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Building the Modern Forehand

by  John Yandell

Commonalities At Last

Quite a range, to say the least! It’s incredible when you think about it. Here are 7 players who have all been at or near the top in pro tennis and the shapes of their backswings are all completely different.

And we haven’t even talked about how their backswing motions change—or don’t change—when these same players are rushed, on the run, or when the ball is especially low. (Don’t worry, we’ll save that for later.)

So what does it all mean?

Despite this long list of similarities and differences, and despite all the unanswered questions, there are two things all the backswings do seem to share.

First, no matter what the shape of the backswing, no matter how high or low, the players all keep the racquet hand on the right side of the body. If you look at the hand over the course of the motion, it never goes back behind the plane of the torso.

Hewitt, Hass, and Safin sometimes flirt with the edge of this line, but they don’t cross it. Interestingly, Roddick, the man with the highest hand position, seems to stay further to the right on the way down than anyone else with the possible exception of Agassi.

A critical commonality: right-hand on the right side

The second commonality we’ve already discussed in detail, this is the hitting arm position at the bottom of the backswing. All the motions deliver the racquet to a similar position as the player starts the foreswing to the ball, or in some cases before, with the elbow tucked in toward the body and the wrist laid back.

But that still leaves some pretty basic questions unanswered. For example, can we actually determine the relative size of the motion of the various players?

The players’ backswings all travel different distances in multiple dimensions. The overall “size” of the backswing could be defined by the total distance the tip of the racquet head travels, or it could be defined by the total distance traveled by the racquet hand instead.

And what about the motion of turning the racquet partially or completely upside down? These players may move less from side to side, but how do we factor in the extra motion required to rotate the racquet?

We can probably say with some confidence that Hewitt has the largest overall backswing. He has the highest hand position and the highest racquet position.

Then and only then do you see a real jump as the racquet moves toward the ball. You can count this for yourself in the Agassi movie below. This high speed clip shows the last 30 frames leading up to the contact, so you can see the racquet dropping toward the bottom of the backswing, and then accelerating forward to the target.

Click the first 10 frames and watch how much his hand moves from frame to frame. The movement is quite slight and virtually the same from frame to frame.

Now click the next 10 frames. Again there appears to be almost no difference in how far his hand advances.

Now click the last 10 frames leading up to the contact. You’ll see a noticeable jump in how far the hand moves—especially the last 3 or 4 frames before the hit.

So as the racquet head is moving through the backswing, it appears to be moving evenly, at about the same speed. Rather than building racquet head speed gradually, the real acceleration seems to start only with the forward movement to the ball. This is after the backswing has delivered the hand and racquet to the hitting arm position.

It takes almost exactly 1 second for the player to move from the start of the forehand to the contact. But, as we noted above, the motion from the bottom of the backswing to the contact takes only a tiny fraction of this interval, about 5% of the total time or a little more. This is an interval of less than 1/10th of a second.

The acceleration of the racquet happens suddenly and explosively, starting only a split second before contact. The racquet appears to be moving at a much slower speed for the vast majority of the backswing.

Looking at the footage, you could reasonably argue that, rather than accelerate the racquet, the role of a good backswing is to place the racquet in the right position at the right time so it can accelerate in the next phase of the motion.

This observation is consistent with an Advanced Tennis 3D quantitative study of college and local tournament players. The data showed the speed of the racquet head was basically even over the course of the loop, accelerating only at bottom of the loop or slightly before.

Now is it still possible some of the amazing variations in pro backswings contribute more to racquet head speed at contact than others? Sure.

Conceivably, a particular backswing size or shape could get the racquet moving at a faster average speed over the course of the motion, or possibly it cold start the burst of acceleration at the foreswing a fraction of a second sooner, or help it peak at a slightly higher speed.

But we really have no idea if any of this is true. Again a definitive answer will require quantitative filming and 3 dimensional measurements of the top players.

What the footage does seem to show is that any differences (and possible advantages) in particular pro backswings have got to be less important than the two key points they all have in common. Again these are: staying on the right side of the torso regardless of the size, and delivering the arm and racquet to the hitting position at the bottom of the backswing (or before).

So if it’s all that simple, then why bother with this long, intricate analysis of the differences and what we know and don’t know? It’s a fair question.

I hope that students of the game will find it inherently interesting, because it is something that has never been studied in detail.

But it’s also important from a teaching point of view, because so much current teaching input focuses on the “best” size and shape. So it is important to know what’s really going on. Before you decide to copy a player, you should at least know whether your idea of what his backswing looks like matches the reality.

You already can guess the answer. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. In fact, this strategy can lead to disaster.

So, for example, if you copied Andy Roddick’s backswing with the radical hand position and racquet rotation at the start of the motion, but couldn’t get to the hitting arm position, it would be a huge negative, not a positive.

Whether a specific backswing motion is shorter or longer or simpler or more complex is irrelevant if it doesn’t do it’s most basic job. You see all the top players get to the foreswing position with their unique motions, but the point is they all get there.

