Technical Training I: Looks define the result

Everyone loves talking about strokes. What’s textbook? What’s not? What's classic? What's modern? What's a modern classic? Is there even such a thing as a textbook stroke? And so on…

This debate is at the very least entertaining, as well as a complete waste of time as far as helping players to achieve what the want to the level that they’re capable of achieving. (Another frequent debate topic in tennis circles…)

One fundamental view of stroke technique we have at TennisSpeed can be described in 4 simple words:

Looks define the result.

What is so puzzling is that this simple concept simply eludes so many players, parents and coaches today.

What this means is that if you want to hit your forehand with some reasonable hope of achieving the same result as Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal, the simplest way to do this is to copy the exact movements they make when they hit their forehands.

I pick this specific example of the Federer and Nadal forehands because the technique(s) used by their respective owners is the current state-of-the-art as far as how to maximize the power, spin, and consistency of the forehand stroke goes right now (and for the immediate future).

And despite what the vast majority of instructional articles that exist all of today’s media in either print or on the mighty Web may say, the only way that you’re going to reproduce their stroke is to reproduce their exact body and racket movements, as completely as you’re capable of reproducing them.

Yes, as far as I am concerned, you CAN reproduce the fundamental movement patterns involved in reproducing either hall-of-fame forehand either fully or partially.

What you need to understand is that the quality of your reproduction, the quality of the resulting stroke will be determined by how much innate, or, as many call it—“natural”—athletic ability you have.

If you have the same raw, athletic ability of the actual owners (i.e. Roger or Rafael), then you can reasonable expect to generate the same stroke they have (more or less).

If you have a different—most likely lower—level of athletic ability, then your reproduction will be slightly different (i.e. less powerful, consistent, accurate, etc.) from the original.

What’s impossible is to think that you can reproduce their results by just modifying your existing technique using all available, published instructions in print or on the Internet, or by copying the techniques of other players who aren’t them.

For example, I guarantee you that you will not reproduce the Federer or Nadal forehand by trying to copying the Gonzalez or Blake forehand. And, consulting the resident Web tennis “experts” at places such as F-B.com; T-----P----r.net, W—T-----.com, or T-----O--.com, etc is as futile as the previous option as well.

(Let me just say that as far as I am concerned, there are enough free videos of Federer and Nadal hitting forehands on YouTube, that it doesn’t make sense to pay the subscription rates that these sites ask for. Anyway, the rest of the so-called “content” on those sites only serve to dilute, if not contaminate the real value of those sites, which lies in the videos themselves.)

The next illogical stage in this almost absurd situation is the common claim made by the tennis coaching and instructional establishment that their movements are specific and idiosyncratic to them (i.e. Roger and Rafael) alone, and the best that you can achieve is to reproduce the immutable and unchanging tennis technical “fundamentals” they promote that may be present in their technique.

What if the truth is the exact opposite: that you CAN learn their exact movements, and what’s preventing you from doing so is the inability of your chosen teaching pro, coach, parent-coach, or website to figure out what they’re actually doing. There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of words and images out there that have vainly tried to uncover the principles of the Federer and Nadal forehand.

What you and they fail to realize is that no amount of mainstream tennis technical knowledge or experience will be able to decode the not-so-secret principles (for a select few coaches on Earth, that is) used by Roger and Rafael.

The truth of the matter is that conventional tennis technical knowledge is really unimportant (and perhaps irrelevant) to reproducing their supreme movements compared with understanding the fundamentals of general athletic movement in humans.

Bottom line is this, for all practical intents and purposes, if you want to stroke it like Player X, get some video (high-speed video would be very helpful in this regards: i.e. 200+ frames per second video) of Player X executing the stroke of interest and copy what you see to the best of your ability.

If you want to take it to the next level and understand why you’re making exactly those moves, well… Your options are limited and very expensive, or you can just stay tuned!

TTFN!

