Your Strokes:
Eva So Forehand

Analyzed by John Yandell

Any working teaching pro knows that, when you look at the forehand of 3.0 to 3.5 players, it is very common to see a triad of related problems. These are a backswing that goes too far behind the body, a late contact point, and a compressed finish.

And we can definitely see all three tendencies in the before forehand video of Eva So in this month’s Your Strokes. Eva is an avid club player, who just happens to be the wife of my genius chiropractor Dr. Ken So, and the mother of two daughters who were stars on my high school tennis team in San Francisco.

But this was actually my first time working with Eva. So we started with filming her in high speed video. From that we could see all three problems.

The first was that her arm and racket tip moved significantly behind her body (although there are definitely much worse examples at the club level!)

We could also see that her contact appeared to be behind the edge of her front foot in her neutral stance. Her arm was extended too much to her side to really make contact in front.

Finally we could see how compressed her forward swing was in the followthrough. It was as if the entire hitting arm was being pushed back toward her body, limiting her extension and ability to hit more along the line of the shot.

In many cases recognizing these or similar difficulties is relatively easy when compared to actually facilitating a cure. But what if I said that this wasn’t the case with Eva?

What if I said she was able to make one relatively small adjustment in the preparation, specifically the backswing, and that this actually improved all three problems almost automatically? Does that sound crazy?

Some of the most important work we’ve published in the last year is the analysis of the ATP forehand developed by biomechanist Dr. Brian Gordon. (Click Here.) Although personally I have been studying backswings for a long time, the best I had concluded was that, among top players, there was a huge range of shapes that all seemed to deliver the hitting arm to the correct position at the start of the forward swing.

So maybe the backswing was more a matter of personal style--at least within certain limits. As long as it stayed within reasonable parameters it probably didn’t have a huge impact on the quality of the forehand.

Brian’s three dimensional filming and research showed something completely different. His analysis led him to conclude that there was actually something that could be called an ideal backswing position. Although most top pros pass through or close to this position at some point, the simplest and purest example was probably Roger Federer.

This backswing position - part of what he calls the Type 3 or ATP forehand--is fairly low with the hand reaching at most shoulder level. The racket hand is to the player’s hitting side.

But there are three other critical points. First the racket head is above the hand. Second, the racket tip is pointed somewhat back. And third the face of the racket head is titled slightly downward toward the court. The downward tilt especially turns out to be critical in what Brian calls the “flip” of the arm and racket at the start of the forward swing.

This backswing position activates processes in the muscles which increases their ability to generate force in the forward swing. (Technically this is called a stretch shorten cycle.) At the same time, this backswing keeps the racket on the player’s hitting side, makes it more compact, and also makes the early part of the forward swing more direct or linear as it moves toward contact.

Having worked with dozens of high school girl players over the years who had similar problems, I was curious to have the chance to see what effect teaching this position to Eva would have. (I stopped coaching high school two years ago this fall and have been feeling nostalgic, so Click Here if you want to see the music video we made with my last championship team, but I digress...)

I showed Eva herself on video and a couple of examples of Roger Federer in the key position in Brian’s forehand. I also pointed out how he stretched his opposite arm across the court further than she did - even though she kept both hands on the racket pretty well.

I had Eva model the position physically - including the opposite arm stretch--and also close her eyes to create an internal mental picture. My hope was that the effect would be a solution to the first issue, a reduction in the size of the backswing with her racket staying more to her hitting side or at least not going quite so far behind her.

From the first ball, her backswing shape immediately changed. She was passing through Brian’s position or something very close to it. She then proceeded to keep her hand fully on her hitting side, with the tip angled only very slightly behind her.

It was a huge, virtually instantaneous change. But the effect went way beyond that.

I would have been happy to have had just a more compact backswing at that point. But the change in the backswing also seemed to have had a big impact on the other two problems we had identified. These were the late contact point and the compressed extension in the forward swing.

With her racket starting more directly behind the ball, Eva’s contact moved noticeably forward. The shape of her hitting arm also changed - from a straighter arm reaching more to her side, to a bend in the elbow which appeared to put her shoulder in much better position.

Extension

The movement from the contact to the extension also changed noticeably. Good forehands normally have a foot to two feet of spacing between the torso and the hand when the racket reaches the point of maximum forward extension - the point at which the racket reaches out furthest toward the opponent.

There was a huge difference here for Eva as well, as the after video shows clearly. Look when he racket reaches about eye level how much less her arm is compressed in toward her body.

So it was an amazing experiment that opened my eyes to the potential of the ATP backswing across the range of levels. And it happened with a one hour video session.

When I work with Eva again, I will probably work with her on the model positions for the contact and the extension, and teach her those specific checkpoints. Hopefully we can improve her hitting arm position further. And her torso is still somewhat too open at contact for a neutral stance forehand.

But the interesting thing was the huge change she made in the backswing seems to have automatically pushed her toward improved positions in the rest of the stroke.

To me that’s really exciting. It gives me a place to start with virtually every player who walks onto my court with forehand issues. And it seems to make a range of other basic changes easier and also makes them seem more integrated one with the other.

I’ve tried it with a few students other with similar results. It goes to show that with an open mind we can all learn more about how to improve the fundamentals we may have thought we already understood.

And that there can be synergy between certain changes. Increased simplicity. What a relief!

Why don’t you guys in the Tennisplayer community do some experimenting of your own and report back in the Forum?