And that raises another question. Where did all those unique pro motions come from anyway? Did top players come up through the juniors with the same size and shape backswings they now use as pros?

Pete Sampras is another example. As a junior he had a classic, beautiful compact loop. You can see it in this piece of rare footage of Pete at age 9 that Robert Lansdorp has been kind enough to share with TennisONE.

We see something similar in the video that Nick Bollettieri took of a young Tommy Haas training at the Academy. In some respects, Haas’s backswing is still one of the most compact in the pro game.

But it was even more compact and classical looking then. Note how the loop was even smaller and he didn’t close the face nearly as radically on the way down. Pete and Haas have very different grips, and their motions look very different now. But it is fascinating to see how similar they were as juniors.

So if these elite players learned with simple, compact motions, how good an idea is it for junior players to try to model the much more extreme variations they may have developed later in their careers?

In the filming I’ve done over the years for USTA national coaches, one of the things that has been most shocking has been the gigantic backswings of many top juniors. Some of these players have bigger backswings at age 12 than Lleyton Hewitt has today.

Unlike the players we have examined above, many of them also take the racquet hand back way behind the plane of the body. That probably doesn’t bode well for playing at higher levels.

But severe backswing problems are just as common at the lower levels of competitive and even recreational junior tennis. In some cases, they can incapacitate players and make it impossible for them to even rally.

I recently saw a 13 year old girl who was hoping to make her high school junior varsity team. She was about 5’ tall and weighed about 95 lbs. She had some athletic ability, loved tennis, and had a great attitude.

Unfortunately, her teaching pro had tried to teach her to the Pete Sampras pro backswing. I said tried, because her motion didn’t really look too much like Pete’s.

When she started her forehand, she instantly closed the racquet face all the way down. Next, she straightened out her arm and took the racquet back until her hand was two feet behind her, keeping the racquet face still completely closed.

From this position, she would swing forward, desperately trying to flip the racquet face over and get it to the contact point on time. A lot of balls were going into the bottom of the net. At best, she was able to bunt a few over that bounced on the service line at about 20mph.

Some examples of elite juniors with backswing positions that are more extreme than any top pro.

Now that was depressing. Saying that her pro was trying to put the cart before the horse would be the understatement of the tennis teaching year.

The main thing all pro backswings do is connect the two key points in the forehand: the turn and the start of the foreswing. For the overwhelming majority of players, the best way to move between these positions is going to be the simplest. This is true even for young players who may actually grow up to be elite competitors.

Trying to develop an extreme backswing right off the bat is probably the best way I can think of to reduce the chance of mastering those far more vital positions.

At the end of the day, if you want to copy a pro backswing, Agassi is easily the best model. Why? Because his motion is quite compact, because his hand stays well on his right side, and because the motion has the least internal movement.

The racquet face starts slightly closed and stays more or less at the same angle all the way to the start of the foreswing. This simplicity has got to help in consistently establishing the correct hitting arm position at the bottom of the motion.

But if you decide to use Agassi as a model, pick one of his more compact backswing variations, in which his racquet hand reaches about shoulder level. It might also be a good idea to incorporate one element from Pete Sampras, and try to establish that hitting arm position even sooner than Agassi on the way down from the top of the backswing.

In fact the video of a young Pete or Tommy Haas are probably as good or better models for most players. A final possibility is to go totally retro and consider a straight backswing, especially if you are not able to create the key hitting position at the start of the forward swing.

I’ve had tremendous success doing this in the Visual Tennis system. (Click here for more info about the book Visual Tennis.) It may not be fashionable but it works. Check out Kerry Mitchell’s great article "Measuring Ball Height," which makes the same point. Typically, if you learn to connect the positions in this way, you’ll eventually and naturally evolve a super smooth compact loop. But that’s just my opinion (currently in the extreme minority).

So that concludes the first detailed analysis of what may have seemed like a simple topic—at least until you started this article. Now let’s move on and see what happens when the players move from the start of the swing to the finish.

We’ve seen the commonalities in the swings across the grip styles in the first article. We’ve seen that there seems to be no correlation between the type backswing and the grip style, or between the backswing and any other technical element, for that matter. Now let’s see some technical differences between the players that actually do correlate with grip style, and how and why they matter in playing and teaching.

Want to study high speed video of the modern forehand for yourself (as well as all  the other strokes)? Click here to find out about advanced tennis videos. Your comments are welcome. Let us know what you think about John Yandell's article by emailing us here at TennisONE. John Yandell is TennisONE's CEO as well as a Special Contributing Editor. Yandell is the research director for the Advanced Tennis Research Project which is undertaking a revolutionary study of the physics and bio-mechanics of professional tennis (www.AdvancedTennis.com). John has done on court video analysis for players including Gabriela Sabatini and John McEnroe, and is the author of the critically acclaimed tennis instructional book Visual Tennis. Yandell has directed instructional videos with numerous top coaches and players including, Jim Loehr, Allen Fox, Pat Etcheberry, Dick Gould, Frank Brennan, John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl.

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