P.S. I’ll be in Indian Wells for the BNP Paribas Open from 3/8 to 3/11/09, so anyone who wants to talk about anything relating to speed in tennis should give me a ring (303.242.5441) and maybe we’ll get together and “talk TennisSpeed” somewhere in the limited shade at the Tennis Garden.

The Power Revolution in Tennis - Part 3 (Behind the scenes of the Federer Forehand)

The last post in this series – The Power Revolution in Tennis – Part 2 (Defining the New Topspin) – I focused on the two main fundamentals of the “New Topspin” that’s employed by the stars of the sport today on the signature shot of power tennis – the power forehand. The first of these “modern fundamentals” is the closure of the racket face during all the phases of the stroke, and the second is the shallower overall swing path that enables today’s players to create a flatter, more penetrating shot trajectory without affecting their ability to generate sufficient topspin to maximize control over their shots.

No one player has leveraged these two crucial elements of the modern topspin forehand more than the 12-time Grand Slam singles champion who goes by the name of Roger Federer.

In this post, let’s take what’s perhaps a bit of a sideways journey into learning more about the story behind the development of what’s essentially the state of the art in tennis forehands these days, the Federer forehand.

The “greatness” of the Roger Federer forehand is nothing particularly novel from a technical standpoint. IMHO, the Federer forehand is not a “novel synthesis” of “classical and modern technical elements” as some want to interpret it (see Tennis Magazine – US, May 2008).

Arguably, every player’s stroke technique is essentially a synthesis of certain specific ideas, philosophies and movements. Did Roger come up with his personal synthesis on his own?

Not really. You’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Roger had help. (To find out who helped him develop his signature forehand, read on!)

Federer’s forehand represents a integration of technical elements from 3 particular former Grand Slam champions (who themselves won a total of 27 Grand Slam singles championships) to create the forehand he’s employed only since mid-2001, around the time he bounced one of his tennis idols, Pete Sampras from Wimbledon in a compelling 5-set clash at Wimbledon.

Before I reveal the “ancestral lineage” of the Federer forehand, it is interesting to note that it took Roger almost 3 years (maybe longer) to develop and employ the forehand the fans have come to revere and his peers have come to fear, envy and revile. If you have ever seen footage of Federer before 2001, you would have seen a very different forehand entirely. Roger’s forehand when he broke through at the Grand Slam level in the juniors (1998) and in his first 3 years as a pro (1998-2000) resembled the old Sampras forehand more than the one that’s driven him to 12 Grand Slam titles in a little over 5 calendar years.

Search for a YouTube video of a 1998 indoor match between Federer and Andre Agassi played in Roger’s hometown Basel Indoors, and you’d see a fast, but much flatter, and unpredictable forehand that Federer would execute by fanning the racket face open in the backswing and then closed as he accelerated to contact (a la Sampras in his early days on tour). When he “timed” the closure of the racket face correctly, the result was devastating. However, the reality was that for every sweet stroke that blasted past Andre, Roger would mistime the closing of the racket face 3 or 4 times and create shanks that handed Andre a ton of free points over the course of a two set defeat.

Basically, credit is due to Peter Lundgren, Roger’s original “sherpa” on the pro tour for helping him learn the skills to transition his classic, “Samprasian” flat forehand into the “SlamMaker” version of the past 5 years. What Lundgren was able to accomplish between 1996 and 2003 was to add the necessary modern refinements to Federer’s original Sampras-Becker-style forehand technique to increase the overall safety and consistency of his stroke.

Once Federer mastered the fundamentals of the modern Swedish topspin forehand, the rest, as they say, is history.

For you technical afficiandos, if you look carefully, and have a very good visual memory – Roger’s forehand today bears more than a close resemblance to the forehand stroke used by Mats Wilander during his salad days where he won 7 Grand Slam singles in a 6.5 year period between 1982 and 1988. Federer makes bigger movements than Wilander did – i.e. Roger makes a much larger rotation of his upper body and has much greater extension of his racket arm through the contact zone than Mats, but the general swing shape and underlying “philosophy” (maximum topspin to maximize safety and consistency) is essentially the same.

