Strike, Don’t Swing

Tennis is a series of strikes, and strikes are like snowflakes – no two are exactly the same.

No two forehands are exactly the same. No two backhands are exactly the same. What matters in tennis is whether you can see the ball clearly, form an intention for how you want to strike it, and then execute that intention to strike through the ball how you wanted to.

Why “Swings” Fail

Imagine you’re returning serve. You’re locked in, seeing the ball crystal clearly. Your opponent hits it, it bounces, time freezes in front of you, and you get that clean feeling of hitting the dead center of your string bed. 0-15. More clean execution follows, each subsequent contact even cleaner than the last. 30-40. Break point.

I’m returning so well. Time to go big down-the-line.

Shank. Deuce.

So what happened?

Your mental process changed. On the previous five returns, your primary focus was seeing and then striking the ball in front of you. Your mental point of focus was out in space in front of you, in the area where your racket would ultimately contact the ball. On the break point, your mental point of focus changed to the other side of the court. Anytime the mental point of focus is not on the contact area (or on the incoming ball before that), it becomes drastically more difficult to actually land a high quality strike.

Swinging is Narrow, Striking is Universal

So many of my students, and so many of you, have lots of random shanks and fence-hitting shots sprinkled into your game. Those wild misses occur because your mental pattern is not striking through the ball that you see, but rather taking a pre-planned, pre-visualized, and pre-committed swing motion, regardless of what ends up in front of you.

Wild misses occur because your mental pattern is not striking through the ball you see.

Players who swing instead of strike have the generative process for tennis strokes backwards. They see the ball early, then prepare the swing in their mind, and then execute that swing no matter what happens later. That’s not how fault tolerant tennis is played. Visualizing the swinging motion itself early only works if everything, and I mean everything, goes perfectly after that.

Committing to a movement pattern before the ball arrives is the least fault tolerant thing you can possibly do. Any slight mistake in your early tracking, your probing or footwork, or your mental projection of the ball’s flight path, will usually cause an outright miss. God forbid a bigger fault occurs – you get a bad bounce or slip; you’ll be lucky if you even get it back to the net.

High level tennis merges anticipatory and reactive movements. Even late into the receiving process, great strikers are observing and adjusting. You start preparing your stroke early, but that’s all you’re doing early – preparing. You haven’t mentally committed to an actual swing path yet. You explode to the ball with your feet, and at this point you have an idea of what you’re going to try to do, but that idea is constantly updating in real time based on the information you’re seeing as the ball comes in.

High level tennis merges anticipatory and reactive movements.

The moment you fully commit to your swing is the latest possible moment during which you still have the time to hit it. This is why hitting hard is so effective in tennis – your opponent must commit to their swing earlier, leaving them less time to observe and adjust. On almost every shot, you can make all sorts of small, and sometimes even large, adjustments before you have to fully commit to your movement pattern, but you can only do this if you’re paying attention, and if you’re focusing on tracking and observing the incoming ball. You will not adjust if you’ve already visualized the movement pattern you’re planning on executing; you’ll just do that movement regardless of what happens, and miss whenever anything upstream has gone slightly wrong.

On almost every shot, you can make all sorts of small, and sometimes even large, adjustments.

Striking Creates Improvisation

The anticipatory + reactive hybrid orientation is how players like Carlos Alcaraz and Roger Federer are able to improvise with such unbelievable success. Yes, they predict the ball well, and yes, they see the ball well early, but they also see and react exceptionally well late.

The actions they’re taking as they hit are not best described as “hitting a forehand” or “slicing a backhand volley;” but rather as:

1. Developing an intention for how they want the ball to move
2. Using that intention to reverse engineer how to strike it, based on where it is, where they are, and how the racket moves
3. Executing that strike

Most of the genius comes in the second step; those two, specifically, possess an unprecedented understanding of how the racket moves through space, and how to create the kind of contact they want. The fundamental process they’re using to strike a ball, though – forming an intention for the strike, and then executing – that process can be taught and practiced, just like anything else.

Aim Your Strike, Not Your Swing

In tennis, you don’t aim by thinking about your opponent’s court. You aim by striking through the ball in a specific way. You visualize aiming by visualizing the vector along which you want the racket to strike through the ball.

If you’re going to visualize an inside-out forehand, you must visualize the racket traveling through the ball towards the inside-out target. The primary goal is a certain kind of contact, not a certain kind of ball flight, and not a certain kind of swing. The downstream goal is a certain kind of ball flight, and the swing does create the strike, but ultimately it is the strike itself, the manner in which the racket interacts with the ball, that is the proximal goal that will achieve all others.

Taking us back to our serve return example – when you decide to “go down-the-line,” what you should visualize are the rough strikes you’ll need to take to do that on both the forehand and the backhand. If you’ve sufficiently practiced these strikes – if you’re comfortable throwing your racket through any vector, at any contact point, then at the moment the ball crystalizes in front of you, it should be simple enough to strike through it the way you’ve practiced thousands of times before.