Positive, Neutral, and Negative Balance

Here’s a simple way to understand the basics of balance in tennis. Shots can be played in:

• Positive balance – your weight ends in front of where it started.
• Neutral balance – your weight ends at the same depth it started.
• Negative balance – your weight ends behind where it started.

In a perfect world, we’d play every shot in positive balance. Positive balance lets us recruit the most leg muscle while powering our shot, by driving our weight into the court. Positive balance is the lynch pin of offensive tennis, and even in neutral tennis, we want to utilize it as much as we can. Because our weight is moving forward when playing a shot with positive balance, we must start early and contact the ball well in front of us.

Neutral and negative balance are compromises we make when receiving high quality shots. Many shots are hit too hard, or too far away from us, to consistently transfer our weight forward into our reply, so we don’t try, in order not to miss. We’re also often forced to hit at a contact point closer to the body than we’d like, which can make the extra drive from positive balance very difficult to synchronize with the rest of the swing.

In a perfect world, we’d play every shot in positive balance.

Elite players use all three of positive, negative, and neutral balance, because different situations on court require different balance. In fact, the examples of Roger Federer you’ll see throughout this article are all from one, single point.

Positive Balance

We’re using Roger Federer as our model for this article, because he might be the best tennis player in history at recruiting positive balance to his advantage (though Carlos Alcaraz is now giving him a run for his money). Case in point: the image below. Roger is attacking a ball which is well past the service line utilizing positive balance. Many players simply don’t possess the skill to do this, and much wait for a far shorter ball before attacking.

The loading stage on this particular shot occurs in almost a strictly single-foot stance – around 80% of his weight is on his right, loading foot, with only 20% on the left. This is a common way to play a forehand in positive balance – start on the right, land on the right, and kick the left forward to prevent over-rotating through the contact.

The other common way, when you have a little more time, is to transfer your weight forward onto your left foot, and then kick the right leg back behind you to prevent over-rotation.

In either case, the legs rotate the body into the shot and drive the body forward. Positive balance allows offensive shots to be played with control. Because of Roger’s weight shift, he’s able to use a conservative upper body swing, while still producing a hard, penetrating shot. Were he to play this shot in neutral balance instead, he’d need a much more aggressive upper body twist to generate the same level of velocity.

Tilt the Torso

The last, critical element that positive balance requires for success is a tilted torso. When you lean into the court, you are naturally going to hit the ball down more, and so, in order to compensate for that, you must swing at the ball up more. Adopting a slanted shoulder angle is the easiest way to do this.

No matter which footwork pattern you use to attack a shot in positive balance, you’ll always be leaning in, and when you’re leaning in, you need to slant your shoulders to compensate. The deeper your shoulder slant, the more your natural stroke will proceed low-to-high, causing you to send the ball higher. Practice it, and you’ll get the calibration right, and make no mistake that, if you lean into a shot without slanting your shoulders to compensate, the ball will almost certainly fly straight down into the net.

Neutral Balance

High level opponents will do everything they can to prevent you from playing in positive balance. One of the common ways they do this is by hitting the ball away from you. Positive balance requires loading the back leg and pressing into the court. If you’re sprinting to the side as you prepare, this is going to be quite difficult.

Neutral balance is the best choice when playing shots on the move. Here, we see Roger moving right for a forehand, and playing the shot with neutral balance. The loading phase looks very similar to the shot played with positive balance – we’re just missing the forward lean – and just like with positive balance, the right hip fires to initiate the forward swing.

The critical difference in neutral balance is that the leg does not, on net, drive the body forward. Instead, on this shot, Roger’s weight ends in the same place it started.

Neutral balance is a compromise. We’d love to drive our weight forward into every shot, but sometimes we just don’t have the time. If you try to play a shot in positive balance, when it should really be played in neutral balance, you’re likely to make an error. Your decision really comes down to the ball you’re seeing in front of you, and your experience in similar situations. Here, given the speed of the incoming ball, and Roger’s movement to the right, he elects for neutral balance, and in doing so produces a high quality reply with ease.

Negative Balance

The beautiful thing about modern racket technology is that strong, athletic tennis players can rip the ball without missing from any position on the court – even if they’re falling backwards. In order to do this, you need to master negative balance.

Sometimes, the ball gets on top of you. The better your opponent, the more likely this is to happen. When it happens, negative balance allows you to still drive off the ground to power your swing.

We can’t always use positive balance. Positive balance requiers a contact point well out in front of the body, because we’ll be driving forward into the ball. When we don’t have that contact point, trying to fire forward into the shot anyway will cause an error. To avoid that, we could forgo leg drive altogether – and if you’re sufficiently jammed, you might have to do that, but typically a better compromise exists: fire your hip into the shot similar to how you nomrally would, but allow your body to fall backwards to accomodate the late contact.

Two critical insights underpin negative balance. First: it’s okay. Actually, in many situations, it’s optimal to fall away from the ball. The correct orientation towards ball-striking is goal oriented. You see the ball in front of you, and you want to strike it a certain way. If spinning around and flying backwards is the best way to do that, go for it.

Rotation is the engine that powers a shot played in negative balance.

Second: the hitting side of the body still goes forward. Look at the image of Roger Federer above. Even though the body, as a whole, has fallen backwards, his load foot has flown forwards. If both feet go backwards, you aren’t going to be able to hit the ball. By spinning backwards, your hitting side still travels forwards, even as your weight travels backwards. Rotation is the engine that powers a shot played in negative balance.

Balance is a Continuum

We break balance down into positive, neutral, and negative, to make it easy to communicate, but in truth, balance is a continuum – there aren’t only three, distinct options. You can drive forward in many different ways when playing in positive balance, and you can fall backward to various different degrees when playing in negative balance. Similarly, exact neutral balance is actually quite rare; almost every shot will have either a small positive or small negative component to it.

When you’re actually on court, you’ll play shots across the entire balance spectrum.

Since you can’t practice everything, when you practice, I recommend practicing positive, neutral, and negative balance. They are effective checkpoints that ensure you will become comfortable with all the different kinds of balance you’ll need. When you’re actually on court, you’ll play shots across the entire balance spectrum.

Lean towards positive whenever you can. If you’re playing a neutral ball, even if you’re slightly time pressured, if you can manage just a small lean into the ball, that will dramatically improve your shot quality. If you’re stuck in negative balance, the less negative it is the better. Try to time the ball such that you won’t need to fall backwards to hit it, but if you’ve messed up, commit to falling backwards so you can still fire your hips into the shot.

No matter which balance you use on a given shot, feel the ground through your foot, the same way you feel the ball on your strings. Become aware of your balance on court, so that your athletic brain can begin integrating it into your game. Strokes start from the ground. The more accurately you can interact with the ground, the better you’re going to be.