My Eastern Forehand is WEAK!!!

[lukman41985]

I was out hitting today. I must say, I've made some good progress on my two-handed backhand. Satisfied, I decided to try another experiment, an Eastern forehand.

First an aside: when I first started taking private lessons, I remember that my pro had a good laugh when he saw me hitting forehands with a continental grip and serves with an Eastern forehand grip--I was doing things completely opposite!

Anyways, an Eastern forehand grip was what I was using until my junior year of high school. My coach switched me over to a semi-western forehand because he noticed I had a tendency to end points quickly, mostly by losing them, when I would go for a big flat forehand. So during some lessons, I became comfortable with a semi-western forehand that utilized a more low-to-high, vertical swing path.

Well, after reading the Federer forehand analysis, I decided to try to give the Eastern forehand a go, this time utilizing hand and arm rotation, and a slight bit of low-to-high motion, to get some good spin on the ball for consistency's sake. I have to say, I hit a bunch of terrible forehands. I was consistently bad with the Eastern grip. When I made contact with the ball, my hand felt so weak on the racquet and inevitably, the racquet face would open up and sometimes even slide under the ball.

I've got all the basics in my forehand down, atleast from the visualization I've done in the mirror. I studied the commonalities of the modern forehand article inside and out. I'm just bewildered about this Eastern forehand because yeah, I do want to hit with a bit more pace. I guess what I'm wondering/asking/confused by is the whole path of the racquet and how one really establishes the hitting arm position. The weakness I felt in my hand on the Eastern forehand made me think that when I hit "well" with my semi-western forehand, maybe I was just spinning the ball in and not actually following through on all the key positions.

I kind of wished I never tried this experiment. It's got me confused and really second guessing my whole forehand. Yikes.

[johnyandell]

Sounds confusing. But to me this post falls into the category of unanswerable due to various assumptions and lack of (visual) information.

"I've got all the basics in my forehand down..." That's an assumption. Even if that's true, another assumption is that these basics were all transfered to the eastern grip version, assuming it really was an eastern grip, assuming it really was "weak" after a few minutes of hitting.

I'm not saying your experience of all this wasn't real but I just don't think it's possible to make these kinds of evaluations without (carefully) looking at some video. And a semi-western grip may be just dandy--remember also Fed's grip is a little different than Pete's. Depending, you might or might not be able to do some of the extreme things with the grip you were holding.