How to Hit a Brush Forehand in 5 Minutes

How to hit a brush forehand in less than five minutes. Welcome back to Tennis University, the final solution to your tennis game where my brand is No Bullshit Tennis Coaching that will fix your tennis game permanently so that you'll never need another video, another tennis coach, or another set of tip drip piece of advice for your tennis game ever again. So everyone is familiar with the brush forehand. This is one of the most popular ways to hit forehands where essentially you're staying behind the ball and many players are familiar again with the Topspin Pro products, but a lot of players are doing it wrong. So in this video, I'm going to explain how to do it correctly. The first thing you have to have is the proper grip. If you have the wrong grip, you will have the wrong contact angle later because your grip is the static angle of rotation that you're holding the racket at. So let's fix your grip. First, we are not going to explain grips using this traditional convoluted system that forces you to memorize three parts of the palm, enumerate the handle, and memorize a weird name like Semi-Western, Continental, and Eastern. There's a method that is 10 times easier and 10 times faster, and this method is literally just knowing whether or not the tip of your middle and ring finger is on the correct side of the handle. Every racket handle has eight sides. Two of them are long, two of them are medium, four of them are short. For any version of the forehand, including the brush forehand, you want the tip of your middle and ring finger to be on a short side followed by an open medium side. The medium sides are aligned with the edge of the racket. The long sides are aligned with the face of the racket. You want your middle and ring finger to be on a short side where the next open side is a medium side, not a short side where the next open side is a long side. So tip of the middle and ring finger are on a short side followed by an open medium side, then close the hand. Of course, make sure you have the right grip size for your hand as well, and then you're done. And of course, traditionally, what people would call this is Semi-Western, but you don't need to memorize any grip names. You just need to look in your hand and know if the tip of your middle and ring finger on the correct side, and then you're done. Then put your left hand on the neck of the racket, bend your wrist back all the way so that it's like you're holding a stop sign, and this is our ready position. Now, when we take our racket back, here's what we're going to do. We're going to stay in open stance. We are not going to step in. You step in when you need to get closer to the ball. The vast majority of forehands hit by pros and high-level players are in open stance. If you don't need to move forward, you don't need to step in. Also, stepping in takes away energy from you, and also, when you leave open stance to go into closed stance, you lose access to something called space correction. Space correction is a self-explanatory form of footwork where it allows you to correct the space between you and the ball last second. If I'm too far from the ball, I can swing and slide towards the ball. If I'm too close to the ball, I can swing and slide away from the ball. So again, I can swing and close the space between me and the ball simultaneously, or I can swing and open the space between me and the ball simultaneously. This is impossible in closed stance. If you're too close, you're going to t-rex your forehand. If you're too far, you're going to bend your back, and it's not going to be comfortable, and you're going to hit the worst forehand ever. So please stay in open stance unless you actually have to step forward. Next, to take the racket back, we're going to turn the entire body. Notice what I'm doing here is I'm rotating the left foot. People say you need to step into the ball to turn your hips. Well, you can turn your hips without stepping by turning that left heel, and then we go from this slight isometric squat that is in ready position to a slight lunge to the right. Then from here, we're going to push the arm to the right. We're not looping the arm, we're pushing the arm. When we push the arm, we're activating the deltoid and the tricep. From this position, your racket should be like a stop sign facing back. A lot of people are arguing whether or not you should take your racket back right or all the way back. This isn't some sort of weird category like the WTA forehand or the ATP forehand or all these weird or reified categories that people come up with. If you have time to take your racket back all the way, you take your racket back all the way. If you don't have time to take your racket back all the way, you don't take it back all the way. That's the only difference between players who take their racket back southeast of them versus players who take their racket back all the way south. Either way, your racket needs to be this stop sign. Now what we're going to do, this is our preparation. Now we're going to go into the swing. To swing, we're going to pull the racket down. We're going to swing below the point of contact. Let's say the point of contact is right where I'm pinching my fingers right here. A lot of players, when they hit forehands, they swing straight at the point of contact, making contact with the ball right behind you. What you have to do is you have to swing below the point of contact. And then what we're going to do here is we're going to wave the wrist up aggressively. This aggressive wrist wave is going to pull the rest of the arm up. So when we're brushing the ball, we're trying to stay behind it. What we're not trying to do is hit through the ball and point our racket forward. When you're brushing, you don't want the racket pointed forwards at all. Is that a valid way to hit the forehand going through the ball? Absolutely. But again, this video is about just how to brush the forehand. I have another video called how to hit the forehand flat or how to hit the forehand with heavy topspin. Both of those cover how to strike through the ball and hit flatter versions of the forehand. But again, we're swinging below the point of contact. Then we're waving the wrist up. Then that momentum is going to carry the racket and our arm up. And then once our racket is pointed up to the left, we're going to pull it in. So we're waving the wrist at contact. That's the first thing we're doing with the wrist. But the other thing we're doing with the wrist is turning it forwards like this. So you wave the wrist upwards and you turn the wrist forwards. Both of those put topspin on the ball. I'm going to demonstrate with just the ball, moving my wrist. Both of those motions put topspin on the ball. So again, we swing below the ball. We move the wrist aggressively. That pulls our entire arm. We also do want to move our arm. Then once the racket's pointed up to the left, then we follow through over our trapezius or in common language, over our shoulder. If you do it correctly, the racket should be finishing horizontal like this over your trap slash shoulder. And the bottom logo of your racket should be pointed forwards. Now, what you absolutely do not want to do is crank your arm all the way down like this. I see tons of players, they're trying to get an aggressive brush on the forehand. And what they do is they crank really aggressively like this. This is absolutely terrible. You cannot do this. This is completely wrong. And then lastly, what do you do with your leg when you are swinging into the ball? You are adding a slight calf raise into the ball. So again, if you put everything that I just taught you together, then your forehand should look just like this. You can immediately take everything that you just learned in this video, go to a tennis court, apply it immediately and see immediate results. If this video helped you out, then I created a more extensive forehand masterclass that's designed to, again, fix your forehand permanently so you never need another lesson for the forehand ever again. Most people spend anywhere from 50 to 100 hours of lessons in order to master the forehand, when in reality you can master your forehand in less than a week when you have the right instruction. I have thousands of players who ask me for lessons all around the world. And because there's only one of me and I can't be everywhere all at once, that's why I created these online masterclass courses as well as all of these videos on social media. So if you wanna fix your forehand permanently, I have a link to the forehand masterclass in the description and the pinned comment below. And as always, if you enjoyed this video, please like the video, comment any thoughts or questions you have below and subscribe to my channel if you wanna see more content like this.