Until Federer mastered the principles of the Swedish-flavored, modern heavy topspin forehand: closed face at all points of the swing, combined with the powerful forearm rotation through the contact zone (the so-called “wiper”), his forehand was more of a liability than the “SlamMaker” we know today. Roger has always had the racket speed that few players in any generation possess, what he lacked until say, the end of 2001 to early 2002 was the ability to harness and control his natural racket explosiveness using the only practical means to harness and control that kind of power: the application of massive amounts of topspin… As well as express his natural “creativity” for varying his strokes by being able to more reliably control his ability to generate (top-)spin for every stroke.

From a technical standpoint, the “SlamMaker” has evolved from the techniques he originally adopted from his early tennis idols, Boris Becker (6 Slams) and Pete Sampras (14 Slams), combined with the Swedish refinements (based on the Wilander forehand which helped him win 7 Slams) set into place by Peter Lundgren. Do I have any knowledge of exactly when Lundgren began the work that eventually led to the emergence of the SlamMaker? No, I really don’t…

All I really know is that without the topspin maximization techniques brought by Lundgren, it’s pretty clear that the history and landscape of pro tennis over the past 5 years would be starkly different. Without the emergence of the SlamMaker, Lleyton Hewitt probably would have won close to 10 Slams himself by now and we’d be talking about the Hewitt-Nadal rivalry or era.

The only technical element that might represent a true “innovation” by Roger is his tendency to “break” the so-called “double-bend” or “double-confusion” (as my friend coined it) structure that the US teaching pro establishment has come to espouse as a so-called “modern stroke fundamental”.

The true function of this movement - breaking the “double bend” structure of his upper arm and forearm through the contact zone -is to enable Roger to fully release the stored energy – in the form of higher racket speed – he originally created by arranging his arms the way he does in his backswing.

If Federer were to retain the “double bend” structure through the contact zone, and then execute the “wiper” finish, he wouldn’t be able to use the natural acceleration and energy that results from allowing the forearm to accelerate and extend forward.

Effectively, the Federer forehand is a modified sidearm throwing movement that resembles that movement that’s used by a major league infielder when attempting to throw out a speedy runner on a ground ball. In order to get any kind of velocity on that sidearm throw across the diamond, the infielder must “break” the arm angles he created initially after picking up the grounder, and create the same arm “extension” as he releases the ball from his hand.

That “extension” of the arm at the release point of a throw or through the contact zone of a tennis forehand is critical for maximizing velocity (and spin, if you have the “closed face at all points of the stroke” part already down cold). Did Roger consciously "invent" this movement? I personally kinda doubt that. As far as I can tell, Roger's not the first to employ this type of movement as a part of his forehand. If you look closely at tennis techniques in the history of the sport, there have been other top players who used the same move (i.e. remember Jimmy Arias?).

So, what does that tell you about all those tennis players who are/were trained to maintain or “hold on” to the double-bend structure? What it tells me is that there are a lot of players out there who have the potential to really improve their forehands. What does that say about the coaches and pros who “trained” these players in the revered “double bend” technique?

Hey, draw your own conclusion about that…

TTFN!

The Power Revolution in Tennis - Part 2 (Defining the New Topspin)

In my last post, I began talking about the fundamental difference in the understanding of the proper use of topspin in today’s modern power tennis between US tennis and the rest of the successful tennis nations (i.e. Spain, France, Argentina, etc.).

The “rest of the tennis world” understands topspin as:

“Topspin” = “Control”.

Whereas, here in the US, the powers and coaches understand topspin as:

“Topspin” = “Slowing the ball down”.

Therefore, the “rest of the world” has been teaching their players how to maximize control at ever-increasing ball speeds that we see in today’s top-level tennis, and here in the US, we are developing players whose strokes become inconsistent, unstable and uncontrollable at those same speeds…

And you wonder why US tennis has trouble consistently producing legitimate (ATP) Top 100 prospects?

