In today's lesson we're gonna talk about whether it's a good idea to change
your grip for any stroke in your game. If you have been playing tennis for a while
and you want to change your grip for any shot it could be a forehand a backhand
or a serve you're gonna have a difficult time in changing your grip and this has
to do with the muscle memory of your wrist. Let me give you an example of
my forehand. So I have a semi-western forehand grip. So my wrist is used to a
certain level of wrist extension at contact and since the contact with the
ball on the forehand is occurring when the stroke accelerates to the max I'm
not aware of my wrist position and therefore cannot change it and I'm solely relying
on muscle memory. So what happens if I hit a forehand with a continental grip
I'm likely going to have the same position of the wrist and that's going
to open the racquet face. So I'll hit forehand with a continental grip and
most likely this ball is going to go long I have no way to control it. On the
other hand if I go into an extreme western grip my wrist will have the
muscle memory to be in a certain amount of wrist extension which will close the
racquet face down too much resulting in net errors. So if I try to hit a forehand
it's very likely that I'm going to hit it into the net if I hit it with an
extreme western grip. In the case that you have an continental forehand grip
you're most likely the wrist is going to be more in a straight position and so
now if you try to even change it to an eastern grip you'll see that in
that same position the racket face closes. It's not that much of a
difference in angle so you might be able to get away with changing from
continental to eastern, however, if you go one over to semi-western you see that in
that same wrist position the racket face closes too much and you will not be able
to get the ball over the net. Now on the other hand if you're someone who has an
extreme western grip you will see that the wrist will be almost completely
straight at contact and now what happens as you go over into a semi-western grip
that's more conventional with that straight wrist the racket face will open
up and you will likely start hitting balls very long. So whether you can
change your grip or not will depend on how long you've been playing tennis and
how much muscle memory you have developed. And this is the case for any
other shot in tennis whether you're serving with a forehand grip on the
serve it depends on how long you've been doing this because on the serve if we
serve with a let's say a semi-western grip, at contact the wrist is more
straight and your body gets used to that you develop this certain muscle memory.
Now as soon as you go into a continental grip with that straight wrist position
the strings are angled off to the side and you going to started missing
everything wide. So my recommendation for you is if you have a forehand grip on
the serve you must change it no matter how long you've been doing it. You must
practice a lot to get your wrist used to the continental grip. On the forehand if
you have a continental grip, that is a grip of the past and I advise you to change it
to at least an eastern grip. However, if you have an eastern grip a semi-western
and a western grip there's nothing wrong with any of these three grips and it
might not be worth changing the grip because it's gonna take a lot of balls
is gonna take a lot of time committed to changing the grip and it might not be
necessary. If you have problems on the forehand, the cause of these problems
might be something other than the grip. On the two-handed backhand it's really
only one grip you can use which is the your dominant hand being at semi-western
and non-dominant hand between the semi western lefty and the eastern lefty
and really this is the only way to hit a two-hander. Now on the one-handed
backhand you have the option of going eastern or you can even go to the
western backhand grip. Both these grips are fine, the eastern backhand will give
you a more neutral position of the racquet head and it's gonna be easier to
hit the ball flat or with topspin. If you go over towards a western one-handed grip
it might be more difficult to achieve a flat backhand. Another very common
problem recreational players experience is the changing of the grip mid stroke.
So on the serve for example players will go into a continental grip and then
somewhere around this area there will regrip the racquet that will move their
fingers and go back into their forehand grip. Or on the forehand if
they change their grip they might be in a correct grip and then right before the
drop the racquet they turn the racquet around. And there's a great way for this
to stop happening and all you need is a piece of paper. So now let's talk about
the serve. You're going to take a piece of paper and you're going to go into
your continental grip and now you're gonna put that piece of paper right
beneath your fingers right here and you're gonna hold the piece of paper. Now
if you serve and you move your fingers this piece of paper is going to come out.
So the only way to keep that piece of paper on the racket is by holding and
not changing the grip throughout the motion. And this works the same way on
the forehand where you might need two pieces of paper one small one and one
bigger one and you place it underneath your fingers like this and you place
another piece of paper right here because you do want that spreading
between the next finger in the middle finger. And the same way if you have
muscle memory where are you changing your grip mid stroke and you let go the
piece of paper is gonna fall out. This is a great way to maintain the grip
throughout the forehand stroke. Thank you guys for watching this video. Please
leave a comment in the section below I'll be happy to respond. Hit that like
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