The Forehand is a Function

Imagine you’re at the eye doctor, staring at the vision chart. You can see every single line in perfect acuity, even the tiniest line at the very bottom. You have excellent vision, right? Not quite – there’s one more thing we need to check.

What if you turn your head, and the image stays the same? You try to look at the eye-doctor, but you can’t, because you’re still seeing the eye-chart, fixed in place, its little characters as clear as ever. What if, no matter where you look, no matter what light hits your eye, all you see is the chart?

Despite the crystal clear acuity, you would be, in a very real sense, totally blind.

Because vision is more than the ability to perceive a single image – vision is a process in your brain that produces an image based on the incoming light, and it is only as efficacious as its ability to change that image as the incoming light changes.

Your forehand is the same way. It is not a swing, but rather a neurological process in your brain that produces swings based on sensory input, and your Forehand Function, just like your vision, is only as good as its ability to change its output when its input changes.

The Forehand Function: (Senses) → Movement

The inputs to the Forehand Function are sensory. Primarily, your:

• vision on the ball
• sense of your body’s location, motion, and balance
• vision on your opponent

These inputs often need to be processed further:

• project the ball’s future flight
• project your own set of movements
• anticipate the moves of your opponent

Then there’s further, goal-oriented processing:

• how should I send the ball back, tactically speaking?
• what strike will create that desired ball flight?
• how do I produce that strike at the ball’s eventual location?

After all of it, the output is a set of motor commands which, hopefully, produce a forehand swing that sends the ball back how you wanted to, and we judge the Forehand Function by how often and how well those motor commands win us tennis matches.

Losing Pretty vs Winning Ugly

If you were to stand still and reproduce a swing that looked exactly like Roger Federer’s, in an artistic sort of way, that would be impressive, and yet the ability to do so would be far from sufficient to play at Roger Federer’s level.

Actually, this isn’t really a hypothetical. Alexa and I have both worked with many students whose swings look amazing, in a naive sense of the word, and yet they don’t… well, actually work. Despite the aesthetic appeal, the strokes don’t produce the desired effects on the ball, and their owners can’t win tennis matches. At first, it seems like a paradox, but it’s not, because the forehand is not a swing, it’s a neurological function, whose output must, necessarily, vary based on its inputs, and whose very usefulness as a function only persists insofar as its sensitivity.

The forehand is not a swing, it’s a neurological function, whose output must, necessarily, vary based on its inputs.

Losing pretty occurs precisely because the Forehand Function is miswired. It’s been optimized on creating a pretty stroke, regardless of the situation, rather than on striking the actual ball effectively. If you are losing pretty, there is a part of your Forehand Function that’s deficient. It is NOT the biomechanical piece – not the piece that sends commands for rotational power, or relaxes the forearm to facilitate topspin, or keeps your chest in-line. Those biomechanics are present; they’re what create the aesthetic appeal.

Typically, it’s an issue before that, during the processing steps:

• project the ball’s location
• decide how/where to send the ball
• identify what kind of a strike to attempt
• design a swing that will create that strike, at the ball’s location

The success of this process, which must take place intuitively, in mere milliseconds, is absolutely required for the Forehand Function to succeed, and it’s why, paradoxically, uglier swings are often more effective. The swings aren’t ugly as a first-principle, they are ugly because they were adjusted, correctly, during these processing steps. Typically, for an ugly swing, there was some moment of recognition, where the athlete realized:

“Hey, my perfect swing isn’t going to go through the location where the ball will end up. Or maybe it will, but it’ll send the ball out (or wide, net, whatever). I need to take a different, less perfect swing instead.”

And so even though the swing becomes ugly, it successfully strikes the actual ball, at the location where the ball did, in fact, end up, in a somewhat desirable way (not out). So even though the swing was ugly, the Forehand Function that produced it was actually quite beautiful, and effective. It categorically, overwhelmingly succeeded in its role, because it successfully altered its outputted movement pattern to accommodate the novel sensory input.

