Free the Feet, Free the Hips

Whenever possible, you want to power your forehand using both of the primary engines that accelerate the stroke: positive balance and rotation. Lean into the shot, ending with your weight deeper into the court than it started, and coil your body away from the ball during preparation, and then into the ball as you swing.

I see a lot of people get stuck when trying to combine these two ideas, because they aren’t comfortable hitting while airborne. When the feet are rooted to the ground, many kinds of motion are impossible, and many of those impossible motions are necessary for combining positive balance and rotation. This doesn’t mean you need to jump when you swing, just that you need to allow your feet to leave the ground when they want to.

At preparation (left), the feet are firmly rooted to the ground, with more than half of the player’s weight over the back foot. Notice the bent angle at both the knees and the hips. That weight is driven off the feet during the initial leg drive, which straightens both the knee angle and the hip angle, thereby powering the swing (right).

When you drive sufficiently hard into your shot, there will be a few things your feet want to do:

1. They’ll want to turn with your body.

2. They’ll want to counter-rotate.

And if you press in a forward direction, recruiting positive balance, your feet will also want to:

3. End in front of where they started.

As the swing continues, both feet turn forwards with the body. Additionally, the left foot kicks forward, and the right foot kicks back, counter-balancing the upper body’s rotation.

When the feet are firmly planted on the ground, each of these three movements is either impossible, or at the very least, much more difficult.

The feet can’t easily turn while rooted, because of friction with the ground. Picking up just the heel can partially resolve this – the feet can turn while the ball of the foot is still in contact with the ground, but that’s only really viable at low swing speeds, like while warming up, because at faster swing speeds, if you make a small mistake in your balance while pivoting like that, you could twist an ankle.

Planted feet can’t dynamically counter-rotate either, because they aren’t in the air to do so. The particular counter-rotation pictured above involves one leg kicking forward, and one leg kicking back. In order for those kicks to naturally occur, the feet need to be airborne.

Lastly, when you drive forward through your shot, the feet want to move forward with you. They aren’t going to slide forward, so their only option is to leave the ground and then rejoin it. If you aren’t willing to leave the ground, you’re going to feel very stuck trying to lean into your shots.

When Do We Not Deload the Back Foot?

Roger Federer playing a forehand in neutral balance. Though the back heel does come up, his weight remains on his back foot through the duration of the stroke.

Leaving the ground is not universally useful. If your opponent has hit you an exceptionally fast, deep, or heavy ball, you may not want to transfer your weight into your shot, because doing so would cause your reply to be too inconsistent. In that case, you can keep your bodyweight over your load foot as you swing.

We call this “neutral” balance, and it’s a perfectly fine way to hit a forehand. You’ll still fire from the right hip, just not forward from the right hip. This means that your bodyweight won’t fully deload from your back foot. You’ll still probably want to pick your heel up, so that your foot can rotate in place, but you don’t need to fully deload the foot in order to hit a decent shot.

This kind of shot, unlike most forehands you’ll hit, is powered almost purely by rotation, and isn’t powered by forward weight transfer at all.

On shots like these, you’ll almost always perform a counter-rotational brake with your left leg – kicking it up and forward – to prevent you from over-rotating. Were you not to send your left foot up, your initial rotation would cause your body to spin off to the left, and you’d find it very difficult to make clean contact.

Driving into the Court

Let’s talk about the actual mechanics of leaning into your shot. All on-balance tennis shots start by driving with the strong muscles in the legs, and in order to recruit positive balance, that leg drive must send us forward. This requires allowing the hitting hip to internally rotate, so that, when your glutes fire and straighten out your hip angle, that straightening sends your weight forward into the court.

Jannik Sinner, during the early part of his swing, transfers his weight forward, beginning with nearly all of it on his right foot (left image) and ending with it roughly 50/50 (right image). During this process, his hip internally rotates, such that further extension at the hip joint will drive the body forward.

