Tag:forehand

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...

The most misleading coaching advice towards stroke production – 2 – Forehand

(Under construction) As a result, the players are developing the wrong image of the ideal stroke in their mind and use this image as the base for their stroke production. This ill-conceived process can start already with small children during their first attempts at hitting of the ball. Even today, most of the children are starting to learn forehand based on the elbow flexion instead of pronation, which is easy to teach, when done properly. This wrong guidance then often continues at the following stages all the way into professional tennis..

Catherine Bellis – Forehand 3.0 with potential

Below, I am comparing Catherine's forehand during her 3rd round match at the 2014 Orange Bowl (against Shiskina / USA - the first tie-break set was very tight there) and her forehand in a practice match against Kayla Day (USA) during the 2017 French Open. At her example is then also quite well possible to explain the certain mystery of the stances.....

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...

Jelena Ostapenko – Powerful Forehand 3.0 from Latvia

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....

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...

Rebeka Masarova – top Swiss junior player in 2016-2017

Rebeka Masarova (*1999 / SUI) with her WTA ranking of #314 (as of July 18, 2016) is currently the world highest ranked player before reaching the 17th birthday. Rebeka, who won the 2016 French Open junior event a few weeks ago, considers service as her favorite stroke. She has Slovak and Spanish roots and is currently being coached by her mother. As all very successful Swiss female tennis players of the past over 20 years, Rebeka was developed largely privately outside of the regular Swiss Tennis Association program!

What is holding back American Sloane Stephens ?

In my personal opinion, Sloane's main "road block" is in just mediocre TENNIS 3.0 benchmark fulfilment in most of her strokes, which could be based partly on limited knowledge of and partly on missing readiness to apply the TENNIS 3.0 CODE within the "3 Step Tennis Stroke Regulation" as often and as precise as possible.

Rafael Nadal and his forehand lasso finish – uncovered

Forehand lasso/reverse finish of Rafael Nadal (*1986 / ESP) is not always exactly what many think that it might be. Surely, Nadal as many other players (notably Sampras, Sharapova) goes with his racket very fast and steep up and later back when he is hitting an emergency forehand with limited time/space availability (close to the body)....

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...