Do you have a player at your club that's grunting really loud every time they hit
the ball and everybody's annoyed having to play
them now i want to tell you that you have to take it
easy on that person because grunting in tennis
is intuitive and how do i know that grunting is intuitive well because
i grunt when i play tennis and i have absolutely no control over and the
interesting thing is that as my intensity increases so does my
grunting and if you watch rafael nadal play
often when he starts a match his grunts are very quiet and then as the match
goes on and especially when the match gets tight
his grunts become much louder and of course grunting can be fake too and
there are many players who are grunting loudly on purpose and this is
of course really annoying and can be seen as a hindrance.
and especially prolonged grunting such as this
and some players would do something that's even more annoying which is
grunting after the ball has been struck
so this is again a hindrance to the opponent because as the ball is clearing
the net if the player is still grunting the
other player is distracted from the shot however if the grunting is
done intuitively and it's done in the moment of contact with the ball
like this i don't see anything wrong with this and
in fact some of the greatest players of all time
grunt players such as djokovic nadal sharapova
azarenka or back in the day monica seles i can tell you that personally if i
don't grunt i lose a lot of intensity and
interestingly people were so annoyed with monica seles back in the day that
she stopped grunting for a little while and her performance
dropped significantly and here's the important question why do players grunt
well this is the reason why i made this video and i see a big
problem at the recreational level connected to grunting well what grunting
basically is is breathing so all professional players
exhale when they make contact with the ball
now some will not only exhale they will produce a sound
while they're striking the ball you will not see a high-level player who will
hold their breath as they're hitting the ball
however on the recreational level a big problem that i see is players will
hold their breath as they're striking the ball and here's
what will happen to your stroke if you hold your breath obviously you're
going to get out of breath faster if you're not breathing properly
but in addition to that also when you hold your breath on your
stroke your body is going to be clenched up
it's going to be stiff and you're not going to be moving in a fluid continuous
way so what breathing does it allows you to completely
unload the stroke in the most natural way so guys it's very important that you
exhale when you make contact with the ball this will
improve your strokes it will make it more continuous and you will not get out
of breath as fast if you happen to make a sound
while you exhale and grunt there's nothing wrong with
that and it's going to sound very different from a fake grunt and if
you're uncomfortable with making sounds when you play tennis i completely
understand you can do the aaron krickstein method so if you watch
aaron Krickstein back in the day he would blow his cheeks up like this
and then as he hit the ball he would exhale so it looked like this
so this is an alternative method if you're really uncomfortable with the
sounds that you're making on a tennis court a way to make sure that you exhale
is to blow up your cheeks and then exhale just like aaron kriekstein did so
guys i already told you that i grunt when i play and it's not something
that i'm in control over it just comes out of me
intuitively and as i'm watching myself over the past few years i feel like that
my grunt is very similar to novak djokovic in fact it's
about the only thing me and him have in common so take a
listen and also take a listen to djokovic's grunt
you tell me if it sounds similar
what do you think guys i think it's pretty spot on