For most players, thinking “lean in” and “drive forward” is plenty technical enough to master this motion. If a coach is telling you to “move through your shot,” or something of the sort, and you’re having trouble figuring out exactly what they’re asking for, this is it. Internally rotate the hip as you drive. It’ll send your body forward.

When you do this, it will deload your back foot, causing it to come off the ground. That feels pretty natural for people, but what’s less natural is the fact that, if you push hard enough, your front foot will need to come off the ground as well. If you’re feeling restricted, just let both feet come off the ground every time you swing, and all of the sudden the idea of leaning forward through your shot won’t feel so foreign.

Thomas Machac’s Brilliant Lower-Body Utilization

I want to analyze this specific Tomas Machac forehand, because it perfectly exemplifies why freeing the feet is so effective. With this shot, he is successfully attacking a ball that’s not easy to attack – it’s not short, it’s not floaty, and it isn’t right to him either. He has mere moments to generate as much force as possible, and he does so successfully, by freeing his feet and firing his hips in the right way.

Tomas Machac striking a heavy cross-court forehand en route to his quarterfinal win against Carlos Alcaraz at the Shanghai Masters in 2024.

During preparation, he coils on the right leg, leans in, and prepares to explode into the shot. The right hip is slightly internally rotated – the knee is deeper into the court than the foot. Because of this, when he fires through it, it drives his body forward into the court, in addition to initiating his rotation.

As he explodes forward, both of his feet leave the ground. This allows him to perform counter-rotational brakes with both legs while in the air, preventing him from over-rotating. The right foot moves back, and left, while the left foot moves forward, and right. Both of those movements are rotations in the opposite direction of his torso rotation. By counter-rotating his legs like this, he’s able to twist extremely hard without then over-rotating through contact.

In the final frame, he lands on his left foot, well in front of where he started, as a result of his forward lean during preparation. His net forward displacement shows us that he’s injected significant power by shifting his weight through the shot (in addition to, of course, explosively rotating). Since the left foot came off the ground during the drive phase, it didn’t restrict this forward momentum at all, and he landed comfortably on it during the follow-through.

Watch the Lower Body

When you allow both your feet to leave the ground on your forehand, it gives you maximal flexibility for the kind of swing you can take. You can perform any desired rotational braking with both legs, and whether you want to drive one centimeter into the court or twenty, your feet won’t restrict you until you land.

Both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal allow their back foot to come off the ground as they swing sufficiently hard.

Next time you watch your favorite player on TV, don’t follow the tennis ball, and instead watch your chosen player’s hips and feet throughout the duration of the point. Watch their ready position, their split-step, and their recovery, but most importantly, watch how their lower body behaves as they swing. You’ll see many different foot behaviors, many different weight transfers, and many different counter-rotations occur, and, most often, you’ll see one or both feet frequently leaving the ground.

Specifically, watch for any higher balls that they attack. Almost always, they will do so by allowing both feet to come off the ground, as they combine explosive rotation and positive balance. They will explode up to the ball, coil, and load, and then both lean through and uncoil into that approach shot, blasting it past another one of the quickest athletes on the planet for a winner.

6 Comments

  1. Chris
    April 21, 2023

    Thanks for these great articles! You say (paraphrasing): initially the back foot is pointing away from the net, along with hips. I’m wondering how this works with an open or slightly open stance. Should I rotate my back foot along with the hips initially as well?

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      April 23, 2023

      Look at your favorite players on tour, and experiment with what they do. Djokovic is my favorite to have my students copy, when it comes to the open stance forehand. The back foot is typically totally sideways, before the stroke, or diagonally forwards/sideways.

      Reply
  2. Tim
    January 8, 2025

    Great tips! I finally figured out why my forehand was lack of power. Thank you!

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      January 9, 2025

      Amazing. Happy to help.

      Reply
  3. Nick S
    January 9, 2025

    Most impressive tennis content on the internet by far.

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      January 21, 2025

      Thank you!

      Reply

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