The Forehand Press Slot

This position is magic on the forehand. I call it “the press slot,” because it’s the moment your stroke’s final powerful muscle group – the chest – engages to press the your racket through contact.

You reach it by throwing your racket behind the ball in a certain way. If you do it right, as you reach the press slot, you’ll feel your chest fire, and your racket will comfortably whip through the ball.

In this article, you’re going to learn:

1. Exactly how the chest powers the stroke
2. What the final part of the stroke, when your chest engages, looks like
3. How to start your swing by throwing the racket into the press slot accurately

How the Chest Powers the Forehand

Every human being has a big, strong muscle group in their chest, known as the “pectoral muscles.” These muscles are responsible for pressing the hands and arms forward. In order to hit a maximally efficient forehand, we need to recruit these muscles.

In order to do that, you need the ball in a certain spot when you swing at it. When it’s in the right spot, you can fling your racket out to it, causing your chest to engage, and then that chest engagement will send your racket effortlessly and explosively through contact.

There are two kinds of anatomical motion that occur as the chest engages to finish the forehand stroke.

1. Horizontal Shoulder Adduction

The angle between the upper arm and the chest closes as the hand moves forward. You can tell when a player’s chest has fully engaged by when their humeral-pectoral angle starts rapidly closing.

2. Internal Shoulder Rotation

Another natural consequence of pressing your hand forward is that your shoulder wants to internally rotate. This is extremely useful on the forehand, because internal shoulder rotation causes our racket to rotate upwards through the hitting zone, which ultimately creates a topspin strike up the back of the ball. The reason the chest drive powers forehand contact so well is that we get to both drive through the ball, creating velocity, while simultaneously causing the shoulder to internally rotate, creating topspin.

Pressing from the Press Slot

Though your forehand’s kinetic chain physically starts from the ground, the swing’s intention starts with its final drive through contact. The early part of the swing must be executed in such a way so as to set up the late part of your swing – you know you’ve done it right if your chest engages, and your late acceleration through contact is maximally comfortable.

The Press is Brief and (mostly) Automatic

Before we move on to when to press, I want to be clear on how to press. Your chest should engage without you having to think about it. If it doesn’t, you aren’t throwing your racket out to contact area properly. Tweak your early swing until you feel your chest firing naturally, rather than just forcefully trying to press despite those muscles not engaging on their own. Weighted shadow swings are a great way to cue yourself into chest engagement, if you’re having trouble feeling it with the lighter racket.

Once you feel your chest engaging, you can, if you want, intentionally press harder. The final part of your swing is a brief, explosive, transient push, during which you inject as much force into the ball as you can (or want to), in as small an amount of time as you can.

The final part of your swing is a brief, explosive, transient push.

The press is not a long, slow movement, akin to a one-rep maximum bench press. Instead, it’s a short, explosive movement, as if you were trying to bench a lighter weight into the sky, sending as much force into the bar as you possibly could, before the weight ultimately flew off your hands.

Throwing Into The Press Slot

I see many players fire their final pressing action too early, and a few fire it too late. Both mistakes desynchronize the stroke, making it extremely difficult to control the contact, and to generate velocity.

Throw the racket out away from your body, towards the ball. Where exactly? Use comfort as your guide. If you’re throwing into the correct press slot, it won’t take intentional effort to cause your chest to engage and finish your swing. It will be comfortable to press the racket forward at the end. You won’t feel jammed, tight, or awkward, but rather, your contact motion will feel seamless, effortless, and explosive.

For most, the optimal press slot arrives shortly after the elbow passes the hips, while the torso is still sightly closed, and, critically, the hand is away from the body. The initial part of the swing sends the racket from in to out. Swinging out early in the motion helps the chest engage to press the racket back in through contact. Here’s how to find the start of your contact zone using a wall.

Different players have different pressing rhythms. Jannik Sinner and Casper Ruud, for example, both have world class forehands, but Jannik Sinner presses earlier in his rotation than Casper Ruud does.

The earlier you press, the more closed you’ll be at contact, and in your follow-through. The longer you wait to press, the more rotated you’ll be. Like with all movements in tennis, there are many right answers.

The most important part of the press slot is whether you can really feel it. Can you feel that transition point, when the racket is out away from your body, and it’s about to fly back-to-front through the contact zone? You want to have supreme confidence in your ability to accurately throw the racket into that location, and supreme confidence in how your chest is going to engage to finish your swing once you get there. The rest of your forehand swing, as well as the entirety of your forehand improvisation, is built off of that confidence.

Your Early Rotation

The early part of your swing exists in service to the late part. Your early leg drive and torso rotation must fling the racket into a comfortable press slot, such that when you get to it, your chest finishes your swing on the vector you desire.

Your early rotational torque is transient. If you keep actively twisting past the press slot, it’ll be nearly impossible to time your contact, and your stroke will lose much of its fault tolerance. During the late part of your swing, from press slot to contact, the torso will still continue to rotate, but only passively.

The forehand is not a perfect whip. Your torso won’t completely stop, transferring 100% of its energy into the arm, so don’t worry if you’re still rotating while your chest engages. That’s totally fine; most players leak at least a little velocity there, because to do otherwise would make the forehand far more difficult to execute.

(Andrey Rublev’s torso actually does almost completely stop. Through the hitting zone, he performs a much more aggressive counter-rotational brake with his left hand than most players do. It’s hard to say whether the additional velocity he gets from that is worth what appears to be a sacrifice of improvisational flexibility.)

