....they also made some improvements on Jack's backhand and then some serious work has been done on Jack's service, which can be considered as quite a weapon now. In this article, I would like to focus on some qualities of this "new Sock service", as he showed them at the ATP 500 tournament in Basel (SUI) few weeks ago already, just before the above mentioned Paris event....
But in both cases shown here, Ernesto didn't create an optimal space to be able to throw his elbow and racket away from the body against the target and the result was in both cases just a mediocre forehand, which was not putting the opponent under significant pressure. The main reason behind the suboptimal spacing might then not be primarily in the poor footwork capacity, but much rather in...
In general, being able to hit the return either in the open stance or with the stepping in leads mostly to a much more dominant return with body energy involvement than stepping across, which mostly blocks a significant amount of the body energy. The ability to dominate a high amount of the returns from the outside leg (also on the forehand side) is one of the key elements in the game of the very top players. It brings, besides the already mentioned body energy dominance, also....
The one-handed backhand can be considered as Stefanos' signature stroke. He belongs to the rather small group of the young players playing the one-handed stroke on the backhand side. In general, the one-handed backhand variety gives a better chance for the acceleration but can be also rather more challenging...
For many years, the service could have been considered as Martina's biggest weakness, mainly due to a suboptimal form of the pronation with the elbow staying rather too low and the racket traveling rather too much on the horizontal plane after the impact. Over the course of the years, Martina was able to improve it a bit and her pronation did look much better later in her career. With the elbow.....
One of the bases of Jelena's success is her powerful forehand, which was clicked as having higher average speed than the forehands of the men's #1 seed Andy Murray (GBR) during the 2017 French Open. Jelena's forehand has an excellent foundation with a form of the takeback/backswing, which is bringing the racket into the appropriate hitting position very early. She doesn't have any potentially disturbing....
..back then, I was quite impressed by Jack's forehand, which he was unlike most other young Americans of his generation (Harrison, Young, Kudla, etc.) dominating rather by the body than by the arm action. He seemed to me like one who was able to stay immune to the widespread "infection" of the technique focusing at highest possible racket head speed and largely ignoring the importance of the body energy for the successful combination of power and stability/control in the strokes. It was, besides others, also Jack who brought me to the development of the model for the ideal body energy dominated modern forehand - Forehand 3.0...
The very well developed essential elements of a good service are here mainly a well-controlled toss, excellent eye control of the ball, a good build-up of a tension in the body and a sound understanding of the targeted pronation channeling energy against the target in the first part of the follow through. Such a solid Service 3.0 is an excellent base for further growth and shows that good developmental technical work on service was done with Kayla in the past.
Regarding service, forehand and backhand, Marin Cilic can actually serve as a certain standard prototype for the TENNIS 3.0 style of stroke production, where body energy dominates the stroke dynamics as well as racket position in space and where elbow reaches longest possible distance from the center of gravity during and after the impact.
Roger's service has more pronounced pronation and he spends a higher percentage of the service energy on the dominant (=right) side of the body than Andy. Over his entire career on the tour (data until mid-January 2017), Federer has the 1st service percentage of 62% (Murray 58%, Djokovic 65%, Nadal 69%) on which he won 77% of the points (Murray 75%, Djokovic 73%, Nadal 72%)...
