Ema you have one of the best female forehands i've ever seen i would easily rank it like top 50
wta thank you so much no problem you know what's great about your forehand you actually can play it
with spin you know because a lot of other wta players that play a little bit more flat but
you can also play with power and you have a great forehand return but when i looked at your forehand
in slow motion you have some of the typical characteristics of a wta forehand and which is
number one the first thing that everybody notices is that when you take your racket
back the racket kind of goes behind the body like this and that usually correlates also with
a contact that's closer to the body and with a bent arm so my question to you is these two
things this larger backswing and this kind of closer contact the body something that you were
taught that or did it kind of happened naturally no i was always thought to have a short backswing and
to hit with the elbow away right and then this other stuff kind of happened despite these tips
why would my contact be different why would wta contact be different than atp contact
it's further behind it's like it's like here let's see like here and atp is a little bit more here or
here like this and it's because of the take back so it goes from it goes from here and the atp and
then it goes like this and then this no i don't actually i don't teach the backswing at all i let
it happen naturally i never teach the backswing and what happens with most female players is that
if you let them swing naturally the racket will go back here naturally because that's where they
feel more strength they need a little bit extra room and also it matches the type of forehand
that has a little bit later contact because the truth is that the vast majority of females play
if you take like a still shot right at the moment of contact you'll see this right here
on almost all of them even serena and if you look at the men it's a little bit more in front so this
has to match the backswing so if i go more atp style from here to here there's enough room there
if i go from here to here there's not enough room you see there's not enough range of motion
you don't get enough power from that so you need a little bit extra room to go from here to here
and then here but the thing about timing that's a little bit confusing and i'll try to explain
it with a comparison to my forehand so if i try to take the racket back like you and took the racket
too far back see my contact is going to remain the same so i'm going to make contact a little bit
more further in front than you for example so from here to here it's not going to be enough time and
i'm going to make contact late and yes indeed i'm going to hit the ball late which doesn't mean that
if you take the racket back to this place that you're going to hit it late because your contact
is going to be a little bit further behind if you look at like for example serena or
or any of the other players who are playing like on fast surfaces or grass courts they
don't really i mean they're not late they're hitting the unbelievably hard like madison keys
or sloane stevens they're hitting the ball so hard and they're not late on the forehand
but what's funny about that is if i tried your backswing i went like this
i indeed would be late on my forehand. so ema let me try to ruin your forehand i'm going to do
i'm going to teach you atp style okay so the first thing you got to do
is you got to close the strings on the outside as you drop the racket and let's see what happens
right there now i'm gonna drop feed it so basically you go like this right here so you just
close the racket you close the racket here and then and then accelerate from there
i think you're still going a little too far back you close it on the outside good
you feel how much shorter it is the stroke you know why because you're still making the same
contact so there's not enough continuity in the swing it's more short it's more cramped
up right because you go in here and then here and then here like this here try it again do it again
and you know it's funny like you told me before you actually were did you tell me you
were taught in college to like go a little bit more here so even though they tried to
shorten it up it still would naturally go a little further back and do you feel like your
forehand like was there was problems with timing or did you have any issues with it
my forehand actually improved
a lot during college yeah i think your forehand is amazing i mean like for example your forehand
is so good if you start making these little changes it's very possible you make it worse it
just doesn't feel natural when we're trying this i feel like i'm just muscling it it's muscling right
i don't know like there's not enough room and then i just feel my arm working
a lot right like i'm all i don't know i think there's not enough momentum so you get
see backswing creates momentum right so there from here it's just not enough momentum it just
doesn't fit with you because again i feel that the correlation is important with the
contact you will naturally make contact here and it's very hard to change that
i mean you can force the arm to be straight but that wouldn't do you any good
sorry but so the atp players the men yeah i guess so they don't take it back they just go here
well there's actually believe it or not there's a few guys who take it back wta style like um
jeremy chardy florian mayer there's a few guys who will take the racket a little bit more on the
behind the body like this and of course there's probably others that are ranked below the top
hundred that we don't know about but the vast majority of atp players will they will close
the racket more on the outside like this what they call the hitting side of the body so if you
it's going to be on if i'm right handed it's going to be on my right side the racket really never
breaks this side of the body it stays here and as they accelerate it goes back like this
yeah so the contact is going to be more in front on atp for sure so even though most atp are bent
to with the arm they will maybe have a little bit more space between the elbow and the body
like this where wta the elbow is definitely much closer to the body if you look like
sloane stevens even serena muguruza like some of the greatest forehands you'll see this the elbow
very close to the body and there's nothing wrong with that obviously because you can
those forehands are so good that maybe the best wta forhands in the world is just naturally what
happens that some players especially females will feel a little bit more strength making
contact closer to the torso so then my question is once you see your player starting to do that
you don't worry about it in my opinion i i don't i don't see what's going to happen there's going to
be a few females who will be a little bit more straight and they will take the racquet back
a little bit shorter and you do see that on tour there are some like justine henin or sam stosur
there's always some like so if it's coming naturally without instruction then it's perfectly
fine let them play more the atp style but i would never force a female player female junior to
adapt an atp forehand because in the vast majority of cases it doesn't come natural so what i do is
just let them take the racket back naturally and then just work on the fundamentals all right so
now take a couple more regular forehands and just let it rip so you can recalibrate your forehand
and go real hard on these two
awesome forehand ema good job nice