I'm really bad at this no all right guys you can see i cannot do the hula hoop i'm not using my
hips too well but i somehow still manage to play good tennis and the reason for that is
that you don't need to use your hips in order to produce good tennis strokes so the topic of
the hips and how they're used on the tennis strokes gets a little complex and we'll go
through all the strokes but let's start off with the forehand so if you're interested
in finding out what part of the body leads the way on the forehand in great detail check out
my kinetic chain video and what happens on the forehand that the stroke is initiated with the
non-dominant arm that is the first link in the chain and take a look what happens to my forehand
if i lead the stroke with the hip so in other words i'm going to initiate the stroke
with my right hip and take a look what happens
what happens when you hit a forehand like this is that you're opening up
way too early you can see that the stroke does not look right as opposed to starting the stroke with
the non-dominant arm and then leading the way in the rotation where the kinetic chain is happening
from top to bottom take a look i'm going to initiate the stroke with my non-dominant hand
and then naturally the entire body ends up rotating going from the top to the bottom and any
forehand at the moment of contact has the right hip for a right-handed player behind the left hip
and this is also the case when the dominant shoulder gets ahead see the right hip never gets
ahead of the dominant shoulder there's always the structure at the moment of contact on the forehand
so you can see here that the hip does not lead the way the non-dominant arm goes first then the
shoulders and then the hips and then the legs at the very end it's the top to bottom kinetic chain
and again you take a look at any high level forehand you will see that the
right hip is going to be behind the left hip at the moment of contact while the dominant
shoulder is in front this is true for the open stance forehand and the closed stance forehand
so what you should do as a recreational player is not to think of the hips the hips will naturally
move with the rest of the body they are somewhere in the middle of the kinetic chain so if you
don't think about it and naturally rotate the body the hips will be correct do not under any
circumstance try to initiate the forehand stroke with the hips first this will result in a rotation
that's happening too early and you will have a very difficult time controlling the ball
so on the backhand the hips are going to be used differently from the forehand that has to do
with the sequencing of the torso rotation on both the one-handed and the two-handed backhand let's
start off with the two-hander so as opposed to the forehand where we're initiating the stroke on top
on the backhand we're going to initiate the stroke on the bottom with the hands close together and
because of this reason the hips and the shoulders are gonna rotate simultaneously into the ball
and this is also true for the one-handed backhand the one backhand has a separation of the
hands that begins in the middle of the body if you take a look at any high-level one-handed backhand
you will see that the non-dominant hand will come with the racket and now the separation will start
somewhere here and for this reason the hips and the shoulders will have to rotate simultaneously
and again this is not something that you need to worry about or you don't need to initiate
this with your hips and go early here this will naturally happen as you begin to rotate
and the reason is because the hands are going to be closer to the body and are going to be lower
to the body the difference to the forehand is that because the hands are higher at the initiation of
the stroke is because of this reason we can start the rotation with the non-dominant arm we cannot
do that when the hands are close to the body and we're also going to be very close to the contact
point with very little time therefore the rotation of the hips and the shoulders will have to take
place simultaneously and this is true for both the one-handed backhand and the two-handed backhand
and if you try to do something with your hips this close to the contact you can
very easily ruin your backhand let me show you what that looks like so i'm going to try
to manipulate my hips and open them up while i hit my backhand and take a look what happens
so you can see they are completely mis-timed the rotation opened up way too early let me
show you another one i'm going to try to open my hips you see there i open up too early
and therefore lost control the ball and it goes the same for the two-handed backhand on the
two-hander i'm going to try to open up early with the hips and let's see what happens you see that
opened up way too early i lost my balance and i lost control of the shot so guys just like the
forehand do not think of your hips on the backhand things will fall into place concerning the hips if
you execute the fundamentals correctly so when it comes to the serve the topic of the hips gets
a little more complicated because we can move the hips this way but we can also rotate the
hips so let's first talk about the rotation of the hips it's going to be very similar
to the forehand so the rotation of the hips on the flat and the slice serve keep in mind that rotation in
