A New Forehand Teaching Progression

The results 3 years later--my daughter's forehand. In this article, I'm excited to present a new type of teaching progression for the basic forehand. You may be surprised when you see that this progression is a nothing more than a series of simple physical exercises, none of which involves hitting a regulation tennis ball. These exercises are the foundation I used to teach my daughter the forehand when she began to take an interest in tennis at around age 10. You can see how it all turned out three years later in the animation of her forehand filmed by John Yandell at a Northern California coaching presentation. I'll talk more later about the subsequent steps in developing the stroke, but this article describes how we laid the basis. As I explained in the first article, (Click Here) my approach is to communicate information to players using as few words as possible. The idea is to use images and feelings. The purpose of this progression is to help the player feel all the core elements of a sound technical forehand simply by the process of doing the exercises. Research shows that this will accelerate the learning process by communicating directly with...