Understanding Professional Forehands: Part 1

The pillars of the Type III ATP forehand are defined by the forward swing, independent of the backswing and followthrough. My previous article described the Four Pillars of the Type III ATP forehand. (Click Here.) These pillars are exclusively defined by attributes of the forward swing – that is, they are independent of the backswing and follow through. The Four Pillars are: Fractionation, or assigning racquet velocity sources to unique body rotations. Independent contribution of the hitting arm. Linearization of the hand path. Neuromuscular enhancement of vertical racquet head speed acquisition. The Type III forehand is an ATP forehand model based on biomechanical research, neuromuscular theory and experimentation on the court. Models explicitly filter individual outlier characteristics to arrive at a technical composite indicating what optimal technique might look like from a biomechanical perspective. For this reason, it would be expected that few forehands would exactly fulfill all the model attributes. At the same time, it would be expected that most world-class forehands would fulfill at least some of the model attributes. The interesting question is at what point is a forehand close enough to the model to be classified as Type III? And if not Type III, what? This...