general is going to be limited on the kicker so on the flat and the slice the rotation of the hips
will never be initiated prior to the elbow so the first thing that happens on a flat and a slice serve
once the racket drops is the elbow will come out and now from here the body will continue
to rotate eventually going to a position where the right shoulder is aligned with the left shoulder
and if you take a look at my right hip you will see that the right hip will never get
ahead of the left hip while the shoulders are parallel to each other in relation to the baseline
so that means that the rotation is executed top to bottom very similar
on the forehand it starts with the elbow and then naturally the rest of the body will rotate
eventually with the legs turning and going like this
and guys do not under any circumstance start to initiate your serve with the hip this is
going to be an absolute disaster take a look if i try to start the rotation with my hips
actually i think i pulled something in my back that was dangerous do not do this guys you can
see how terrible it looks let me show you one more time i'm going to try to initiate
the rotation with my hip oh my goodness yeah this now i pulled something on the right side i got two
pulled muscles in the back okay let me try now a regular serve you tell me which one looks better
so guys do not worry about the rotation of your hips on the serve naturally the hips will rotate
with the rest of the body if you execute the fundamentals correctly so when it comes to going
forward with the hip on the serve this is something that you do see from high level players
and it's something that is an option to you and i'm going to explain what the purpose of it is
but first let's talk about what happens in the loading position of the serve so when the serve
is fully loaded we're going to have our racket here in the trophy phase our non-dominant arm
is gonna be vertical to the ground we're gonna be on our toes we're gonna have our knees bent we're
also gonna have our chest up to the sky this is gonna depend on your flexibility and now if you
take a look at what happens to the serve once we toss the ball in front of the baseline we're
going to lean forward now if you lean forward without getting the hip out you're going to
lose your balance very quickly and what happens to the body if we get our non-dominant hip inside
the court at the same time lean forward this is going to provide our body with a lot more balance
and you got to push the hip into the court up to your comfort level there's even some
professional level players that do it too much so they're severely going to the court
like this now the body is bent in a very unnatural way you got to remember that
when the body is bent in this way there are no biomechanical reasons why you should get more
power from this there's absolutely no power straightening in the body from here to here because
we're only working here with the side muscles of the abs and we really don't have a lot of
strength on the side of our body so do not go past your comfort zone when you're pushing the hip into
the court personally i like doing it a little bit to gain balance as i'm leaning in and it
feels much better than being straight like this and leaning in so i do recommend it to players
that want to improve their balance while they're leaning forward but be very careful not to overdo
it because you will not be able to come out of a position that's too extreme like this remember
that a lot of power on the serve comes from bending the body backwards because as the body
straightens now we're using very strong muscle groups mainly the abdomen and the lower chest area
to straighten the body so this is a far better way to load the serve bending it this way rather
than this way now some players like Sampras will do it both so they will slightly have
their hip into the court and it will also bend backwards and this does feel quite comfortable
but if you take a closer look at sampras's serve you'll see that he doesn't have that extreme
pushing out of the hip it's just slightly inside to give the body a little bit more balance
as it's leaning in but he has a severe backbend of the body and he's going to be able to generate
a lot of thrusting power as he accelerates upwards into the serve so guys i'm not saying don't use
your hips i think it's good to use the hips in general it can help you help with your flexibility
and it's going to help you to become an overall better athlete and i'm sure i can benefit from
learning how to hula hoop however if you're trying to use your hips to improve your stroke
a lot of players think they're going to get more power from using the hips the opposite is going
to happen you're going to make your strokes worse your timing is going to suffer and you're going
to lose control and the far better thing to do is to not think of the hips at all when it comes to
the rotation of the hips on our ground strokes or even the rotation of the hips on the serve trying
to initiate this stroke to the hips will not only make your stroke worse but it can possibly lead
to injuries it's not something that you should try to attempt to do instead don't think of your hips
at all apart from that little tip that i gave you on the server you can push your hips slightly into
the court the hips will naturally be in the correct position if you execute the fundamentals correctly