How To Hit Massive Forehands With Modern Forehand Technique

What if I told you that you too can hit dominating forehands with compact modern technique just like the players you see on screen right now. In today's video I want to show you how I helped one of Germany's best junior players transform a weak forehand with an inefficient big backswing into a powerful forehand with compact modern technique that still allows him to maximize This is the same type of forehand technique that you see the best players in the world use today. They utilize short compact motions while still managing to maximize racket head speed. How do they do that? They prioritize muscles that are more efficient at generating racket head speed and that allows them to take the ball incredibly early while still maximizing power and control. The best news is that this forehand technique is not reserved for the best players in the world or the most talented junior players like David. This is simply the most efficient way to generate maximum power with minimal effort on your forehand and that's why you too should develop this forehand technique with a compact backswing. The problem is that our instinct tells us to take a bigger backswing whenever we want to hit the ball harder. That's exactly what was going on with David and that's what's going on with most junior players and most club players. Very likely whenever you want to hit the ball hard you take way too big of a backswing and that is simply inefficient. Of course that's not how you generate maximum racket head speed. You generate maximum racket head speed by optimizing your kinetic chain. What does that mean? You coil and uncoil the right body segments in the right amount and in the right order. These big backswings lead to all kinds of problems on your forehand shots including timing problems, contacting the ball too far back or behind your body, and muscling the ball with too much independent arm action. All of this leads to shots that break down especially under pressure. So if you feel like you're muscling the ball with too much arm action, if you feel like you're often contacting the ball late or behind the body, then make sure you watch the rest of this video because I'm going to show you how to fix this. So let's take a closer look at how we fix this for David and how you too can develop efficient technique with maximum racket head speed. Okay step one in the OTI method is always diagnosis. We want to show the player what they're doing right now and what they should be doing instead. Now just as importantly we want to explain why this change is important in the long run for their game. So that's exactly what I did in the first video review for David and his father Christian. Let's have a look at that. Hey David and Christian it's Florian Online Tennis Instruction. I'm going to review David's forehand here. He's already doing a lot of things well. He's got good power but at the same time he's got a big inefficiency here that's costing him a lot of time and forces him to stand far behind the baseline which we see right here. But let's look at what he's doing well first. Good grip, very much in the acceptable range. You know he's loading the body segments properly. He's getting on the inside here so that he can swing inside out from close to the body to away from the body to generate power. He's also using the lower body effectively. Knees and legs are bent and now he's uncoiling. Front leg straightens out so he's already sequentially calling and uncalling the body segments quite effectively. So what is the the big problem here? The big problem is the height of his backswing. If you look at this the hand is above his head and this is a big inefficiency because it costs a lot of time and it does not add racket head speed. That's why you don't see top forehands like Carlos Alcaraz or Yannick Sinner with this type of backswing. In fact backswings are getting shorter and more compact because the game is getting faster. Now there's another inefficiency here. He's taking the hand past his shoulder on a right left axis. Once again that does not add racket head speed. Junior players will often do this because they think it adds racket head speed but it's an inefficient way to swing and it also does not add racket head speed. So that's the primary thing that we need to address first. Here I also want to show you a comparison. At the top is Alex, a pro player we've worked with on the forehand quite a bit. He's got a really powerful forehand with excellent technique. So let's do a little comparison here. Okay so here at the bottom you can see your hand is going above the level of your head. If you look at Alex here you see that his hand is in line with his shoulder so it does not go above shoulder level. It's exactly at shoulder level. You'll see that Alcaraz and Sinner they will have their hand even a little bit lower something like this because the game is so fast at the highest levels of the game. Now the other element here we see that Alex has the hand in line with the back shoulder here and your hand moved past the back shoulder. And so those are the two primary elements that we have to fix first. We have to make the motion more compact so that you can then also stand closer to the baseline because this backswing is forcing you to be very far behind the baseline. If you look at this and that was very typical for you here in this video and also when I saw you play points. Step two in the OTI method is always fixing it with progressions. So many players make the mistake of trying to implement a new technique at full speed right away. It just does not work. So I had David do shadow swings in the beginning. We didn't film those but basically he's focusing on not taking the hand above his shoulder and then from this angle he's also focusing on not taking the hand past the shoulder line here in the back and just doing some slow shadow swings exaggerating the correction. And then from shadow swings he did a couple of drop feeds and then we quickly moved on to basket feeds which you can see right here. His dad is feeding very predictable balls from the basket and the instruction I'm giving David here is to pretend he's hitting a half volley. Now if you're not that familiar with half volleys we can show one up here but basically on a half volley you take the ball so early that's usually when you move forward and the ball ends just in front of you and you have to abbreviate the motion. You have to have a super short and compact motion. Now if you watch Sinner and Akra's play for example nowadays I often call it half volley tennis because it's getting so fast and they have abbreviated the motion so much that they are generating tons of racket head speed with short compact motions. It allows them to