Developing an ATP Forehand Part 2: The Forward Swing

[bottle]

I came up with a kind of formula for myself for hitting this shot: "Open, nudge, tap, flip, ship...this old man came rolling home."

But, reader, I ask, How good is painting by the numbers or breaking down sequence to this degree when doing something as organic as hitting a ball very well?

A breakdown in steps (and maybe you have your own) may be as essential for you as it is for me, but once it's established, the person needs to expand a category here and combine some items there.

What to expand? The action represented by the word "ship."

The shipping, spearing or flashlighting-- whatever you prefer to call it-- is very fast and powerful, so how did it come about?

Through proper loading of the shoulder for a long-armed shot along the lines of Roger Federer.

All the items listed before "ship" happen almost as one.

I used to be contemptuous of looped forehands which pause for a long time in racket's lowest position, and still am, but now think that bottom of tap melding into flip is where any magic will occur.

The racket coming down to flip is when the hips fire: The leg driving up a lot or little next happens simultaneous with shipping of the racket butt in a basically horizontal if slightly upward direction.

Some good contacts can happen right then. But if the contact happens after that, during the beginning of a roll, much of the success of the spin will be due to the speed and power at which the spear traveled and how far it got.

Note: The word "open" for me as used here represents a raising of the racket tip by three inches extended over the entire backward wind of the shoulders.

[bottle]

In fact, the shoulders are still (see second video in the article) as Roger starts to tap the dog.

This is perhaps more significant to me than to some since I've long believed that left arm's pointing across is connected to continuing turn of the shoulders.

I've been partial to forehands in which the two body rotations (backward and forward) are closely connected, and still am.

But there can be a tiny pause between them which might be pretty effective.

[bottle]

How Late Can One Load the Arm?

Today I'm trying to do it simultaneous with flip, i.e., to prolong the flip. Arm going backward (a relative idea) just a few inches before it lets go will prolong the "spearing" while adding pace from slingshot effect.

Trick then will be to siphon off some of this energy for upward spin...

An added benefit could be that one gets clear, relaxed, uncluttered tract just before the flip since one won't be employing reverse action during the "tapping the dog" of this time.

[bottle]

A List

I probably hate lists, have said that a good tennis stroke is more like a well-constructed sentence than a bunch of check points. Still, in a thorough re-reading of this material (which CANNOT be done too much in my view and the same can be said of a first-rate poem or any good stuff that yields up its meaning in gradual stages), I discovered some imperatives.

. Increase the amount of independent arm travel in the forward swing. This is permitted by good position points. The vaunted and correct brevity of this stroke is relative to Type 1 and Type 2 forehands. But within its own genre (Type 3, which is mostly far out in the slot) it's long. Brian Gordon has arm pointing toward rear fence with racket tip skewed toward right fence by about twenty degrees. I found myself, after this re-reading, adding about a foot-and-a-half of backward arm travel. I go backward in order to get the arm farther forward by contact. I don't know if I slam correctly in ping-pong (probably not), but the way I do it is a very fast sweep on top of anything else I'm doing with body core. What a difference. How much more racket head speed becomes possible.

. Centripetal force is key. A slightly inside out path naturally reverses itself to outside in as the racket tip flies up.

. Brian Gordon: "I define the start of the forward swing as the exact instant the hitting hand has BOTH forward and lateral speed, meaning the first instant it is moving both forward but also sideways along the baseline." Forward, I immediately understand. Sideways, I deduce: Toward outside. So start of the forward swing must happen right after core and arm had their little tussle to bring arm in (whew!).

. Elbow gets in line with the shoulders as in a serve.

. Arm "lags slightly behind" the core swing. It counters it. Conflict is good, leading to a big loading up of force to create (Gordon) "what I sometimes call the sling shot effect."

. Racket path: Go a little to the outside-- to make racket tip fly straight up as centripetal force (to the inside) infuses itself into the equation.

. Learn all about Gordon's "transition." These two articles are a more elaborated version of the Rick Macci video essay. If like me you just discovered an extra foot-and-a-half of independent arm travel backward and the same forward, turn the forward part into straight arm flashlight spearing like Federer-- and re-read anything Gordon says about transition and different players' transition points and "partitioning." I will not recap this material. You'll do better to re-read the original.

. Hit both flatter and moonier balls from this same construction. Gordon: "Less flip is associated with a flatter shot."

. More forward upper arm position, in straight arm mode, "causes the racquet to move vertically" and more from shoulder than forearm (as in double bend construction).

. Sling arm from farther back (me) to get it farther out front.

. Wrist muscles, for somebody not able to be as successfully late as Federer, actually resist the forward joint rotation.

