4 Steps to Stroke Production

All strokes in tennis, and I mean all strokes, share 4 key elements. While the specifics of implementation vary for each stroke, at a fundamental level, high quality ball striking requires four things things.

You must be able to:

1. Generate force
2. In a direction
3. Through a point in space
4. While maintaining your string angle

That’s it. Mastering any tennis stroke – forehand, backhand, serve, it doesn’t matter – is simply a matter of mastering these four skills.

1. Generate Force

Often, in my lower level adult classes, a player will receive a floater which lands well inside the service box and bounces up above their shoulders, and they… can’t put it away. They aren’t even close to being able to put it away.

The issue – they simply cannot generate enough force. To a person who’s just watched tennis on TV, it looks like an easy shot, but in reality, it isn’t. Generating force is difficult. It doesn’t matter how “easy” a shot is, there still exists the fundamental challenge of coordinating your body to swing the racket fast enough to hit the ball hard.

So that’s our first step: learn to actually generate force.

My favorite tool for learning force production is the weighted shadow swing. By adding weight to your swing, you force your body to recruit its strongest muscles to perform the movement. Once you’ve primed yourself by swinging something heavy, go back to your racket. It’ll feel light and whippy, because you’re now accelerating it in an efficient way. Swing something heavy frequently enough, and that way of swinging, the way that generates a lot of force, will become habit.

2. In a direction

It’s not enough to just generate force; we need to generate that force in a direction.

What if I want to aim my shot, instead of hitting it randomly? What if I want to play high over the net on one shot, then flatten out the next?

These tasks require not just force, but directed force.

Once you’re capable of getting something heavy to swing quickly, the next step is to pick a vector through space and swing the weight along that vector. As an example – a right handed player trying to improve their cross-court rally forehand will pick a vector that has a right-to-left angle to it, and is diagonally up, because that’s the direction of maximal force when producing a high-margin cross-court shot.

Practice every direction you’ll use. Swing straight, swing diagonally up, swing diagonally down. Swing right-to-left, swing left-to-right.

Practicing force production in every direction will craft your stroke into a truly flexible one. Some players hit very hard cross-court, but can’t coordinate their kinetic chain when hitting down-the-line. Others can easily hit high, heavy, deep forehands, but have no ability to flatten it out to attack a short ball.

The more vectors through which you can generate force, the more versatile your game will be, and vice versa.

3. Through a point in space

This next piece of the stroke production puzzle is what transforms a merely good stroke into an elite one. Can you generate force, in a direction, through a specific point in space?

The next step on our shadow swings is to practice swinging along every vector, through different points. Can you generate force, in every direction, when the contact point is a little too close to you? Can you generate force, in every direction, when the contact point is a little too far away? What about if it’s low, down at your knees? Waist height? Shoulder height?

Just like producing force in any direction increases your versatility, the ability to do so through a wide array of points further increases it.

Probably the most under-discussed part of elite tennis is the role vision plays in this step. While we’re actually playing, we need to use our eyes to send that force in a direction through a specific point in space – the ball.

Your tracking informs you:

1. Where the ball is
2. How it’s moving

Once you’ve mastered generating force in a direction, it is your vision that informs you where that force in a direction needs to be created. Practice swinging hard through every contact point imaginable. That way, no matter what you see as the ball comes off the ground, you’ll be able to rip it.

4. While Maintaining Your String Angle

There’s one caveat to the previous three steps – on non-overhead shots, we need to take our swing in such a way that, as the racket is flying through contact (including the brief moments before and after), the angle of the strings barely changes. This creates fault tolerance – if we miss execute the stroke by a little bit, it’ll still succeed.

Tennis is difficult. On almost every shot, a small fault will occur. You’ll be a little early, or a little late. You’ll misidentify the contact point by an inch or two, or misread the ball’s speed slightly. World class strokes do not fail when only a small fault occurs. Any stroke that fails if execution is only slightly off is not match usable.

So how do we manage this string angle maintenance?

When learning to swing hard, throw the racket out in front of you, and pay attention to the way your hand is rotating. Maintain a loose grip, 3-5/10 grip tension, with slight wrist extension. That’s pretty much it – just experiment until you find it. There will be a part of the swing, out away from your body, where the racket will be whipping through the air fastest, and the hand will rotate in such a way that the string angle doesn’t change. That’s your contact zone. Adjust the way you hold the racket if necessary – it’s better to alter your grip to fit your swing, than your swing to fit your grip.

Memorize where, in relation to your body, this high velocity flick, through which the string angle remains constant, is happening. Swing your racket again, and again, and again. Get familiar with this location in space, because, ultimately, this is the part of your swing you will use to strike the ball.

This is the part of the swing you need to be able to transpose along any vector. Practice getting this flick to happen right-to-left, left-to-right, low-to-high, high-to-low, etc, and make sure you can do all of those through a wide array of points in space.