Best Forehand: Nadal or Federer

[bottle]

A Viper, not a Wiper, right?

I can't remember, but I may have attacked my friend, Sesjel, somewhere by mistake. Wiper on a forehand needs to be venomous, for sure, and is a huge
percentage of a good Federfore. But it needn't be muscular. It can be generated, alternatively, by two clever changes of direction during a short
section of a big body swing in which hand first accelerates ahead and second
resumes original speed and trajectory and separation from body before kind of collapsing into opposite arm near the top. Just one opinion, but I think it's done better from the relaxed right forearm rather than with upper arm as well, which I can see twisting up after contact (if you-- I-- study Roger's elbow in the videos).

On serve some of the critics may have a point when they say that upper arm
rotation only slows down certain serves. Those would be the serves of rotorded servers, i.e., servers severely less double-jointed than Roddick and Sampras. The only way I can get any notion of what serving life might be for them is to crank upper arm while it is parallel to court and bounce a short overhead over two or three adjacent courts. To me that's a pretty big demonstration of the power possible from that joint.

The rotorded server tries it on a serve, though, and hits with miserable, downward spin. I guess every player needs to decide how rotorded or not he or she actually is. But very few are in the Sampras-Roddick league. I remember Justin Gimmelstob comparing himself to Sampras and cursing his stars-- a guy who knows a lot about the game.

I think a severely rotorded server still needs to turn the upper arm, but when
it's above his head, for position. Brian Gordon tells me to reserve the word
"pronation" for forearm twist, but really, it's very similar stuff. And some teaching pros resist the word altogether, insisting that the phenomenon is
an unconscious, physiological reflex to protect your arm from horrid damage,
but if you leave the dog alone, it will come home all by itself wagging its tail behind it.

From this I've been wondering whether the arm protection comes from the special motion or from the arm position that the special motion concludes with. If the latter, you could straighten the arm and pronate everything and even open wrist out from a cobra (backward from the usual wrist thing) and get it done quite early (some inches from ball, anyway-- try five to start) and
do the early arm straightening passively through hips or gut motion or both with enough left to cream the ball whether core body rotation is horizontal or vertical at that point. Try to hit the ball with a big part of your body, in other words, and multiply this by throwing your elbow forward at the same time, and restrict yourself to just these last two last instant things for a lot of pop whether you're rotorded or not.

Of course I'm prejudiced and only care about the rotorded-- the ones who really need attention.

[sejsel]

I can't remember, but I may have attacked my friend, Sesjel, somewhere by mistake. Wiper on a forehand needs to be venomous, for sure, and is a huge
percentage of a good Federfore. But it needn't be muscular. It can be generated, alternatively, by two clever changes of direction during a short
section of a big body swing in which hand first accelerates ahead and second
resumes original speed and trajectory and separation from body before kind of collapsing into opposite arm near the top. Just one opinion, but I think it's done better from the relaxed right forearm rather than with upper arm as well, which I can see twisting up after contact (if you-- I-- study Roger's elbow in the videos).

.....

No, I do not recall that you have ever "attacked" me - don't worry.

As for the more constructive part of the debate - viper is of course forearm movement to a large extent - I prefer to see it more as natural consequence of what happens due to accelerations of the racquet head occurring today in conjuction with semi-western like grips and other elements of the game evolving over the course of time. Even though you can (and probably, in some instances could or even should teach it - read what Counts and Lansdorp have written about it) - even if I am not direct proponent of imposing it on a student (late Tim Gullikson had good explanation on the subject), viper has to be put in context of what happens in the stroke - as well as how and when. Sampras still blows people of the court with forehand, without doing the viper - so basics of follow-through have to come first. The shift that has been made today is that people teach viper like movement earlier even without making a proper progression prior to that, and there is always a chance of ruining (if only temporarily) the stroke - if this is not done properly.

There's an excellent article by Jeff Counts on tennisplayer.net on correcting someone's forehand - error wasn't in the lack of viper, but shoulder and torso movement and their timing (in "opening" into the shot).

Also, what is somewhat interesting to see is the lack of distinction between describing the viper and reversed forehand follow-through earlier in the debate.

Personally, I would be much more careful in completely thrashing Gilbert, Cahill and so-called "top coaches". Even though some criticism can be justified - little do we know on their (in?)capability of, for ex. building a player from the scratch - I think their decision to work with top-players makes completely sense money-wise, and there are opposite examples - Stefanki said in an interview prior to working with Gonzales how much he enjoys working with juniors.

There's much more to be said on these subject(s), but I'll have to leave it for now.

[bottle]

Good. Thanks.

I really enjoyed this and am sure other people did, too.