Biomechanical Fundamentals Of Tennis Technique

If you’ve been working on your forehands and/or backhands for a while, but you still have trouble controlling the ball or hitting it effortlessly, then you’re likely missing some of the fundamentals of tennis strokes.

It’s very likely that you have been focusing on the playing style of a particular player and not really noticing the biomechanical fundamentals of their strokes.

So many different styles … But what are the fundamentals common to all of them?

In this video article, we’ll cover:

• the biomechanical fundamentals of forehand and backhand tennis strokes,
• the key mental processes that need to run in your mind,
• the reasons you missed the fundamentals in the first place, and
• the tennis groundstrokes and cars analogy that help you look at tennis technique in a different way.

Forehand And Backhand Biomechanical and Mental Fundamentals

So, now you’re wondering: What are the forehand and backhand fundamentals, and why are they the same?

I’ll explain each fundamental in separate videos, but for now I’d like to give just a quick overview.

First, biomechanically, the player is coiling to begin storing energy, and that process then continues with loading one of the legs.

The mental process that runs at that time is the rhythm of preparation, where the player reads the ball and prepares in the rhythm that the ball dictates.

What is usually missing and what I correct all the time are the steps that follow.

Second, you need a solid stable base off which you will initiate your strokes. Without balance, you will have no consistency.

Third, the most important biomechanical element is body rotation into the shot, especially initiating through the hip rotation. You must do it right, though; that means not over-rotating and not just hitting with your arm.

Fourth, you need to time your stroke so that you meet the ball in the right contact zone where your wrist and arm are aligned correctly. If you don’t hit the ball at the right distance from the body, the stroke won’t work reliably, and the hit will not be effortless.

And fifth, on a fundamental level of hitting groundstrokes, there is balance also at the end of the stroke. The player is not rushing to recover but is looking to complete the stroke movement before moving their feet again.

Roger Federer typically demonstrates all these elements including the balance at the end of the stroke perfectly, yet you likely never noticed them.

If we take a look at the backhand, we will see that the fundamentals are exactly the same; there is less rotation on the one-handed backhand, but the principle is the same.

We need the right rhythm of our movements with the incoming ball, we need a very stable base off which we will initiate our stroke, and we need to initiate the movement through the legs and body rotation with the hip again leading. Hip leading the body rotation is often overlooked yet so fundamental.

We need to time the ball so that we meet it in the ideal contact zone where the arm and the wrist are aligned properly, and we need to maintain balance at the end of the stroke.

In my view and experience, these are the most crucial elements of a forehand or a backhand that must be done well; otherwise, the stroke will not be reliable or executed with effortless power, no matter the backswing’s shape, what grip the player uses, or what their follow-through looks like.

The Body Box And The Swing Box

I’d like to show you another way of looking at the groundstroke fundamentals, and we’ll use a neutral stance this time and a different view. The fundamentals are obviously generally the same of those used with either neutral or open stance strokes.

Note the two boxes: The first one points out the body area, and the second one highlights the initial swing area from backswing to contact, which is what matters most in the swing.

The biomechanical fundamentals happen within the body box.

This is the part that needs to be executed correctly, but most players and coaches pay the least attention to this aspect.

As you can see, I marked Swing Style as Priority #4, and you’ll see why in a minute.

So, as we observe Roger begin executing the forehand, we need to pay attention to the sequence of events.

If you’re slowly starting to agree with me about the importance of the biomechanical fundamentals and that they are more important than swing techniques, then we need to first pay attention to the sequence of events in the body box as those will also give us the priority of importance and priority of correcting the player.

Balance/stability obviously comes first. The foot is firmly planted on the ground and acts as an anchor while the leg acts as an axis around which the player rotates their body.

The second action in the sequence is the hip rotation, which initiates the body rotation.

With most players, the hip rotation is missing as their whole effort goes into the arm swing. The kinetic chain is therefore broken, and there is no power transfer to the arm.

The final part of the body rotation is the shoulder rotation, which acts as the final lever and enables us to swing the arm effortlessly off one of its ends.

This is the sequence of events that happen in the body. In my view, this sequence actually suggests to us what is the priority in corrections we need to work on with the player..

What must annoy the coach the most is if their player is not stable and does not rotate their body into the shot.

Most of the incorrect arm movements are, in my opinion, compensations for lack of balance and lack of power from the body.

Once we re-establish the balance and body rotation, the arm movements tend to correct themselves mostly subconsciously as the brain finds more efficient ways to swing the arm and coordinate it with the body movements.

Examples Of Correcting The Fundamentals First

Here are some examples of before and after clips of recreational tennis players who took lessons with me over the course of a few hours or a few days.

They all struggled with controlling the ball’s direction and, of course, were not able to hit the ball effortlessly.

They thought I would fix their technique, but I worked on their balance, body rotation, and contact zone.

Note how little – if at all – the swing technique of the players changed yet how much better their whole stroke looks now.

The players control the ball much better because they have much better control of their body and therefore much better control of their racket head.

They get more power from the body and can relax their arm more, swing it more, and get more easy power.

Improving tennis technique and the overall game of adult recreational tennis players is very difficult because they have years of bad habits.