Who in the US pro tennis pipeline possesses the technical profile of a true Top 100, much less Top 50 ATP pro—i.e. a player with excellent foot speed, who can consistently hit first serves over 125 MPH, and has today’s super-heavy, high-speed topspin groundstrokes?

Well, at least there’s one US player who fits this profile and his name is Donald Young (ATP #98).

Is there anyone else?

The answer is not really… What we have is a tiny smattering of players who have one or two of the required attributes above, but it’s just not in the right combination to give me any reason to foresee a Top 30 or Top 50 future for them. Physical superiority cancels out all theory, and our “prospects” simply fall short on the physical and technical side of things these days.

For example, there are some US players who fulfill the 125+ MPH serve part, but not the heavy groundstroke part, nor the speedy footwork part (i.e. Isner, Delic, and Kendrick), and some who have the heavy groundstrokes but not the foot speed nor supersonic serve (i.e. Kuznetsov), etc. Is there an up-and-comer who at least has the foot speed/heavy topspin groundstroke profile other than Young? Maybe Jesse Levine, but he first needs to generate at least another 10 to 15 MPH on both his first and second serves.

So to close out this part of our discussion, is there anything we can do about the scarcity of legitimate US tennis prospects?

Well, having now met many of those in charge of US high-performance tennis, I’d say there’s not much anyone can do to change this situation really, unless we start hiring coaches and trainers from outside US tennis. The knowledge level of the principals of the US tennis establishment today is simply too dated and therefore inferior to be useful today or for the future. And since we haven’t yet perfected time travel, the only solution is to (reluctantly) admit that we lack modern tennis knowledge and begin hiring those outside experts from Spain, France and elsewhere.

You know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, so expect the prospect drought to continue.

Sorry about the slight drift off-topic, but the more I observe here in our fallen tennis nation, I feel more disappointed than encouraged ...

Back to the subject at hand, and let's continue our on-going conversation about the proper use of topspin…

So, the first thing you need to understand about topspin today, is that topspin is a(n) (technical) attribute that must be maximized in today’s high-performance tennis. Maximize topspin production on your groundstrokes (and serves, for that matter), and by definition, you are maximizing your ability to control your shots.

This fact is especially true given the ball speeds that top players today can consistently generate on their strokes. We have measured groundstroke speeds well over 100 MPH that are struck in the regular course of matchplay at the pro level, where the average rally speed is consistently in the mid-80 MPH range (it was in the low-to-mid 70s for the most part up to about 2002 or 2003). The only way to control the length and placement over such high-speed strokes, maybe the only way to keep the ball in play, is to maximize the amount of topspin applied to each stroke.

The topspin rates on today’s strokes are also higher than they’ve ever been as well, as topspin production increases in direct proportion with increasing overall racket and ball speeds, and especially given the techniques used by players today to strike their shots.

So, how do you strike the ball to maximize both straight-ahead ball speed and the topspin to control all that speed?

There are two crucial elements to today’s maximum topspin groundstrokes:

First, contact is made with a slightly closed racket face (anywhere from 3 to 10 degrees closed; and the racket face is closed throughout the entire forehand movement for most top ATP pros);

AND

Second, the overall swing path is considerable shallower (by almost 50% or more in many cases) than the swing path used in the past to generate heavy topspin.

The Federer forehand is representative of this “new topspin”, where he maintains a very closed racket face at all stages of his forehand stroke—from the backswing, through impact and during the follow-through—as well as swinging his racket on a path that is only about 30 degrees upward from start to finish such that rarely does his racket finish higher than his shoulder line. The result of this “swing geometry” is an extremely high-speed, high-spin stroke that flies through the air with the trajectory of a stroke with a much lower spin rate—i.e. the trajectory of what’s understood to be representative of a “flat” groundstroke.

Previous incarnations of the heavy topspin forehand involved both a far less extreme closure of the racket face (a perfectly perpendicular racket face was considered to be optimal), and a much steeper—anywhere from 45 to 60 degrees upward versus 30 degrees—overall swing path. What also needs to be mentioned here is that the racket speeds used in the past were also significantly slower than those used today, and the only way to hit groundstrokes that landed deep in the court with heavy topspin was to employ the “swing geometry” described above.