take the ball early and still rip the ball and that's why it's so important for somebody like David who wants to be a pro player to develop this short compact motion. And as you can see in the video here he's doing a really good job. I'm constantly telling him to exaggerate the correction and make it feel like a half volley and he's doing a good job. He's even keeping the hand a little too far on the outside here. We want that hand approximately in line with the back shoulder but I don't mind an exaggeration at all because I know the muscle the old muscle memory is going to kick in and once he starts rallying that's going to come back anyways. So I absolutely do not mind an exaggeration here and he's doing a really nice job keeping the hand below shoulder level and not crossing that line here. Here are a few more basic basket feeds however David is now a little more comfortable and he's starting to hit the ball a little bit harder. I like what I'm seeing at the same time these shots are a little too flat. If you look at this he doesn't quite get under the ball and he's hitting a little bit too flat but I'm happy so far with the development of the swing path. David was doing very well at the same time his shots were getting a little too flat. He lacked spin. He didn't quite get under the ball as much anymore. He was used to coming from a much higher position to get under the ball and create that spin and this brings us to something else that we worked on that is more advanced. It's called the late hitting concept. It's often called lag. In his old forehand the tip of the racket was pointing up and we want that tip to point more to the right so that then as you swing forward the tip of the racket can flip back. We can pre-stretch the muscles in the forearm here. Now that being said we don't usually recommend this for club players in the beginning. You have to have good fundamentals in place first and that's where personalized instruction is so important and you not only do you have to know what you have to work on the diagnosis but you also have to know which drills, how fast to progress through these progressions and one way to do that is to get our help with our mentoring program where you get video feedback every single week and we guide you step by step through this process. It's really our most successful program. Players achieve dramatic improvements and if you're interested there's a link underneath this video. Go ahead and check that out. We can guide you step by step to turning your forehand into a big weapon or any other stroke just like we're doing it here with David through our mentoring program. It doesn't matter which level you're at. You can be a 3-0 club player, you can be a 5-0 club player, anything in between. You can be a high level competitive junior player like David. We do this with professional players as well. It works at all levels and we really guide you step by step. We take you by the hand and improvements are even guaranteed. So if you're check out the link somewhere below this video for more details on our mentoring program. So we had a look at some video together and now he's trying it again and my instruction to him is half volley with spin. So he is thinking about swinging like a half volley, super short and compact and he's also trying to generate more spin now, get a little bit more under the ball and if we look at these here, this first one for example, this one's really good. You can see now also his hand is in line with the shoulder line here, doesn't go past and he gets under the ball more right here and this is starting to look really, really good. Of course this is still for him a relatively slow speed but we're starting to really get this together. Not all of them are of that quality. Sometimes he certainly reverts a little bit. So here for example, if you look at this, the hand is crossing the shoulder line here. So the shoulder line is here and so in this case the hand is going a little bit too far back. It's not that big of a deal because it's still much shorter than it was before but you know it varies and that's absolutely normal here and right here he's taking it a little bit too high above shoulder level if you look at this. So clearly the old habits are still creeping in which is absolutely to be expected this early in the process. So we did a lot more repetitions of this at this stage. I'm not going to show you everything because it will get a little bit boring but developing new muscle memory requires a lot of repetitions at these stages and most players are not used to training this way and so you really need to find ways to practice this way to develop that new muscle memory. If you haven't done so you should really check out my free live presentation on the four reasons players fail with their technical transformations. There should be a link in the description under this video. It will completely change how you think about technical training and you will find out why you struggle with making technical changes and what you need to do instead. Here David is doing a good job. Again sometimes he's going a little bit too high like on this one. Sometimes he crosses the shoulder line but overall it is a lot more compact than it was when we started this session. After the basket feeds we started some rallying at very slow speeds as you can see here. He is now continuing to try to shorten that backswing. I'm continuing to tell him to focus on a half volley backswing and it's pretty good. He definitely gets bigger on the backswing. For example right here look how the hand is above shoulder level right here and that's okay. I just continue to remind him about that and he continues to focus on that and there are quite a few here where he does not go too big and we just make sure we start at a very slow speed again here. This is definitely too big so even for somebody as talented as David it was not super easy to do this correctly right away. What's also interesting to note here is the first two or three he's doing quite well. You can see here the hand is approximately the height of the shoulder here and so he's doing quite well after the basket feeds the first couple and then his swing gets a little bit bigger in the rallies. So again this one was a very good one. You can see here the hand is under shoulder level which I like and now he gets a little bit bigger step by step and that's most likely because his focus is moving away a little bit here. You can see it his focus is moving away from really isolated focus on what the arm is doing. He's now following the ball more with his eyes which he has to a little bit but the key is bringing your attention back to this part and not worrying much about that ball. You would much rather be late for that next ball coming than