Stretch/shorten cycle: What it means to your game.

[GeoffWilliams]

It's not just stroke technique, but energy applied to the shots. If you master both, you can hit 100mph groundies.

[10splayer]

It's not just stroke technique, but energy applied to the shots. If you master both, you can hit 100mph groundies.

I'll reserve the right to disagree here Geoff, upon further explanation.

[GeoffWilliams]

The only thing all top pros, male and female have identically in common is this:

THE UNIT TURN

The unit turn allows us to turn sideways, and stretch backwards, elongating our muscles, and coiling our power and our energy, to enable a fluid strike forwards, as the muscles shorten and collapse into the shot, creating a whip like vicious acceleration effect. They all differ on the stretch backwards, and the whip forwards, but no one is a robot out there. With the right frame weight, and string set up for your game, a constant defense of the contact point, a very large understanding of stretch/shorten energy and muscle coiling, your game will make it's largest improvement ever.

The faster your collapse of the shorten part of the cycle, the faster your shot will move outwards, and this takes intense discipline to focus your relaxed stretch back, and your explosion forwards on the shorten/whip like muscular contraction. When the muscles contract, they shorten into the whip like snap that creates the shot "heaviness".
The energy you practice informally, will mirror formal match play. To ensure the most power/speed, relaxed stretching back is most important. That is why the atp snap back fh works so well, and why pros can serve so well, and why top one handers can crack bh so well. Top players are top energy masters, and stretch/shorten masters. All of that depends on great footwork to set up the right contact points. All of that depends on contacting the ball at the right distance in front. Most ues are made due to contact point mistakes. Either too far out or too far back, or wrong part of the string bed. These distance contact errors are made because people are attempting to contact every shot as if it were a medium height shot, like a flat wall in front of you, rather than adapting your contact point according to the arc your own arm makes in front of you: high incoming shot=way out front on the arc: low incoming shot=way closer to your center core body. Medium incoming shot ht=mid range out front, which is the most common contact point area, hence, the most common mistake timing made, is trying to hit all shots at this point regardless of arm and wrist length. These are caused by timing errors: either a unit turn error (not in time, not made fully, not made at all, so you never get set sideways), or mistakes on front distance caused by: too far out on a low short ball, netting it, or too late/far back on a high ball, going out long.

It's also worth mentioning the lack of hip rotation, like baseball hitters use, or golfers use. The top players are more disciplined about closing hips off, and uncoiling forwards. They also are more disciplined about inverting the frame towards the net on fh, but inversion is not taught on bh groundies, and only the top players one handers do it, such as Gasquet. Inversion creates a longer kinetic path way to whip around the U turn corner at shorten/acceleration. See the baseball hitter, inverting his bat, towards the pitcher, waggling it, in a relaxed, fluid way, to that he can create far greater bat speed at shorten/collapse/contract. His hips are also very closed, and when he steps forward, transferring all weight into his shot, and opens up on the ball, they face the pitcher, rotating a full 90 degrees. Top players do this on all groundies and serves.

Stretch/shorten/explode/rotate. That's it in a nutshell, and the same with energy, it's like a sneeze.

[DougEng]

Stretch-Shorten Cycle

I will save my comments regarding stretch-shorten cycle and power for an article I sent to John a short time ago.

[GeoffWilliams]

If you want to learn how to explode on the ball, you must begin to master the sneeze like energy on the shorten end of the cycle. The reason why all pros have the unit turn in common is to gather the energy back wards from a sideways position. There is no power without a coil. There is also no power without the energetic release of the coil. Nerves can block both coil and uncoil, and cause us to waver in our reactions, our hands, our upper and lower body, so that we jam ourselves in a match. The energy masters don't jam themselves. They may be jammed by opponents who have placed them under emergency time gaps, but they no longer cause themselves to glitch on coil/uncoils.

So how do we train for this smooth speed? The next time you go out to practice, notice how much tension you are gathering in your upper body during the gaps between shots. You will be shocked at the level of tension. Focus on almost totally relaxing the upper body while on the run inbetween shots, and while reaching back off unit turns. Then focus on the explosion into the shot, the contraction of your muscles, so that the entire practice is an energy practice. If you succeed in noticing the tension in your upper body, and then relax it, and use that relaxation to create sneeze like short cycle speed: You will be amazed at the results. BAseball hitters, golfers, martial artists, they all use the same hip rotation/relaxation techniques to create vicious acceleration.