Hi guys Nick here from Intuitive Tennis. So should you have a completely relaxed
arm on the forehand and have the body's rotation and momentum take care of the
rest? Check out today's video and find out. How relaxed should the arm and the
hand be on the forehand well it's not as relaxed as you think it is
and the way I found out about this was thinking back to my college career I had
one peculiar injury where I broke two fingers it was these two fingers that I
broke during weightlifting and I decided to play through the broken fingers
anyway and the result was very bad. I could play but I could
barely hold on to the racquet and my forehand was pretty much gone and also
when you take a look at the players you take a still image of any of the top
pros of the contact point on the forehand you can see there's a big
degree of the forearm muscles flexing so you can see there's quite a bit of
control and stability applied to the racket at contact. When we look at the
forehand we can break it up in three different parts we can take the
preparation phase also known as the backswing and then we can take the
contact there's another phase and we can take the finish as another phase. So I
think it's perfectly okay to be relaxed when you take the racquet back. It really
doesn't matter. You don't necessarily have to be but you can. You see some
players like Murray or David Goffin they have very relaxed wrist back here
and the wrist that kind of hangs down like this and then as the racquet drops
and they tighten the racket a little bit. This is perfectly okay and it's very
individual. Other players will set their wrist early in the stroke
ala Wawrinka or Djokovic. They will have the wrist extension right away in the
take-back and then just simply maintain this position as the racket goes into
the contact. On the finish it's very similar. Some players, Federer for example,
will have a very relaxed finish after contact the wrist will will flex this
way often and it looks very relaxed so this is very individual and very
personal I don't think it makes any difference how you do it.
However, when it to the contact it's very important to understand that the ball comes at
great speeds into the racquet sometimes and we do need to apply some
stability into the racquet and if we don't if we
have a very relaxed contact point and the racket is going to be very unstable
it can close like this you can open and you can flip backwards like this and
it's going to result in a lot of misses and a lot of shots that are not gonna be clean.
So how do we practice the stability of the racquet. The tightening
of the of the hand and the forearm right at contact. Well that's something
that comes completely intuitive to most players. Many great players learn to play
at a very young age and this happens completely naturally. They hit the ball
and they tighten without being conscious of tightening the racquet and it might
feel to them as if they're relaxed because and when they regain
consciousness of the stroke it's somewhere around here and this is
where they relax the arm. However they are much tighter in the way they hold
the racquet at contact you can see that if you take still images of the pros and
you can see the muscle flexion of the forearm.
However, if you are a recreational player let's say levels between 3.0 and 5.0 and you are
consciously trying to relax your arm at contact and trying to have the body take
care of the rest. In other words having the arm swing by itself. You have to be
very careful because in my personal experience I've seen players be very
sloppy with this technique and have a lot of miss hits have a lot of
mistakes. So to correct these mistakes you must do the exact opposite you must
set the wrist early in the swing and have it a little bit more rigid and then
as you rotate and be a little bit more conscious of controlling that wrist and
the arm and that's going to achieve a more stable and more clean contact.
I'm going to hit a few forehands I'm going to try to be extremely relaxed and let's
see what happens. Ok so again is my normal grip and I'm gonna be extremely relaxed.
Ok that's almost into the fence straight away that's terrible.
again
no control, the ball goes way along there's no stability here. The wrist is
moving at contact and try one more
and straight into the back fence again
looseness is actually contributing to my instability of the racquet it's creating a
lot mistakes so let me go into my normal
forehand where I'm going to just hit it normally.
right away there's more
control there and a lot more control so there's a different sound of the racquet too.
It's much cleaner and more stable.
Thank you guys for watching this video. Please
like share and subscribe. I'll see you next time.