not being focused on the arm and doing the correct thing there. So we often see this after the basket feeds the first couple in the rally are pretty good and then players revert a little bit because their focus goes more towards the rally and away from the focus on the new technique. As you can see David reverted a little bit when we went to the live ball and this was controlled hitting at a slow speed for his level and yet he still went a little bit higher than with the basket feeds. This is absolutely normal but I just want to re-emphasize why it is so important that you go through these progressions step by step and also ideally that you have somebody monitor that for you or you self-analyze. You film yourself on a regular basis. Please trust me when I say that your feeling is misleading. I guarantee you David's feeling at this point was that his hand was down here but it was still above shoulder level. It was higher than we want it to be and that's because every small change feels huge to you. So when you are working on something like this and you start the live ball rally exaggerate. You got to be willing to make it feel awkward. Make it feel like your hand is down here when you're used to having your hand up here and most likely then you'll be in the right spot in the middle. So after some initial down the line rallying with a new technique at a slow speed we now went ahead and started some cross-court rallies which is usually a little bit more challenging when you're making that change. So we incrementally increased the difficulty level. Now here I'm standing behind him and I'm constantly telling him to focus on that half volley swing which he's doing a really good job of it. If you look at this right here you can see the hand is below shoulder level. The hand does not cross the shoulder axis back here. So this is a really good short compact motion which will allow him to take balls early like this one. With his old swing he would have had to be way further back to deal with this ball. So of course it varies. Not all of them are this good but here he's exaggerating which I like and he's really managing to keep that motion short and compact. There it's a little bit bigger. There it's shorter again and this only works if you do it at that slow and controlled speed. You need to follow the laws of how new muscle memory gets developed and again if you haven't done so really make sure you watch my live presentation on the four reasons players struggle with technical transformations. Over an hour I go into detail or into a lot of depth on how new muscle memory gets developed and why most players never manage to do it. So check that out and then you can make such a change here as well. This is starting to look really good for David. Since things were going well I now told him to increase the speed a little bit. We're talking about 10 percent or so here. Most players will go too fast too quickly but as you can see he's increasing the speed and he's still managing to execute quite well. Not on every single one but on a lot of them and it's probably not going to go this quickly for a lot of you watching this. That's just the reality of it. He's 12 years old at this stage and he's very talented. Just goes a little bit quicker but anybody can make such a change. We've done this with players over the years, over the age of 80 and so forth. So here you can see again just checking the reference points, crossing the shoulder line just a little bit but keeping it under shoulder level. I'm quite happy with this and this is really what we want to develop. You can also see all the other fundamentals in his forehand that were already present. He had a nice inside-out swing already so from close to the body to away from the body. If you're not familiar with that the inside-out swing is absolutely critical. You need to swing from close to the body to away from the body on all of your shots even if you're hitting cross-court like he's doing here. You can see from close to the body to away from the body. He manages to keep his head still quite well here. There's a down and up movement. He's loading the leg and then he's uncoiling that leg. It's now straight so he already came with a lot of really good fundamentals and we really just needed to focus on making that backswing shorter and more compact. So at the increased speed he did well for a while but towards the end the backswing ended up being too big again as we'll see here in a second. This is absolutely normal but let's have a look here. See this one right there and this one here. Look at this one. Significantly too big again and that's just the time pressure and he's moving to the ball. The speed is increasing. Your brain wants to do what it is used to. Your brain does not want to do the new thing and that's why we have to be so careful in this process of developing new muscle memory. He's still obviously hitting really good shots but he wants to be a high level professional player taking the hand up to this level right here. If he ever wants to play against the Yannick Sinners and Carlos Alcaraz of the world that's not going to do it. That's going to cost too much time. They're hitting the ball too hard and that's not going to work. So here he did revert a little bit at the end of this. So at this point maybe you can guess what my instruction was to him. My instruction was to reduce the speed again a little bit which you can see here. He is significantly taking down the speed again going a step back and this process often goes two steps forward one step back. That was a big swing. Okay we didn't like that one so much but he was doing much better here again at the end. That was good. So now that the speed is 10 percent down he's managing to complete the short compact motion again. And the motion is also changing here throughout the session. This is still the first day but the motion is changing as you can see. Sometimes he exaggerates and he goes very low. Sometimes he goes a little bit higher. The tip of the racket is in slightly different positions and that's all totally fine. The key goal was to reduce the backswing and we're well on track here with that. So you see us here going through the progressions relatively quickly in one session. Now just a reminder David at the time was 12 years old. One of the best junior players in Germany. Very talented. Of course that goes quicker than it does for a club player who's been playing and is much older. Anybody can make these changes but you have to follow the laws of how new muscle memory gets developed. And so if you're interested we can help you with that with our mentoring program. We guarantee improvements. Check out the link below this video if that's something you're interested in. Let's go back to the video. And of