Please analyze my strokes? ViD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKbEo7eGjF4

here is another one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEWkDsyL0Rk

Any tips are apreciated. I have a very big problem, I choke during matches. If I am playing with the people I usually play with I am fine, but when I play strangers I choke. I start to chop the ball and my ground stroke become shaky and my confidence decreases. I slice most of my bh during this circumstance. My serve and returns are the only things that are up to par.

What do you suggest are ways to stop chocking?
 
There seems a problem with your forehand, almost as if you have a hitch in the motion. Try not to snatch at the ball. I think instead of using your elbow to drive through the ball your using alot of wrist. Many of the balls your hitting quite flat. Practice brushing up the ball abit more.

The backhand to me seems smooth and flowing. Very nice shoulder turn follow through.

Thanks, I will try to get more arm/elbow in my forehand and see how it looks.
 
What the others said above me. You seem to have a good pull back until you fling your wrist back and jerk across the ball. With the way you hit, its really easy to make mistakes since its not a fluid motion. It also looks unnatural the way your elbow is when you contact the ball, but that doesn't really have to do with how good the stroke is. FYB is a good place to start.
 
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What the others said above me. You seem to have a good pull back until you fling your wrist back and jerk across the ball. With the way you hit, its really easy to make mistakes since its not a fluid motion. It also looks unnatural the way your elbow is when you contact the ball, but that doesn't really have to do with how good the stroke is.

I agree with you and I will try my best to fix the motion. I will try to get new footage sson of the more improved stroke.
 
Just remember, this isn't something you can fix in a short period of time so don't be frustrated if it doesn't go well the first few days of trying. Good luck with your strokes.
 

OHBH

Semi-Pro
Backhand looks solid. I think the forehand doesn't look right but you might be fine. I think if you just prepared the racket earlier on the forehand side your motion would quickly become smoother.
 

tennis_pr0

Semi-Pro
You are really trying to slap the heck out of the ball on your forehands....not a very high percentage shot. As far as your mechanics, they are fine for the most part, I would just take some off your shots and perhaps try adding some topspin. Just a suggestion because it looks like you were really trying to smack the skin off every ball.
 

mawashi

Hall of Fame
The issue with your strokes is that you're loosing control of your wrist during contact which is why the balls are going all over the place.

When you do make a clean hit, the ball goes very well however, for ever one that goes in, there are 2-3 others going off.

Try to maintain a firm grip upon contact n follow through. The moment you try to wrist through the shot, you loose control.

fuzzyyellowballs.com has some great teaching vids.

mawashi
 

Nellie

Hall of Fame
On the forehand side, don't take the racquet back over your head -

On the backhand side, bend the left knee more for better power and rotation. Also, watch your footwork so that you do not lift the left leg during the stroke, meaning that your weight has shifted back and you are arming the ball.

On both sides, get the racquet loop under the ball prior to contact so you can hit up and through the ball for topspin. On both sides, you are hitting the ball at the bottom of the loop, making it hard to produce topspin. It is one of the reason you are spraying easily fed balls.
 
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tricky

Hall of Fame
Same problem with the feet. Not stepping out properly.

On your BH wing, you often take your load foot and step away from the ball. This can work, except that you don't reset your front foot, so you don't have weight transfer in your shot.

On your FH wing, you often step to your left (going into court) using your right foot. In that situation, you want to step out with the left foot, since that is the foot closer to the estimated strike point. That's generally not an easy shot unless you prepare earlier.

Your footwork makes your shotmaking style really dependent on getting steady, predictable shots back from your opponent. In other words, you are able to time unloading your torso when you're well grooved into the shot. However with better footwork, you're not as dependent on that, and you can concentrate more on tracking the ball.

Some other ideas to reinforce the step-out:

1) Again, try limiting your takeback for awhile to force yourself to hit with good footwork. Imagine that the elbow of your hitting arm is glued to the side of your body, and that it only gets "released" when you initiate your forward swing. That will sufficiently limit your takeback.

2) When practicing, be more conscious of the rhythm of your feet. Make sure you go "Step 1, Step 2" or count "1, 2" with your feet as you execute your groundstroke. This will help you move away from lazy feet, and absent-mindedly pivoting around your front foot. Even if you think you don't have enough time, try to move your feet with that two-count rhythm.

3) Have your partner move you around and just work on moving into the court and getting to the ball, "catching" or "tapping" the ball with your racquet. As you do this, try to keep your trunk relatively parallel with the net, until you are ready to "catch" the ball with your racquet. This will force you to step out with the correct foot.

Some groundstroke fun:

1) For your FH, when you separate the racquet, let your left hand stroke the neck of your racquet as it separates. This will prevent your hand from "tossing the racquet upwards", as you are doing now. You will notice your takeback is less loop-based, and more turn-based. This will help give you the swing that you're looking for. You can shadow swing this and vertify.

2) For your BH, again work on the 2-count rhythm.
2a) On the "1", either lower or raise your racquet with your left arm. (For the classic smile-pattern 1H BH style, lower the racquet. For the fancy shmancy Gasquet look, raise the racquet.)
2b) Takeback and swing with the right arm through the 2-count.
2c) Again, it's about the 1-2 rhythm with the feet. Try shadowing this until you feel comfortable.
 

