Your Strokes: Ted Gregory: One Handed Backhand

Ted Before: a two part backswing and delayed preparation of the body at the bounce of the ball. Although this Your Strokes is about the one-handed backhand, it stemmed from a question about the relative merits between the one hander and the two. One of our subscriber's Ted Gregory came to San Francisco and asked a logical question. As a 3.5 NTRP who was struggling with his backhand, would it make more sense to hit with two hands? It's a great question without a simple answer. It's pretty hard to convince a competitive junior player about the potential advantages of the one hander. 90% or more of those guys are committed to the two from day 1. It also rarely makes sense for an adult woman player to hit with one hand—unless she's the true exception who mastered it early in life. But for adult male players, I think the answer is different. Men, unless they played as juniors, tend in my experience tend to be less flexible, less ambidextrous and have more trouble rotating the left side sufficiently well enough to hit the two-hander. It's just much harder to for them to develop a natural looking, two-hander with real...