course there were also parts where David got a little bit frustrated which is absolutely normal. You know he doesn't like to miss and with new technique you miss shots that you usually don't miss. Like this one for example. I actually liked the technique on this one. Short and compact. He just needed to lift it up a little bit higher. Technique was not bad but as you can see he got a little bit frustrated and that's normal. Right here is a very interesting shot at the end of day one. Now this is really you know a half volley essentially on the baseline. He is further back but the ball is even out. His opponent is hitting the ball out and with this shorter compact motion he can now take this ball and send it back relatively fast. The best players in the world like Akras and Sinner they play what I call sometimes half volley tennis. They manage with their short compact motions to stay on the baseline. The opponent is hitting the ball very deep and with these short compact motions they can hit the ball back faster almost than it came without backing up much from the baseline. And that's only possible when you have the short compact motion and you use the muscles that are most efficient at generating racket head speed. These are muscles that are in the forearm and that's a more advanced concept that we'll talk about at a later point. To finish the day off we had him hit some more basket feeds. Very simple basket feeds and this is something I really like to do after you've done live ball rallying with new technique. You want to go back and you want to really re-emphasize the new technique with easier basket feeds. And here you can see he's already doing much better at this than he was at the beginning of the day. He's really doing these half volley forehands now that you know we see from that was a bigger swing though he had to move okay but these right here and he's missing one every now and then these are the half volley forehands that we see you know the best players in the world hit so much. Roger Federer was one of the first to really take balls so incredibly early with this type of a half volley swing and here I'm giving him a little bit of instruction on focusing more on the hand to generate the racket head speed and not the arm and that's a little more advanced but that's something that David was definitely capable of doing here at this point and he's doing a really nice job at that and he already started to hit some of these half volley type forehands on the baseline during the live ball rally on day one which was a positive surprise for me. So we did a few more sessions like that and then it was time to switch the focus a little bit to movement. What can happen is when you focus on technique from a stationary position then you go back to more live ball your feet are not active enough and so that's something we focused on here. I have to find the balance between very active feet to the ball. I'm telling him about the balance between very active feet before the shot and then remaining balanced and having more quiet feet and legs during the shot. That's very important. At first we needed to just get his feet more active before shots but then during the shot he needs to be stable and he cannot be moving around with his feet anymore so that's what we were focusing on here. The key point for you to take away is after a while of stationary hitting focusing on new technique you do need to bring your attention back to footwork. Tennis is really a combination of how you hit the ball technique and how you move to the ball. Those are the two elementary skills. So let me talk about that real quick. The balance between focusing on technique and movement because technique and movement are the two most important aspects of this game if you want to raise your level. When we work on technique like we're doing here with David the focus initially is a lot on the hitting arm. Now most club players focus a little too much on the hitting arm anyways and don't involve the lower body enough. That being said if the hitting arm movement is incorrect we need to fix that first. So we work on that and then you are often in a stationary position because we have to build the muscle memory that way. So you're hitting these new forehands from a stationary position. You're getting used to that and then at some point we need to reintroduce movement and what's really important then in the progressions we reintroduce movement kind of step by step. That's still relatively straightforward. Now when you start playing points once that new technique becomes more automated you need to shift your focus away from the hitting arm more to the lower body because after all that hitting from a stationary position you're so used to not moving your feet and you're so used to just focusing on the arm that we consciously need to shift that focus down to the lower body because tennis is absolutely a movement game as well. Since then David has of course implemented that new forehand in point play. You see him here playing an indoor tournament during that season when we made the changes and here you know he's hitting really nice forehands as you can see with the short compact motion which is incredibly important on the indoor fast indoor court here. So really nice forehand technique. Finally I want to show you a clip here of some forehand cross court practice with a really good practice partner. Just listen to the sound. You can hear a good technique by the sound of the hit. This is a very solid hit for a 13 year old. And here's some footage from club tennis the following summer. He's playing against adults here 18-19 year olds that are seriously competing as well and he's really dominating with that forehand as a 13 year old. As you can see he's aggressive with it. It's become second nature. The muscle memory is there and yeah it's going really well. So as you can see David now has a massive forehand. It is a really big weapon and he dominates entire matches with it which was absolutely not the case before. Now David already came to us with very strong fundamentals. A lot of you watching don't have fundamentals of that level yet and at the same time maybe your problem and most likely your problem is not the big backswing. You might have a totally different problem and that's where number one personalized video feedback from highly trained specialists like our team is the most effective and quickest way to fix your technique. At the same time you can of course also go through it step by step and rebuild your fundamentals and somewhere here is a video linked up that James made the perfect forehand in eight steps. It's incredibly popular and it's helped a lot of players develop solid forehand fundamentals so I'd highly recommend you go ahead and watch that video now.