contact because it has more room to slow down. And then the more I load, the more power gets released like a slingshot. More power gets released like a slingshot. And even notice when I'm stepping into the ball, how am I stepping in to make sure my body can release that energy forward. At every ball I'm hitting, I'm using a stance that allows me to rotate, whether it be stepping forward, open or semi-open. Following these three tips should dramatically help your forehand because basically once you're in this position, your legs and your shoulders are set up right with the arm in the range, your arm is just basically on autopilot. So if you want to learn more about what the pros use using the butt of the racket to create more leverage, go watch this video.