. Federer typically repositions from 90 degrees wrist layback coming out of slot to 45 degrees at contact (not seen as adding force but rather as providing desired position). Wow. I attain nowhere near 90 degrees. So, if I want to try this, I'll halve the range of wrist layback actually available to me rather than incorporate unwanted stretching, i.e., torture devices between practices.

[bottle]

For Anybody

No forest and all trees is sure to decrease anyone's racket head speed.

[julian1]

For Dr. Gordon

Dear Dr.Gordon,
talking about angular velocities of joints
At least two of joints
have peaks (maxima) after
the contact point.
I am talking about Elbow EXTENSION and INTERNAL ELBOW ROTATION
see Fig 4 of http://bmsi.ru/doc/171d89e9-5c89-4105-b0d1-ac41b5537502
It is NOT obvious how to interpret those data.
Let me try
forehand has a stretch shortening cycle
It is NOT clear whether these maxima are AFTER the END of the STRETCH SHORTENING CYCLE
or before

[bottle]

From Sissy Puss

No, not "limit ourselves," just plunge more into the subject, i.e., THE SUBSTANCE, and by all means do be ridiculous.

I've never been able to get over the writer's workshop at Hollins College with William Golding, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I was elected to read the first story out loud, THE DOUGHNUT MAN, which my girlfriend Katharine Houghton and I had labored hard on all summer.

It was about a guy somewhat like me who sold doughnuts to the tent village at Hammonnassett State Park next to The Long Island Sound in Connecticut.

He would ring a little bell and chant the words, "Delicious Rings of Dough!" There were either 13 or 19 murders. He would hide each corpse under the honeydips looking like teeth, neatly stacked as they were in the back of his doughnut truck which was an old hearse.

William Golding started by saying he didn't know what a doughnut was. He then proceeded to lambaste "the gratuitous violence" in all contemporary fiction worldwide. No, he wouldn't have liked FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. I don't like it either except as an allegory of Mitt Romney turning the United States into his sub complete with ceiling supports and a woven necktie for binding her wrists together.

No further attention went to my story, which faded into complete obscurity after Lynn Nesbit, the second highest volume New York literary agent tried to sell it for a while. The discussion instead consisted of moralization about the contemporary social scene.

[don_budge]

Ridiculous? I am.

Everybody trying to be a literary critic when it comes to this article is ridiculous.

johnyandel did ask for thoughts...were we supposed to limit ourselves on the scope of our thinking?

that being said...i have already confessed to being ridiculous, the most ridiculous no less, based on our discussion of Camus and what's his name...Sissy puss?

[bottle]

J Peredo-- whoopee!! My interpretation was that Sam Stosur lowered her upper arm too soon so that the arm got too forward too soon and the flip therefore happened too much in an upward direction if one is looking at the racket butt. I've decided again that the real effort goes toward the net-- first in a solid, broad arc swing with shoulders and racket traveling at the same rate and then the racket taking off through the additive of scapular adduction (or internal slingshot of the shoulder muscles.) O dear! Am I too complicated? That would be a shame. Someone could slap my hand. Would I get a boo-boo?

Brian's explanations are great, and he very well may correct and improve on what I have to say; but, I always feel the nature of communication has a lot to do with how it is received (and I count as a receiver).

I'm excited by the "things" in the article more than the language. Of course language which allows that is very good.

I'm excited by the prospect of more solid connection in the first part of the forward swing followed by more delay to the time when the slingshot fires. The cue to fire the slingshot when the racket gets perpendicular to baseline is not only "very important," as the article says, but is wonderful. At least when someone is making the honest effort to learn (rather perhaps than to classify). Everybody trying to be a literary critic when it comes to this article is ridiculous. Once, for Virginia Country Magazine, I wrote an article called "A Review of the Reviewers" in which I panned them all. Tom Shales of The Washington Post was particularly incensed and called up the magazine hoping for redress. The magazine, which didn't always have too much character, then wrote a schmooze piece on Tom Shales.

When slingshot fires, the shoulders are still in their whirl, of course. But they don't stop as I think Vic Braden envisioned. I think that the slower speed of the whirl just then keeps racket on the ball a bit longer and adds some weight to the shot.

The left hand is helping to slow them (the shoulders), but I don't see the main mechanism as being acceleration-deceleration. To me, getting the most out of the scapula is what it's all about, same as "long toss" in the videos at JaegerSports on baseball.

How neat that Brian has explained how the essentially (but not completely) horizontal motion of the slingshot additive can convert to upward roll because of a bit of firmness in the hand. (See furniture 17 in one of the articles where the demonstrator starts swinging with just the thumb and forefinger and you can see what naturally happens then.)

J Peredo always asks good questions and always has perceptive ideas of his own.

