Your Strokes:
Shirish Forehand
John Yandell
Recently I had the pleasure of working with a new student on his forehand. Shirish is a long distant pilot for a major airline who has stop overs in San Francisco. He had read my book Visual Tennis (Click Here) and wanted to come work with me directly, and I said great.
He wanted to work on his forehand and so we did. As I always do, I started out by filming him in super slow motion video, and also measuring the speed of his forehand with my pocket radar gun.
Shirish isn’t tall. And the first thing I saw was his extreme western forehand grip. That made sense. Not necessarily what I would teach anyone from the beginning. But not something that I would change either.
So we focused on his key positions that all good forehands share. I am with Brian Gordon that the outside Roger Federer style backswing with a relatively conservative grip is probably the ideal model. But there are many, many players at all levels who have great forehands with other grips and more involved backswings.
What I wanted to see was where was Shirish with the two key positions that all great players share, regardless of grip and backswing. It amazes me, no matter how many people I see, how few players know what they are or actually make them. These are the turn and the swing extension. So I guess that improving those is my mission in this lifetime.
When we looked at his turn it was pretty darn good. His left arm came across his body and stretched toward the sideline. His extension was a different story.
In the models I use, top players not only extend, they wiper, turning the racket tip over so it points more or less at the left sideline. If you have an eastern grip it’s not necessary—you can have a good forehand with an on edge vertical finish (Click Here) but you can also wiper depending on your level and/or the height of the ball.
But with Sirish’s grip the wiper is a necessity to get the racket through. So that’s what we worked on, starting with the model positions. Shot by shot he learned to turn his hand over in the forward swing. He added a lot of extension. It was a great adjustment, and he made it quite quickly. His forehand immediately picked up 5 mph in speed.
It wasn’t perfect and we could still work on the elbow with the extreme bend. But one element at a time and at least now he was turning the racket over.
One great thing is that since Shirish had read my book, he understood it was not just a matter of making the positions, it was learning to translate them into mental images to execute them in actual play. The images are a mental blueprint to visualize rather than trying to talk your way through your strokes in words.
I loved it when he emailed me still images of his turn and extension that he made himself from the video of our work, which I always give to students. There were spot on. He was using them everyday in his play back home.
Another great thing. My approach uses two hour sessions focusing on just one stroke. So many lessons are one hour and players want to work on multiple strokes or even their entire game. They think that’s getting value in lessons. I often have students want to split up my two hour minimum into 2 or 3 strokes, but I refuse.
As a Tennisplayer subscriber Shirish knew that multiple stroke work didn’t help if you want real change. He brought up the great series of articles from Archie Dan Smith that explained research shows you need to focus on one stroke—even at the neglect of others—until the change in that stroke becomes natural and automatic. I’ve included on the articles as the Classic Lesson this month. (Click Here.) Read it and see if it shifts your perspective.
Shirish is coming back to San Francisco again in a couple of weeks. We’ll probably work more on that forehand. stroke…Looking forward to it!
