Proper Path To Powerful Strokes

Hitting with more power in tennis comes with very obvious benefits: you’re hitting winners, forcing mistakes and generally giving your opponent very little time to react.

But having powerful strokes that are at the same time technically sound and therefore consistent is not something you can develop very quickly.

The wrong way of developing power is to go for too much too quickly, which results in two main negative consequences:

1. You’re “muscling” the ball and therefore hitting with lots of tension in your body, which results in poor technique and possible injuries in the long term.
2. Because your technique is poor, you’re making a lot of mistakes, which causes you to lose trust in a stroke.Once you don’t trust your stroke, you’ll tense up even earlier, namely as soon as you see the ball coming towards this particular stroke. That will result in even more tension and more mistakes.

And if we go one step deeper and ask ourselves why you want so much power so quickly, we see that the main culprit is competitive tennis that you started playing way too early before you developed the ability to hit with power while maintaining relaxation and proper stroke technique.

2 Self-Assessment Questions After You’ve Missed Your Shot

In order to realize whether you’re on the right track towards developing more power for your tennis strokes or not, you can use these two questions, especially if you’ve just missed a shot:

1. At what level currently is my stroke, on a scale of 1-10?

Level 10 in this case is a really good stroke at your playing level. If you’re a recreational player, then a level 10 forehand is the best forehand among recreational tennis players.

Also, you must ask yourself this question for each stroke separately since you may have a level 7 forehand and only a level 5 backhand.

2. At what level on a scale of 1-10 was I attempting the shot?

What you may realize is that you have often times attempted a shot level 9 even though your forehand is only a level 6.

Or you may have attempted a level 8 volley even though the current level of your forehand volley is only 3.

Hopefully you can see the problem when you’re going way above your current level.

The best analogy I can give you is that it’s like driving a car.

If the fastest you’ve ever driven is 100 mph, then if you suddenly attempt to drive at 160 mph, you’ll very likely crash in a matter of seconds or minutes.

That’s simply because you don’t know how the car behaves at such high speed, you don’t know long the braking distance is, you’re not aware of how much it skids in a turn and so on.

You have no experience of driving that fast, and therefore you’ll likely crash very quickly.

But if, on the other hand, you attempt to drive at 110 mph first, you’ll very likely be able to control the car and still get out of trouble as soon as you sense it because you do know how to handle the car at roughly those speeds.

And once you drive for a while at 110 mph, you’ll get used to it, you’ll know how the car handles at that speed and you’ll be ready to start testing the 120 mph speeds.

In time, you will gradually and progressively come to 160 mph and be much more in control of the car than if you suddenly attempted to drive at such high speed.

It is exactly the same process when you’re looking to hit your tennis strokes with more power.

First, you must assess your current level and then in practice look to play ONLY at one level higher.

If you can play your forehand very comfortably in a relaxed manner and with proper technique at level 5, you should be able to hit most level 6 forehands and still be able to maintain good relaxation and more or less the same technique.

You should mix levels 5 and 6 as you play and attempt level 6 shots mostly on very nice incoming balls that don’t cause you trouble. Eventually you should try level 6 shots also in more challenging situations.

In time, you’ll get used to playing at level 6. Once you’re used to that speed, you’ll be ready to start attempting some strokes at level 7.

That is the right way of developing powerful tennis strokes which in the long term does allow you to still hit with correct stroke technique and relaxed fluid motion which translates into very consistent and accurate shots.

This gradual progressive approach, of course, takes a long time, and unfortunately most tennis players are way too impatient to follow it.

But hopefully you realize that going for too much power too early brings a lot of negative consequences (poor technique, poor consistency, losing trust in your stroke) and that you need to respect the demanding game of tennis and approach it with patience and a long-term perspective in mind.

I have personally developed all my strokes with this approach for one simple fact: I mostly rallied with my friends (in my first years of playing tennis) and simply wanted to hit the ball in a nice, controlled manner to them.

If I gave them a nice ball, they also gave me a nice ball most of the time, and therefore we didn’t have to go pick up the 3 balls we missed very quickly.

The longer rallies we had, the more time I spent enjoying tennis and the less time I wasted picking up balls.

In time, our abilities improved, and we gradually started to add more power to our strokes.

If we went for too much, we very likely missed quickly and learned our lesson: “I cannot play that fast yet.”

So, we went back to playing at our current level and then attempted some shots at a slightly higher speed where we managed to hit quite a few of those in.

And so this gradually progressive method allowed us to maintain proper technique and a relaxed way of hitting the ball until we reached our current levels where we can hit quite a fast groundstroke, volley, overhead or serve and still maintain proper technique and relaxation and therefore still be consistent and accurate.

One final thing to keep in mind: you will progress slower and slower the higher you go.

In other words, going from level 3 to level 4 might take you only a month of playing, but going from level 6 to level 7 is probably a one-year challenge.

And getting to level 8 playing speed is probably a project of 2-4 years.

The reason for that is simple: the faster you play, the more you amplify the little mistakes that your stroke still has.

While at low speed that mistake won’t cause it to miss, at higher speeds it will.

Therefore you’ll need to polish those little mistakes in order to be able to play consistently at higher speeds.

And the faster you want to play, meaning with more power, the fewer little imperfections your stroke must have.

The good news though is that, once your stroke fundamentals are in place and you can play with correct technique and relaxation at low speeds, you’re on the right track towards correcting all the small imperfections.

You’ll correct these simply through playing a lot and paying attention to non-mechanical advanced tennis skills like:

• watching the ball well,
• hitting at the ideal contact point,
• being in balance,
• transferring weight into your shots,
• timing the ball well,
• looking for comfort,
• looking for smoothness in your strokes,
• having a clear intention,
• letting go more (mentally and physically),
• and breathing properly during and between strokes.

Since every incoming ball you hit is different, you need to adjust your movement, positioning, timing and stroke technique slightly in order to hit it back well.

And these little nuances cannot be taught consciously in English (or any other language).

They improve in time through a lot of playing and by paying attention to the skills mentioned above.

As you combine working on these skills with the gradual approach of developing more power for your strokes, you’ll see that this approach works as it enables you to play consistent shots very accurately while at the same time being able to play with good pace.

Just be patient. It takes some time….