Me, I learn by mistakes as much as through any of my ideas. And I confess that I was firing the slingshot too soon. It should fire right on the ball! And this sharpens the arc of the overall swing! And therefore makes the spearing handle miss the ball! But you've got to wait and wait and wait. Then you get very good pace and spin.

[jperedo]

I'm a huge fan of anything done by Brian Gordon and having him doing work for TP keeps me subscribing.

Regarding the articles - very interesting to see Brian's take on developing a model for the ATP motion. Happy to see it validates alot of my own personal theories on the stroke. However I'm still hoping we get to see something as detailed and complex as the serving series.

Brian i noticed in your analysis of Stosur's stroke that you mentioned a flaw being a "vertical component" to the flip? Was wondering if you could elaborate on what this is?

[don_budge]

A Bit Wordy...A Bit Wristy...the wrist is a hinge.

Would love to hear your thoughts on Brian Gordon's new article, "Developing an ATP Forehand Part 2: The Forward Swing".

It is of course a great article. I read it one time. Nothing to dispute. The wrist is a hinge. There I said it. Five words. Do you agree with that statement Brian? We could quibble with words...perhaps technically it may be more correct to say that the wrist "performs" as a hinge.

Just teasing! Ok...I will go along with tennis_chiro. A little reluctantly. I hate the word "required"...it reminds me of school. I hate school. It is not the reading that I detest...it is compulsory activities. Compulsory reading. That is why I love tennis. It is recreational and the purpose of participating in it should be...fun in the long run.

Was reading this article fun? Hmmm...good question. Was it entertaining? Definitely not. But just to be clear on a couple of things here. I am not a technique freak on the level of some of the contributions in this website. Certainly I believe in teaching sound fundamentals. I believe that I teach basically what is in the contents of this long and wordy piece...if not word for word.

But this is only my opinion. People have different tastes. The article is actually very well written in a scholarly type way. I write research papers for American and English medical journals and I certainly use a different style and format for my writing about different gynecology and obstetrics topics than I do on the forum here. I translate Swedish research papers for a Phd midwife here in Sweden. By the way...a very interesting note about Swedish culture...all doctors including Phd's go by their informal names and nobody addresses a doctor here by saying Dr. don_budge...for instance. It is just plain don_budge to one and all. Isn't that interesting?

So it is a question of style, I think. Not that I cannot appreciate the style. It is only that it is a little high minded for the game of tennis in my opinion. Tennis is not rocket science...or is it? Certainly Red Cross thinks it is. I am not a fan of his...by the way. I am not all that interested in what he has to say. Hardly marginally curious. I can do the math by the way. Does that make me a bad tennis teacher? I don't think so. I believe in teaching with a metaphysical sort of twist...as a human experience. I believe in metaphor and art just as much as I do in physics. But that puts me in the minority in this thread... to which I say...ok. Did you think I was going to say "phooey"? Not in this thread...do you think I am nuts?

To judge this article it seems to me that you must leave it up to the readership and from all indications you have to give it two thumbs up. We/they like it. I certainly respect it. I respect it so much that I will of course read anything that Brian Gordon submits at tennisplayer.net. One thing that I really do admire about your work, Brian...is the amount of work and the thoroughness work that you put into it. It shows real dedication to...if not "love" of the game. No stone left unturned...where art and science collide. Words are play things...when teaching tennis.

[julian1]

The length of SS cycle

Dr Gordon.

The blog of blog.tennisspeed.com entitled
"A Roadmap to a Hall-of-Fame Forehand - Part 6: Could Hall-of-Fame Performance be Determined by a Single Movement? (Sunday, May 20, 2012)"
provides the number 50 milliseconds for the length of SS cycle
The exact quote is (a bit weaker)
"Muscle contraction MUST OCCUR within 50 milliseconds"
Do you think the number 50 milliseconds is correct?

[tennis_chiro]

Adding my two cents...

Just wanted to chime in that while it may require concentration and focus to navigate and understand the concepts elucidated in the articles, they are great articles and should be required reading for all teaching pros claiming to understand the modern game.

Looking forward to more, Brian.

don

[stotty]

Well done BG

No problem with reading the articles at my end. Takes slightly more concentration than reading a novel perhaps...but well worth it. The articles are well written and useful to any coach who wants to improve his understanding of the modern forehand.

I always enjoy Brian's work and look forward to reading his stuff on tennisplayer.

Good work, Brian. Keep it coming!

[rich berman]

2nd forehand article

Well done Brian and team!
I have to admit it took three detailed readings to fully appreciate this wonderful article.
Thanks so much for your contribution to helping me and so many others 'fully' understand the mechanics of our sport.
Rich