0:00 Do you struggle to get depth on your forehand and feel like your forehands just aren't penetrating the court enough? It might be because of your swing path and your mechanics. This was a mistake one of my clients was making in my school community. And so in this video, we're going to go over the mistake and that you may be making and exactly how to fix it. Here's the slow motion footage real quick. And I want you to focus on what happens after contact and see if you can spot the mistake. So the mistake that my client was making was that he was not extending forward enough on his forehand. And what this caused him to feel was inconsistent on
0:48 his forehand. He wasn't able to get enough depth on the ball. So his balls were always landing short randomly and he just wasn't able to get enough control on the ball. So he would randomly hit it out even though he felt like he got a good grip on the ball at contact and he felt like his whole swing felt good too. So the fix here is to extend your arm forwards longer on your forehand. And of course, this will give you more control and also more depth on the ball. And a cue you can use is to feel like you're keeping the ball on your strings for longer. So, of course, we know when we're hitting our forehands, the ball only stays on the
1:34 strings, touching the the strings for a millisecond. And so it might not make sense mentally, but this cue helps you because when you think about keeping the ball on your strings for as long as you can, you automatically will extend forward longer as you're hitting the ball. And why does this work? Because as you're extending forward hitting the ball, your whole body is moving forward. Of course, forward momentum helps you with precision and uh power on the ball. And it also helps you get more depth on the ball. You can think about it like if
2:20 you're trying to shoot a basketball, you would want to aim at it, shoot, and then follow through in the direction, extend in the direction you want the ball to go. You wouldn't want to shoot and then come back and retract your arms quickly or shoot and then pull down quickly. You would want to extend and keep your follow through. This is what the professional players, the basketball players do is they shoot and they keep their follow through there so that they're making sure as they're doing everything they need to do on the court, moving around a bunch, then when they get balanced and go for their shot, everything stays balanced and they extend in the direction they want the basketball to go. So, it's the same concept here in tennis. You're doing so
3:07 much on the court, looking at your opponent, running around, moving left, right, backwards. Then suddenly you need to get balance and you need to hit the ball. So to help you with that consistency and control, you want to extend forward on the ball by thinking about keeping the ball on your strings for as long as possible. Okay. And here's the real life example. This is the UTR 8 and this is Yanik Center world number one. So let's play it back at full speed first one time so you can see the forehand. Now we'll play it back at half speed so you can see it just a little bit slower the extension. And now we'll scrub through this footage ourselves. So as we look at the UTR8 here
3:53 and we look at the swing and the follow through after. If you see his arm is very close to his body and whereas when we compare it to Yanik center he extended a lot further out and his arm is actually ending more in front of his body. This is because he extended more during his shot. So as he hit the ball, if we look at center here, as he hits the ball, he extends forwards longer, keeps his arm out longer. If you can see this, they both hit the ball at the same
4:40 time. This UTR8 here has already wrapped his arm around his body, less extension on the ball, whereas center is extending forwards. And so the cue here that we'll focus on today is trying to keep the ball on the strings as long as possible. It's more of a mental cue, but that's what's going to help you extend forwards into the ball so you can hit balls deeper and penetrate into the court better and have better control. So now we're going to do some drills in order and some progressions to learn this. So the first one is just shadow strokes. So, you're going to come to your right here, and you're going to practice keeping imagine you're keeping the balls the ball on your strings as long as possible. And we're going to imagine
5:25 we're hitting it down the line here. Because for the down the line shot, it's even more important that you extend forward to hit a good shot. The reason why is because when you're hitting down the line, you need it to go forwards and your body naturally wants to rotate to the left. So, it's of course it's easier to just let your body rotate and pull the ball to the left, but for these down the line shots, your down the line shot will be so much better if you actually just extend forward and think about keeping the ball on your strings. So, you want to do 10 of these total. Then next we're going to do some ball drops.
6:10 And you want to do 10 of these total as well. And you're just going to focus on keeping the ball on your strings. You're going to toss it to the right to the right here. You just want to focus on keeping the ball on your strings for as long as possible. This will help you extend forward nicely. So you can toss it to yourself or someone else can toss it to you. And you want to really think about keeping the ball in your strings there. Again, it's just a mental cue. You're not literally doing that. What you're literally doing is extending after you hit. And so it makes sure it aligns everything so you get proper depth on the ball and for these down the line shots so you can even hit it down the line. And next, we're moving on to the live ball drills.
6:57 We're going to do 200 total today and we're starting off with 25 and we're going to do them at the service line. and you want to aim to hit past the other service line. So, we're trying to ease you into hitting it deep. And you want to focus on for each one of these drills, keeping the ball on your strings for as long as possible, which will help you extend enough forwards. Okay, so we're in the short court here. We're going to have the ball machine feed it to our short court, and we're aiming beyond the service line. That's the only place we're aiming. And we're going down the line, of course. Oh, there. I hit a little short. Doesn't matter. We're aiming past the service line. Of course, you're going to miss some, so that's completely normal. You want to think about keeping the ball on your strings as long as possible. The
7:43 next live ball drill, we're doing 75 balls. And this time, we're hitting them from the baseline. So, the ball machine's going to feed them deeper, stronger, and we're still aiming just past the service line there. So, we're we're easing ourselves into getting that depth. Okay? Okay. So, it's feeding them deep now. And we want to focus on keeping the ball on your strings for as long as possible. That one went a little short. Okay. So, we need to focus keeping the ball on the strings longer. Really extending forward is going to help you. These are the down the line ones. Now, let's move on to the last drill. So, the last drill here, we're doing 100 balls forehand down the line. We're at the baseline. And now, we want to aim past the 3/4s court. If you want to, you can put a marker there, but you
8:30 don't have to. As long as you know where the three4s court is. This is the baseline, and this is the service line. This is the the imaginary line is the 3/4s court. So, you want to aim beyond this. Okay. So, we're focused on keeping the ball on the strings as long as possible. We're aiming down the line past the 3/4 court. There we go. So, we're practicing getting good depth here. and we did it in order from easiest now the most difficult one. So if you want personalized help with your forehand link is in the description. Join the forehand weapon academy. I hope to see you there. But anyway, if you want to get perfect contact on your forehands every time, I have a video where I go over exactly that right here. So you can check that out if you like and I'll see you there.
