Why You NEED to Hit High & Heavy Forehands in Tennis

If you're the type of player that is trying to constantly hit harder to beat your opponent then I want you to try this. Try and hit higher and heavier because one of the most effective ways to hit your forehand isn't simply by just hitting it as hard as you can and using speed as the number one way to hurt your opponent. As you may already know there are five different ball characteristics that you can play around with and use to try and hit a high quality ball that's going to hurt your opponent. Those five characteristics are height, depth, direction, speed and spin and utilizing ball characteristics such as height, depth and spin. Those three in particular are really important ball characteristics that really do put pressure on your opponent and a lot of times the type of shot that's going to hurt your opponent isn't just that super fast one which has a very low margin for error. Instead shots that really do hurt your opponent are those ones that are heavy and pushing your opponent back behind the baseline. So height is important because we want to take the net out of the picture. You need to start thinking about hitting the ball at about double the height of the net so imagine that there's another net on top of the existing net and that's where you want to be hitting over. However the key here is that you're using topspin when you're hitting with this height because if you're not using topspin and you're hitting open like this then the ball is likely going to fly to the back fence so you need to ensure that you're using topspin to get that nice shape on the ball to get it down into the court and hitting with depth is also such a great idea because it pushes your opponent back behind the baseline and as I've talked about a lot on this channel pushing your opponent back behind the baseline is one of the most important skills to learn and it's one of the greatest tactics to use in tennis because if your opponent is back behind the baseline they can't attack and it puts you in a much stronger position. As much as I'm such an advocate for hitting high heavy topspin balls there are a few times where you don't want to be using this shot and that is when you're kind of inside the baseline and you have an opportunity to really attack and transition into the net probably then you don't want to be using such a high and heavy shot. Sometimes yes but other times you're going to try and kind of flatten out that shot and hit with more pace. When you are behind the baseline when you're trading or building the point that's when you're you're going to be wanting to use that heavy topspin as your go-to shot most of the time and if you can start using this as your go-to forehand on trading balls then you're going to see a real improvement in your overall tennis at your tennis level. So I'm just going to show you the technique to use guys so you can see that I'm really loading my outside leg my right leg and that's helping me to really rip up the back of the ball and you can see I'm getting really good height over the net the other key thing is to make sure your arm and your hand is super loose here so three things to remember are using that outside leg loading that back leg to help get low under the ball and really driving up with a lot of racket head speed we want to make sure our arm our hand is super loose so we have that whip like ability to get that nice topspin and then obviously the swing path is low to high but it's low to high in an extremely quick fashion in order to get the ball up and down and get that great shape on the ball so guys that's all for this video if you enjoyed it then give this video a like and subscribe to my channel for more coaching videos like this one to come and guys if you want to continue improving your forehand I have another video here for you to go and check out and down in my description box below I also have a free forehand guide for you so make sure you check that out and I'll see you guys in my next video