Visualizing Your Strike

Like almost everything in tennis, the press slot is a visual concept. Fire your early rotation based on the ball you’re seeing in front of you. If the ball is lower, your press slot will be lower, and if it’s higher, your press slot will be higher (you’ll probably need to adjust your hand’s preparation height as well). You may elect to rotate more explosively or less, based on the shot you’re ultimately trying to hit.

No matter what specific shot you’re attempting, your general goal on the forehand is always the same – throw the racket out towards the ball, in such a way that, when your chest engages to send it back-to-front, that back-to-front action strikes the ball how you intended. Flexibility on the forehand is the ability to throw your hand into a wide variety of different press slots, accurately and with velocity, and achieve the result you predicted while doing so.

As you’re tracking the ball in, have a plan for your contact – specifically, where in space you’re going to strike the ball, and how you want your racket to strike through it. All of your early movement and upper body preparation are executed for the purpose of making your plan happen. Move your feet, bend how you need to bend, and then fire the racket into the press slot behind the strike you visualized when you started moving. If you get it right, your chest will seamlessly engage, and the racket will flick through the ball just like you planned.

Swinging OUT and Improvising

If your probing is off, or if the ball bounces strangely, then your swing isn’t going to be maximally comfortable. It’s critical to maintain at least some sort of in-to-out early swing, no matter how awkwardly you need to contort your body to do so, so that your chest will still engage near the end. Without throwing your racket out to at least some degree, your chest won’t engage, and your racket won’t rotate around your hand. Improvisation is your ability to throw the racket out behind the ball, creating that whip effect through it, in novel or awkard situations.

It’s critical to maintain at least some sort of in-to-out early swing, no matter how awkwardly you need to contort your body to do so.

If your situation is such that there is simply no way you can throw the racket outward, do not try to hit the forehand with topspin. Push or deflect the ball back over the net instead. This is a common occurrence on very difficult shots, like serve returns, and it’s a perfectly fine thing to do.

As long as you’re roughly in the right position, though, timing window and swing path variance that will create high quality contact will be pretty wide. Throw the racket out roughly into the right press slot, and you’ll get a high quality strike as a result. This is a fault tolerant forehand we’re teaching, of course.

The Swing’s Rotational Nature

We’ve touched on this throughout, but the most critical part of the press slot is throwing the racket into it in such a way that the chest engages automatically, without you having to consciously fire it. To this end, it’s critical that the early part of the swing is rotational, not linear. The racket is thrown away from the body. Don’t feel like you have to contort yourself to pull the racket back through the ball. When you’re doing it right, that will happen automatically.

The racket is thrown away from the body, almost out past the ball, rather than at it.

For many, this is a strange feeling at first, because, intuitively, you want the racket to travel towards the ball for the duration of the swing, rather than have the racket begin the swing by traveling out, almost as if you were going to hit the ball diagonally sideways. The more intuitive, swing-straight-at-the-ball technique doesn’t work on a topspin forehand, because it fails to harness the most efficient engine for generating that kind of stroke: racket rotation. When the correct press slot is reached, the racket will rotate around your hand due to inertia, and in order for that rotating racket to strike the ball, back-to-front and in a topspin way, we need to have begun the swing by sending the racket out to the side, not straight towards the net.

Once you feel it work a few times, it’ll become more intuitive. You’ll learn to trust the fact that your racket well, in fact, fly around your hand and hit through the ball, and as that trust develops, throwing into the right press slot will become more natural.

Physical Demands of Throwing into the Press Slot

Glutes strength and abdominal strength both play critical roles in mastering early rotation. You need to feel the ground through your load foot, and on almost every shot, you’ll initiate the stroke by firing your right hip towards the press slot. As you do this, your core needs to be stable, such that your upper body whips around as a result. If it’s lax, then especially under time pressure, your arm won’t end up in the right place as you twist into the swing. Strength throughout your hips and core creates accurate throws into the press slot, and accurate throws into the press slot create efficient whips through the ball.

On almost every shot, you’ll initiate the stroke by firing your right hip towards the press slot.

Often, as you’re about to swing, you’ll realize you’re not in the right position. Use any/all of your hips, trunk, and chest to manipulate the racket and try to produce a decent (suboptimal) shot. The stronger they are, and the more balanced you are, the more successfully you’ll be able to do thsi on the fly. You often have enough time, after the ball bounces, while you’re performing the early part of your swing, to realize you’ve made a mistake and improvisationally adjust to a less efficient strike that, critically, still hits the ball in.

Two Parts, One Motion

The forward swing can be understood as two related goals, which are seamlessly connected to produce an efficient swing:

1. Send the racket into the press slot, with velocity.
2. Press through contact with the ball.

Many people internalize the forehand, instead, as only one motion – “swinging towards the ball,” but that can often lead to issues with your acceleration rhythm, because you end up throwing at the ball, rather than into the press slot. The early part of your swing is a rotational explosion that sends your hand out, and often even down. Only the late part is a linear explosion, powered by the automatic engagement of the chest that occurs if you throw your racket behind the ball in the right way.

The early part of your swing is a rotational explosion that sends your hand out.

Work Backwards From Contact

The most critical part of the forehand is contact. Work backwards from contact to design your swing.

How do I create force through contact? Press with the chest.

How do I press with the chest? Find the slot in space from which I can press – where my arm feels comfortable as I press it forward, and that pressing action sends my hand back-to-front.

How do I get the chest to engage? Use the hips and abs to fling the racket accurately out into a comfortable press slot behind the ball.

How do I get even more velocity? Focus on one of your big muscle groups. Press harder through the ground with your back foot. Twist harder with your stomach muscles, or in honor of the press slot, press harder when you feel your chest engage.

That’s the forehand.