That’s why I am showing you these examples and not how well a 10-year-old junior tennis player improved. These younger players are much easier to mold and correct.

My advice to all coaches and players who work on their game themselves is to first make sure the fundamentals are rock solid before working on some more advanced techniques and little details of the strokes.

As a side note: If you’re following an online tennis coach or two and they just talk and analyze but never show you any before and after clips of their students, then be very careful as talking is easy but teaching is very difficult.

As we all know, there are a lot of talkers out there and very few doers.

Why You Missed The Fundamentals

By now, you may be wondering why you missed the fundamentals since you’ve been studying tennis technique for quite some time through YouTube slow motion videos of tennis players and by following various tennis coaches who analyze technique online.

Here are the main reasons I can think of:

1 Your eyes are naturally drawn to moving objects.

What naturally draws your eyes?

Here’s my guess – I think they are drawn to this area marked with yellow lines.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to the most shiny object that moves the most, and that will result in you observing the racket path and arm and wrist action for the thousandth time.

While your eyes are glued to the racket moving through space, you fail to notice what the foot is doing.

By studying the wrist lag technique again, you fail to see what the hip is doing.

And, by focusing on the racket and looking at the smallest details in the follow-through, you fail to see a stable foot and perfect balance at the end of the stroke.

2 You observe and analyze tennis pros in match situations.

If you observe a tennis player in match situations, you’ll see many different adjustments of technique.

All these complex and different movements create less and less clarity on what you should be doing if you’re trying to solve your own stroke problems.

The main mistake here is that you’re looking at the player in a match where they are often stretched to the limit and have to execute a stroke in any way possible to return the ball.

As you’ve seen in the beginning, if you want to observe technical fundamentals of the pros, you need to look at them in the warm-ups and analyze them from the ground up.

3 You analyze personal playing styles (not realizing that that’s a mistake).

One of the main reasons you may have missed the fundamentals is that you analyze a personal playing style instead of biomechanical fundamentals of the stroke.

All four of these players have won a Grand Slam. Federer and Nadal have won the most, of course, so obviously they are the best of the best.

Yet, even in the initial preparation of the stroke, we can spend hours analyzing all the little details and differences in their wrist positions. When you focus on little details, you miss the big picture.

If you compare contact positions and later follow-throughs, you can again find many differences that add to your confusion regarding the right stroke technique.

To better understand why personal playing styles are not the answer and why you should actually look for commonalities and not differences in strokes, let me give you one analogy…

Tennis Fundamentals and Cars Analogy

Looking at the different personal playing styles of players is like looking at different car designs.

I know Roger Federer is an ambassador for Mercedes Benz, I remember Andy Murray driving a Jaguar I-Pace, I think Juan Martin Del Potro has a sponsorship deal with Peugeot, and Rafael Nadal has been endorsing Kia Motors, so let’s give him a nice Kia Stinger model.

So, let me get straight to the point: If your forehand is not very effective and you try to improve it by copying the forehand style of a specific player, that’s the same as taking your car to the body shop to change its shape or paint it in order to correct its engine problems.

Changing its appearance will not make it faster or more stable.

The reason Roger’s Mercedes drives so well is not much related to how it’s shaped.

It drives well because it has modern technology undercarriage, multi-link suspension, perhaps four-wheel drive, and many other high-tech systems that give it great stability and handling.

It also has a modern 6- or 8-valve twin turbo engine that very efficiently and effortlessly produces power with relatively low consumption.

Both undercarriage and engine are hidden from our eyes, yet they are the biggest reasons why driving that Mercedes feels so comfortable and effortless.

The shape of the car adds only a little bit to its performance because of its low air drag coefficient.

Your goal as a tennis player is to understand which part of your forehand stroke corresponds to the undercarriage and the engine as they are the key to effortless power and comfort.

You can probably see the analogy: The car’s undercarriage and suspension have a similar function to the body’s stability and balance, and the car’s engine, where the power is produced, corresponds to the uncoiling and body rotation into the shot.

The consistency of your strokes lies in your ability to balance yourself during play, and the power of your strokes depends on your ability to engage your body rotation into the shot.

Your arm, of course, contributes to power, but it’s not the main source of it.

The arm corresponds instead to a steering wheel, which communicates with the wheels in the car. Both allow us to direct a tennis ball or a car in the direction we want.

So, the next time you’re struggling with your strokes and you’re analyzing a tennis pro to see what they do to hit with such effortless power and control, try to figure out where they get such stability of the body during their strokes and how and where in their body they generate power.

Retrain your eyes so that they stop following the racket all the time and pay attention to all other body parts from the ground up. You’ll start noticing many new and interesting aspects of tennis strokes.

Summary

In my view, the biomechanical fundamentals are a priority when we start correcting a player’s technique.

We need to start with stability, then make sure the large body segments function correctly during the stroke.

Only then can we address the flaws in the swing and start tinkering with the lag techniques and so on.

This does not mean that balance and body rotation are the only things to correct and that we never address the flaws in the swing techniques.

It just means that fundamentals (remember the body box?) need to be corrected first, and everything else should be addressed second.

Stay tuned for the next series of videos where I will address and explain each fundamental separately.