Interactive Forum: Donald Young Forehand

[EricMatuszewski]

Thanks for the encouragement John, I'm glad someone understands the frame by frame advance experiment. It's a real eye opener if you bother to try it.

A slow camera shutter speed will also give a "blurred" racket when it reaches it's highest velocity.

I noticed this years ago by accident after reviewing tapes I made from U.S. Open matches with a slower shutter setting. The blurring effect doesn't occur until much later in the swing, even in players with high take-backs.

It made me reconsider the contribution of a large backswing and helped me discover a much more important contributor to racket acceleration.

I'm sure that the technology Brian has access to can get some instantaneous velocities that would confirm the click thru experiment finding, in a more quantitative way. I look forward to seeing those numbers.

Eric

[rosheem]

Forehand - Dropping Racquet below ball = lack of extension?

I'm really resurrecting an old thread here, but it may relate to some of the recent discussion we've been having about "flattening out the forehand" and driving through the ball.

It seems like the discussion of Young's forehand was focused on the height and size of his backswing, but I would like to look at another element...how far the racquet drops beneath the contact point during the forward swing.

Inspired by some of the recent discussion here and the college tennis I saw this week, I started focusing on my own forehand. I also drop pretty far beneath the ball, but I noticed that the college players did not. Their strokes seemed simpler. So I started visualizing a forward swing that only allowed the racquet to drop as low as the contact point. Maybe a bit of over-compensation, but it worked. I started to feel much more connection to the contact point, better alignment, and better control. It didn't feel like I was working so hard to get the ball "up and down".

The other thing I noticed is that the follow through seemed to flow much better with less constraint. I've been playing around with "holding the finish" and really noticed that my follow through, like the Donald Young example, was compressed and awkward. I think that the further under the ball you are just prior to contact, the more compressed the follow through will be...simply because of the path the racquet must take to make contact.

It seems like in the rear view of the Donald Young forehand, he does not drop AS far beneath the ball, and that is the one clip where it looks like he gets somewhat better extension (although the camera angle might be responsible for that).

From a practical standpoint, I started really nailing my forehand last night when I pretended I was playing first doubles for U of I. This also goes to a point that John has made many times...there is nothing better than the osmosis effect. I would throw away my access to slow-motion video and instructional articles forever if I had the chance to watch live, high-level tennis for an hour every day.