Ted Gregory
One-Handed Backhand

Analyzed by John Yandell

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 power.

You can make all the arguments you want about the dominance of the two-hander in the pro game, but that can be irrelevant if the mechanics are more difficult to master at the club level. And, interestingly, a lot of high level NTRP players that I watch who were ranked juniors don't look nearly as good off the two-handed side when they hit 35 or 40.

I think you can argue that in male club tennis, where power is not really the key to success (no matter what many players tell themselves) the one-handed backhand is often a far better choice.

First, one handers are almost always more natural going back and forth from the drive to the one-handed slice. It's the same with the backhand volley. Underspin can be a huge weapon in the club game, as is all court play when mixed appropriately for a given opponent. No doubt the one-hander facilitates both.

And then there are the aesthetics. Those don't matter to some players. But I agree with my good friend and Tennisplayer contributor Scott Murphy. There's nothing like watching a skilled player produce a great one-hander. And nothing like the feeling when you connect on one yourself.

Still it all comes down to the individual player, So when Ted asked the question about which version he should commit to, we set up the ball machine and I watched him hit about 50 balls both ways. If the two hander had looked better or more promising, we would have definitely gone that way. But my instinct was that his one-hander was more natural and potentially far more explosive.

So Ted decided to go with my recommendation. The next step was to try to give him a great technical framework he could use to master the one-handed motion. When we videoed Ted's one-hander in high speed, there were several factors that seemed important to improve. The first was his turn and racket preparation. That was happening in an awkward two part motion. This led to a problem with being ready to start the forward swing on time.

If we look at good one-handers, the shoulders are fully turned and the racket ready to start forward at about the time the of the bounce of the ball on the court. Ted wasn't reaching this position soon enough, even on the medium pace balls in the center of the court that the ball machine was generating.

A third issue with the rotation of the torso. The hips and front shoulder were rotating far too much through the shot. This in turn was affecting the racket path. Instead of moving outward toward the other side, the hand and racket were coming across the body to Ted's right.

Despite all this, however, he was still hitting a lot of very solid balls. This reinforced my instinct that the one-hander could really be made to work for him if he could clean up the technical elements.

Preparation

One of the interesting issues on all the groundstrokes is the size and the shape of the backswing. Does it add significant racket head speed? Or is its main function to provide rhythm and timing?

I love Roger Federer's one-handed backhand and think that in some ways it's a perfect model. But Federer takes the racket up with an elbow bend early in the preparation. Also his racket arm doesn't reach the straight hitting arm position until a few fraction of a second before contact.

That's great for Roger and anyone else who can make it work. But when players have problems in the preparation, my feeling is that it's usually critical to set the hitting arm position up early and the easiest way to do this is with a straight backswing.

I thought this was particularly true for Ted. As we see in the before the video, Ted had a delayed, two part backswing that looked awkward, lacked rhythm, and contributed to his late timing. The solution in my opinion was to go basically straight back and establish the straight arm at the completion of the backswing.

We can see a couple of great players from the history of the game who had pretty good one handed backhands who set up in something close to this position: John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl.

Check out the animation. You don't think of their backhands as being similar but this is one core element they shared.

What I have found is that if players feel this position they will eventually add a natural looping motion, usually without even realizing that it's happening. The key point is to have the hitting arm set, and also to time this correctly. The check point is to position the racket hand in the middle of the rear leg.

As we can see in the after video, Ted made a huge improvement here. He reaches the full turn position with his racket hand aligned with the middle of the rear leg just as the ball bounces.

For players with timing problems, a little pause there is way better than being rushed. Again the motion will naturally tend to smooth out over time as the player's confidence increases.

As for the others issues of the over rotation and racket hand swinging too far across the body, I showed Ted some high speed video of Roger as a model on these technical points. Watch how long Roger's body stays sideways, virtually perpendicular to the net, in the forward swing.

Also note the checkpoints for the extension of the forward swing. Federer's hitting arm is still straight, and is pointing up to possibly 20 or 30 degrees past perpendicular to the net. His wrist is at about eye level.

Watch also what happens with the back, left arm. It opposes, moving in the opposite direction, backward toward the back fence.

This is not only helping accelerate the racket—it's keeping the torso sideways. These are the classic check points you see on all the great one-handed drives.

But there is a tendency when you hit with one hand to feel that somehow you have to do more. It feels too easy sometimes when you make the right technical positions.

Even more than the other strokes, the one-handed backhand drive is a matter of precise execution and relaxation. Sometimes I think it would be easier if it took more muscle contraction.

This explains why so many one-handers tend to overhit, thinking they can work harder and generate more ball speed. In reality, they end up bending the shape of the swing, losing consistently, and usually losing rather than gaining pace.

As we worked on the key positions, it was obvious Ted began to feel the “less is more” aspect of the stroke. Watch in the after video how his torso stays much more sideways.

Watch how he nails the extension position on the swing, with the hitting arm straight and pointing only slightly past the net with the wrist at eye level.

Many of his balls were quite explosive. You could hear the difference as they came off the strings.

After working for an hour or so, the velocity was starting to approximate the ball speed he generated naturally on the forehand side.

All in all a positive experience! I feel Ted created a simple framework that he can use to take his one-hander up through the levels, and based on our correspondence after his work, I think he feels the same.