If you try to use the same swing geometry as the “classic” heavy topspin forehand to achieve today’s ball speeds (i.e. 85 to 95 MPH), I can almost guarantee you that every shot you hit using the “classic” geometry would fly well beyond the lines of the court. You cannot generate enough topspin with the “classic” topspin stroke mechanics to control the shot trajectory that results from making contact with such high racket speeds.

I have been a frustrated first-hand witness to this physical reality as one of my own players insists on relying on his “classic” heavy topspin forehand mechanics… Despite the fact that he can only put between 50 to 60% of his forehands into the court in a no-pressure, fed-ball drill when he tries to strike the ball over a certain speed using his current “classic” mechanics.

I concede that at this point, my conclusions about the differences between the “modern”, Federer-type swing and impact geometries or the “classic”, Borg/Lendl-type geometries, are based for the most part on anecdotal information, and not on discrete measurements of their actual “geometries” in terms of degrees and MPH. I have only limited measurement data of these attributes and let me say that even acquiring those measurements is a daunting (financial and “cultural”) challenge that involves pricey (to say the least) high-speed video and Doppler radar technologies.

However, I can say that I am very interested in getting this information because I think it has tremendous value in systematically teaching players the type of swing mechanics that will enable them to generate the kind of strokes that are required to be truly competitive at the pro level today and in the future. And, let me say that few of my colleagues and I have already launched an effort to collect this information, so stay tuned…

Let me close out this post by discussing my keen interest in, and dismay about the overall lack of interest on the part of the tennis coaches in the physics of tennis—especially when it comes to measuring the physical attributes of a tennis ball flying off of the string bed of a tennis racket swung by a live human being. There is no readily available information or, it seems, interest on the part of the vast majority of tennis coaches on knowing and understanding, much less teaching the proper launch and impact conditions of tennis strokes.

Contrast the apparent disinterest of the tennis crowd with tennis “ballistics” with the nearly obsessive-compulsive concern of the typical pro (and recreational)golfer with the launch conditions, swing geometries and impact physics of their 14 or more different clubs with their specific model of golf ball that they use during for competition. On the other hand, if someone is interested in performing at the “ultimate level”, isn’t it logical that they (the athlete him/herself) would be very uncomfortable and unsettled to hear from their coaches that a such detailed level of understanding of the very skills they need to have to be competitive with the best of the best is “unnecessary”.

Extreme as it sounds, I think it’s normal for a professional athlete and their coaches and trainers to know and understand as much as possible about the attributes of the skills required to produce a performance level that enables them to be truly competitive at the highest echelons of their chosen sport.

That the tennis crowd largely doesn’t care to know, or worse, believes that this level of understanding is somehow unnecessary to improving the skills of all players who enjoy this great sport is somehow disappointing and disillusioning. But given the reality that the vast majority of tennis knowledge circulating today is based solely on anecdotal information, why would anyone in tennis even bother to care about understanding the game using authentically objective information?

TTFN!

P.S. Note that I’ve omitted any mention of the “double-bend structure” that is commonly touted by so-called tennis experts as a fundamental element of their conception of the modern forehand…

Why is this?

It’s because, IMHO, the “double-bend structure” is a mechanical flaw that emerges naturally to compensate for less-than-optimal positioning relative to ball contact (and is itself justified and reinforced by another myth of “classic” tennis instruction that’s commonly used by the coaching establishment that usually comes out as “crowd the ball for more power”). Let’s put it this way, if you do possess authentic, Federer-ian forehand mechanics, you need to disrupt the double-bend structure to reproduce what Roger is actually doing.

I think my friend puts it best: “double-bend” = “double confusion”.

I mainly see the “double-bend structure” as another flawed variation on the modern forehand.

Anyway, we’ll return to this subject in a future post.