Why does Petra Kvitova tend to higher amount of errors?

Petra Kvitova (*1990 / CZE) belongs with her 2 Wimbledon titles and 4 Fed Cups wins to the top female players of the past 10 years. A few years ago, she was even one match shy of becoming WTA’s # 1. Despite her excellent achievements, Petra seems to have some problems with her constancy and one has the feeling that she is not always fully using her potential given, besides other qualities, also by her tall body with long arms and legs as well as by being left-handed, which is proving to be quite an advantage in tennis in general and even more so in women’s game. Today, I would like to leave other aspects away and focus just at some of the technical elements in Petra’s strokes, which have the tendency to cause some of her mistakes.

One of the main reasons for Petra’s frequent mistakes on the forehand side is, in my opinion, her rather limited degree of TENNIS 3.0 fulfillment as her arm activity with often early bending of the elbow limits the body energy dominance upon the racket typical for TENNIS 3.0. On the photo 1/ bellow, the early elbow bend is clearly visible. On the photo 2/, Petra straightens the elbow further away from the body, but in both cases, body energy influence upon the racket is limited. It seems that Petra doesn’t use the proper TENNIS 3.0 CODE, which would allow her to control the racket with the entire body energy flow. Players with limited body energy influence upon the racket then tend to commit mistakes more frequently, mainly under pressure. These mistakes then come mostly (with highly developed players) in the form of outs by few centimeters or balls hanging in the upper portions of the net, as we can often see with Petra. Should Petra learn to dominate her strokes with body energy to a higher degree, her mistake percentage might go down quite significantly and subsequently her ranking up again. More information available on request – drmgb11(at)gmail.com

1/ Petra Kvitova (*90 / CZE) – Forehand in the practice 1 – follow through – early elbow bend with very limited body energy influence at the racket – 2014 US.Open – NYC

2 / Petra Kvitova (*1990 / CZE) – Forehand in the practice – follow through with an almost straight elbow, but still with limited body energy influence – 2014 US.Open – NYC

Copyright 2014 (photos), 2016 (text) Dr. Martin G. Baroch