Tag:3 Step Tennis Stroke Regulation

Serena Williams – Overhead 3.0

In general, the biggest difference from the service action is that while playing the overhead most of the players are using for the racket take-back the faster upper loop. The time-efficient preparation for the overhead consists of three actions ("triple overhead action") being taken almost simultaneously, immediately after a quick initial change of the grip into the backhand/continental position - 1/ pointing at the incoming high ball (lob) with the non-dominant hand, 2/ pivot while stepping back and slightly around with the dominant-side leg/foot and....

Xiyu Wang – Mistake-prone aggressive forehand

Wang has an almost ideal tennis body with long extremities. For her age, she has already quite highly developed tactical varieties and is well capable of an attacking all-court game, which she applied quite successfully also during her recent US Open campaign. Her overall tactical possibilities are then in my opinion slightly limited by certain technical weaknesses in her strokes. In this article, I would like to look at her forehand. Wang is playing her forehand in a very aggressive manner, but this stroke is prone to rather frequent mistakes, mainly due to the...

Reilly Opelka – Rather troubled forehand

Below, I am comparing Reilley's forehands at these two above mentioned events. I am surely aware that the coordination and an exact footwork are challenging at Reilly's size, but what I am focusing at is the way how he approaches the given strokes as this gives me certain information about the mental image of the stroke in his mind. In the case of an optimal "3 Step Tennis Stroke Regulation", the player puts the priority at the creation....

Ernesto Escobedo – Suboptimal service & forehand combination

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...

Jack Sock – Big 3.0 Forehand, more and more often…

..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...