LeeD

Bionic Poster
I think your strokes are fine for the 3.5-4.0 levels.
Your "choking" is not so great, it's mental. So you gotta play more matches, get match experience, go thru the losing and choking until you get sick and tired of choking and being tentative.
You have to learn to TRUST your strokes to go in. If you can't, then you have to modify your strokes so they always go in...either more topspin, shortening the backswing, swinging more deliberately, quicker/earlier footwork, or whatevers.
You can't play well in matches until you have played MULTIPLE matches against strangers and competitors of all levels...above and below you.
 

Jaxon

Rookie
For choking what worked for me is to just play more matches both people over and under your level. Over your level will teach you strategies and improve your playing. Playing people lower levels will increase your confidence therefore your mentality will improve
 

Bungalo Bill

G.O.A.T.

1. You are using the same hand pattern for a forehand on your backhand. While the forehand does a C pattern, the backhand does a shallow U pattern. Your backswing will be much more prepared to time the ball on a front arm hitting stroke. Otherwise you risk mistiming the ball and hitting late.

This is especially true if you hit your onehander with somewhat of a looser wrist area. This is because you risk the chance of your racquet slanting a bit too much at contact and you dont make contact with the racquet face square.

2. Tricky already mentioned step-out patterns so I wont go into that except ot say it is important to learn them.

3. Slow down the feed a bit on the forehand and practice your technique. On some of those balls it seemed you were spraying and you did not maintain a consistent swing.

When someone mentions to use your non-dominant arm to "scan" the contact zone and then fold back into your body, it is for several reasons:

1. It helps you rotate back into the ball instead of away from it.

2. It helps keep you balanced in an open stance forehand.

3. It helps improve acceleration if you learn to use it properly.
 

Fedace

Banned
Reminds me of Gasquet on the backhand... but your shoulders are opening up too soon sometimes. When you hit a solid shot, they stay closed, if you noticed that
 

mawashi

Hall of Fame
1. You are using the same hand pattern for a forehand on your backhand. While the forehand does a C pattern, the backhand does a shallow U pattern. Your backswing will be much more prepared to time the ball on a front arm hitting stroke. Otherwise you risk mistiming the ball and hitting late.

This is especially true if you hit your onehander with somewhat of a looser wrist area. This is because you risk the chance of your racquet slanting a bit too much at contact and you dont make contact with the racquet face square.

2. Tricky already mentioned step-out patterns so I wont go into that except ot say it is important to learn them.

3. Slow down the feed a bit on the forehand and practice your technique. On some of those balls it seemed you were spraying and you did not maintain a consistent swing.

When someone mentions to use your non-dominant arm to "scan" the contact zone and then fold back into your body, it is for several reasons:

1. It helps you rotate back into the ball instead of away from it.

2. It helps keep you balanced in an open stance forehand.

3. It helps improve acceleration if you learn to use it properly.

BB, glad to see you're back.

mawashi
 

xFullCourtTenniSx

Hall of Fame
What do you suggest are ways to stop chocking?

Well your forehand is really overcomplicated (too wristy and whatnot), and you're afraid to really hit the ball and send it long right?

Well there are several things I can possibly guess from this: 1) you have no faith in your consistency (perhaps because you lack consistency?); 2) and when you tighten up, your forehand is probably the first thing to go because you don't use your wrist as you normally do; 3) when your confidence in your forehand goes, your backhand slowly dies too from the pressure of it being your only working stroke or because it wasn't a consistent shot to begin with but it's all you have left.

There are two things I want you to do to fix this:

-Junk a LOT of heavy spin on those groundstrokes, and swing out as fast as you can doing so with plenty of margin of error over the net. If your groundstrokes are extremely safe, yet you're still swinging as hard as you can on them, you can't really lose out trying to swing out on those strokes. If you want to be slightly more aggressive, hit through the ball more and put less margin of error under it. But junk the ball with heavy spin when you're rallying. To win points, you have to get one more shot into the court than your opponent can, that's all there is to it. If you can get every shot in while still taking a big cut at it, you don't have to worry about that anymore and just have to worry about playing your own game.

-In practice, try to get 50 shots into the court consecutively for each wing. If you know you can get 50 shots in, then what's 10 under match pressure? Nothing really. And if you can reach that number easily, slowly raise it higher and higher until eventually you get to the point where you look to try not to miss at all during practice, while still hitting all your shots where and how you want them. It'd be nice if you could put a value on that, but eventually 1000 isn't enough and you get bored counting it out to yourself to the point where you might actually lose focus.

-Finally (okay there were three things I guess), simplify that forehand motion. Make it so that everything is a natural fluid swing. Unless that wrist action is 100% natural and can withstand the match pressure that you can't, ditch it!
 

5263

G.O.A.T.
On both sides, get the racquet loop under the ball prior to contact so you can hit up and through the ball for topspin. It is one of the reason you are spraying easily fed balls.

worth repeating from what I saw, along with how you are just snatching the racket at the ball vs a smoother accel
 
Thank you every one. I was shadow swinging my forehand and think I get the idea every one is trying to convey on my forehand. I will try to from snatching at the ball and swing through. I am tying to impliment the 1,2 step trick mentioned. I will try to keep my shoulders more closed on the forehand.
 

callen3615

Professional
I actually hate the loop. I think it threw off my tempo. If you just take the racquet back low it might help. I tried the loop and epic failed at it.
 

2ndServe

Hall of Fame
I like your backhand but I definitely think you should be taking it on the rise so it's more in your power zone. I see some that suggest you might have difficulty with the high ones.
 
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