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Two great players demonstrate the incredible diversity and complexity of the modern forehand.
No doubt that the two most talked about forehands in the men’s game belong to Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. But they couldn’t appear to be more different. It’s an amazing aspect of professional tennis: players can succeed at the highest levels with radically different grips and swings. You just don’t see that basic technical variety in any other sport.
We’ve already examined Federer’s forehand in detail in two previous articles. (Click Here.) So now let’s take a look at Nadal in the same way using the high speed video footage developed by Advanced Tennis. In many ways the high speed footage confirms the obvious: when we look closely at the swings of these two players, they put the complex technical elements of the forehand together in different ways. But like all top players, Federer and Nadal share certain commonalities. Interestingly, they also share one element that is rarer among the top players–the use of the straight hitting arm position. We’ll see though that they don’t use this element in an identical fashion.
How does Nadal’s forehand fit into the analytic framework we’ve created?
All our previous…