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In my last article, “The Forehand: A Spring Event”, I suggested that the visual illusion of professional forehands as whippy and wristy and immediately coming across the body has led many instructors and tennis commentators to mistakenly conclude that “racket head speed” is the big secret to power and spin in top level forehands.
In one of the “tornado cam” clips of Roger Federer that are floating around the interent, we see him pulling the butt of the racket towards the ball, and John McEnroe comments that “you can already see how fast his racket is traveling”. The problem here is the implication that the racket is all that matters. Just measure the speed of this one object and you know how big the forehand is. This leads kids to try to swing as fast as they can in an attempt to get the most velocity possible into the racket head.
In “The Forehand: A Spring Event”, I suggested that the physics of tennis works in a much subtler way. It’s more complicated than the “speed of racket = speed of shot” formula. The physical reality of tennis is that we have a squishy, compressable tennis ball pushing into tension…