Ching Lee Forehand Analysis

[keifan]

Jeff or John,
I can see all that was mentioned on the analysis here but I feel you have missed a very important flaw that accounts for his apparent lack of extension through the ball. That is, he supinates and ulnar flexes his wrist dramatically after the "butt of the racquet to the ball" position which results in a very pronounced racquet head drop. From here he must is forced to rely on his wrist more than he should in order to come back (with a steep approach) that needs to incorporate tremendous pronation and radial deviation well before contact and thus he is already "spent" by contact and as a result is finishing his swing immediately after contact. In other words, the windshiel wiper motion is starting too early becuase of the marked racquet head drop. Please let me know what you think?

[jeffreycounts]

Jeff or John,
I can see all that was mentioned on the analysis here but I feel you have missed a very important flaw that accounts for his apparent lack of extension through the ball. That is, he supinates and ulnar flexes his wrist dramatically after the "butt of the racquet to the ball" position which results in a very pronounced racquet head drop. From here he must is forced to rely on his wrist more than he should in order to come back (with a steep approach) that needs to incorporate tremendous pronation and radial deviation well before contact and thus he is already "spent" by contact and as a result is finishing his swing immediately after contact. In other words, the windshiel wiper motion is starting too early becuase of the marked racquet head drop. Please let me know what you think?

Thanks for your close look at the article.

I just went back and looked at Ching's forehands again as well as the article. In the article, if you look at the comparison between his wrist supination and Coria's you will see that they are almost identical. Ching might be just a tad more laid back. And on contact both Coria and Ching look identical to me as well in terms of their wrist/racket/forearm positions (both have come forward and outward with the wrist). As for the dropping of the racket, check out a comparison with Coria and Tsonga:



So I don't think that it is the cause of Ching's problem. You can incorporate this wrist/forearm movement on every forehand, but it has to exist within the context of much larger forces - name torso rotation and the use of the entire arm and shoulder to drive through and up the back of the ball. It is these larger forces that Ching doesn't have through contact.

However, I agree with you in that the extreme wrist lay back and the coming forward of the wrist are not helping Ching here and probably make him feel like his doing a lot with the shot when in fact he is missing the larger powerful driving forces. So I do agree with you that he needs to really minimize this and not lay the wrist back so far so he can get more of his stroke from torso rotation and hand/arm/shouder extension.

So to conclude - I agree with you that the added supination/pronation move is not helping him here. But that supination/pronation isn't what causes his trouble. It's the fact that he isn't using his torso to rotate through the shot and he isn't lifting his arm upward and forward like Coria is.

If Coria wasn't getting the same wrist layback as Ching, I would reconsider, but he is, so that leads me to believe that this is more about what Ching isn't doing that Coria is doing.

One other thing I noticed, and I don't know if I mentioned it in the article, is that Ching's elbow is too close into his body. I see this a lot with players. When the elbow is pressed in tight to the body, this does make it difficult to drive through the ball properly and it really prevents a player from achieving the full wiper motion with the arm and shoulder that the pros are getting.

Thanks again for looking so closely at the article. Let's see what others think about these interesting components and how they relate in terms of cause/effect.

Jeff

[keifan]

Hey Jeff,
Thanks for the quick response. What a great website! I appreciate your comments and agree with all that you say. To my eye (I don't have the ability to freeze/frame the video), his wrist is more unstable than the pro comparisons coming to contact because of the marked supination that his wrist is in at the end of his backswing (almost a loop within a loop). This seems to be a common issue with extreme grips and the desire to get far below the ball which we are all taught. I like to watch Kohlschreiber in slow motion who also has a very very laid back wrist but he does not let the racquet head get much below his hand and as a result seems to be very stable (deep balls) through contact. Anyways, thanks again for your comments and I am truly enjoying my new membership.