Anatomy of the Forehand Function

We want to develop an elite Forehand Function, which is a distinct entity from an elite forehand swing. The first ingredient is something we’re all aware of:

1. Biomechanical Efficiency

When your Forehand Function outputs movement commands, we want those commands to actually produce effortless racket head speed. This is certainly a critical ingredient for an elite Forehand Function, but it is just that. One, single part of the function.

2. Understand Your Own Contact Point

Where, in space, does your racket physically end up when you swing? This knowledge is absolutely critical to an effective Forehand Function. You must know where your swing will end up in order to put that swing through the ball.

3. Correctly Track the Ball’s Position and Velocity

You must correctly perceive both where the ball is and how it’s moving. This is both anticipatory and reactive. You can see the ball, of course, but you can’t directly observe velocity. It’s an inference your brain makes as you track the ball across time.

4. A Whole Bunch of Other Stuff

Those are the three big ones, and yet they alone are far from sufficient for a competent Forehand Function.

You must be physically able to produce the forehands you want to produce. Your brain must have enough ATP to actually run the Forehand Function, and your muscles enough to run the commands the Forehand Function produces. Your circulatory system must deliver that ATP to your brain and body, and your respiratory system must continuously re-oxygenate you to continue the process. Your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascia must not only be strong enough and resilient enough to produce forehand movements, but also sensitive enough to signal their position, velocity, stretch, and fatigue back to the Forehand Function, such that it can make precise use of them in the future.

You need to learn what your strikes on the ball actually do. What produces topspin? What hits the ball flat? Faster, slower? Higher, lower? A truly elite Forehand Function is in a state of constant calibration, whereby each output is then fed back, as an input, into the next iteration of the function to produce better results.

The entire decision making process must be trained as well, both tactically and strategically. What am I good at, what am I not, and then, on this particular shot, where and how should I hit the ball?

And much, much more – too much to go into right now.

Implications for Development

We cannot access our forehand swings directly – we only have access to the Forehand Function. That distinction is critical for forehand development. What is physically happening is not always relevant to how we program our Forehand Function. Physical reality often informs how we adjust our Forehand Function, but just because, physically, your body should move in a certain way, does not necessarily mean that thinking about that fact will have a beneficial effect.

Missing Sensations

The most quintessential example of a physical reality which doesn’t help when verbalized is the “hip-shoulder separation” cue, which tends to, paradoxically, have the exact opposite effect on the kinetic chain as intended. Physically, the pelvis does outpace the trunk for a very brief period early in the swing, but since that minuscule timing window is all but impossible to feel, when players try to implement “hips → trunk,” they typically create a far longer delay than what works, leading to the power transfer between hips and trunk totally breaking down.

(Full breakdown of this critically important situation coming soon.)

Subjectivity

Similarly important, sensory experience will vary from student-to-student. This is relevant with both drills and cues. A drill which unlocks an “aha” sensation for one student might fall completely flat for another. A verbal cue, something like “press your shoulder” might have similarly disparate impact. As a coach, it’s your job to engage with each student. Try to get inside their head, try to reverse engineer their personal Forehand Function, and avoid, although it’s quite difficult, over-generalizing from your own. If you’re able to do it successfully, that’s when the interventions really become magic.

Decoupling is Critical

We must decouple the Forehand Function from the forehand stroke itself. Drills, cues, and everything we do in practice can only, ever, effect the mechanics of the Forehand Function, the neurological process which produces swings. We can never directly modify the swings themselves, and in fact, individual swings themselves are far less relevant than they initially appear. The Forehand Function is what your player will be running, over and over again, as they play a match, and therefore it is the Forehand Function that must be optimized.

What’s so impressive about Rafael Nadal’s banana passing shots is not that he is physically able to produce that swing – what’s impressive is the process that produces it. In mere moments, he processes his opponent’s position, the ball’s position and velocity, his own movement. Maps out a strike that can pass his opponent, maps out how to create that strike, at the exact location the ball will end up, right when it ends up there. His Forehand Function takes all of that, and then has the precision to produce an elegant set of biomechanical movement commands which create effortless racket head speed from a compromised position. All of it goes well, the strike goes as planned, and the result is the banana-shot winner.

It’s so much more than just a swing.