Looking for advice

Looking for any advice that can help my game. I feel like my footwork is in slow motion as well as my strokes.

Welcome mate! Props for filming yourself - always humbling experience and posting it for everyone to judge and comment - takes some courage!

You generally look decent with the shape of your swings, and I like how you get prepared early - with full takeback by bounce.

Regarding your questions:
- footwork: you look trying to minimize the number of steps as you adjust your positioning against incoming ball. Try “dancing” with more steps before you load finally for a swing. It’s really not slow steps for you but deficit of those, in my opinion. Get away from the ball when needed, get more sideways, closer to neutral stance (semi-open is good, but if you can - do it to move forward as you hit rather than stay in place/lean back).
- strokes: to get more racquet head speed reliably and repeatedly work on coiling more and uncoiling more - try overdoing it, coiling (FH side) past 90 deg to the net and uncoiling so that your hitting side shoulder is clearly in front of the off-side shoulder before arm takes off and strikes at the ball. On BH side - coil more, show your back to your opponent, and don’t be afraid to uncoil. Second thing - bend your legs more in load phase. Even if you don’t focus on driving up strongly, more load will help acceleration naturally. Meanwhile, don’t try to accelerate your racquet off the shoulder, let alone wrist. Better relax those areas, let your core and legs do the “power” job, while arm stays responsible for clean swing shape and precise sweetspot contact. Let your racquet head lag and recoil a bit into contact (or stay laid back) - all in unlocked, flowing manner.

Once again, you look to me rather decent, you mostly need to settle proper speed injection mechanisms into your stroke production. And footwork - well, we all have room for improvement here. More active, more diligent, better patterns both in moving to/away from the balls and initiating strokes. Good journey to take.

Curious, what ntrp/utr level do you play at? How many years have you been playing tennis? Strokes are looking great, must have taken a long time to develop!

Spend the next year or so working on your backhand. The quality gap between your wings is enormous. It obvious you run around the backhand a ton, and don't devote giant swaths of practice time to it and it alone. It's not exactly a recipe for excitement, but it's the answer to the question you're asking.

Your "slow motion" comment is a relative thing. You seem to move well enough to succeed at pretty much any amateur level, if all else in your game goes well enough, but improved athleticism is always a plus. It's not really tennis specific training. Seek advice on improving general fitness and athleticism, and for the love of God, don't seek it on this site's fitness subforum, which is the single worst forum I've ever seen for quality of information.

Forehand looks solid. I wouldn’t change anything with the stroke itself on that wing. But you definitely need to work on your footwork and learn how to move forward and backwards effectively. Right now you’re pretty good moving side to side. But Forward and backwards is a weakness. But that’s usually the case anyway for most intermediate players as its just goiing to take time to develop better ball recognition. But defiantly start paying attention to your forward and backwards movement. Watch some YouTube videos on that.

Backhand wing needs more work. I don’t hit a 1hbh so I’ll leave it to others to comment but of the few few 1hbh drive shots yoh struck they look okay when you had time to set up and hit it out in front. So it’s not an issue with the stroke itself. But the problem is with timing and reading balls on that side. And your lack of forward and backwards moment is even more problematic for a 1hbh where striking it at the correct contact point is crucial.

You definitely need to start hitting more backhands whenever you go out for a hit or are on court. You need volume at this point.

Also the backhand slice needs major work. YouTube how to hit a proper slice. You’ll prpobanly need to spend lots of time developing that shot. Also i think you were hitting the slices too close to your body. Tough to see from this angle but you looked jammed and the slice was really short too. As a 1hbh player you NEED an effective slice. I suggest working on the slice ASAP.

What is your utr or ntrp rating?

papahamster said:

Looking for any advice that can help my game. I feel like my footwork is in slow motion as well as my strokes.

Click to expand...

Compare your strokes single frame and side-by-side in this post. To single frame on Youtube use the period & comma keys. Always select the video with the alt + left mouse click, otherwise it starts playing. Go to impacts in each video and work back and forth comparing single frames. Selecting strokes with similar camera viewing angles gives the most accurate comparisons. You can go full screen and come back down and the video stays on the same frame.


Djokovic has a bent elbow forehand as you do. He is very flexible, so on his more twisting forehand power shots, do not copy his full trunk twisting as it might be too stressful for your spine. Note the uppermost body turn for Djokovic and his separation angle. Uppermost body turn is indicated by the line between the two shoulders. In addition, the line between the two shoulder and the line between the two hips - imagine viewing from above - form the separation angle. It is a measure of how much the spine has twisted. Separation angle is an indicator of how much stretch is in the trunk muscles between the hips and shoulders. You can Google separation angle forehand. There are posts on separation angle. See the Djokovic forehand and compare to yours.

For Djokovic's forehand, I notice that his forearm to racket shaft angle during racket lag seems to be smaller than your angle. Probably your arm is not as relaxed and you control the forearm to racket shaft angle. Note wrist joint angles vs time.

Observe all differences of angles, separation angle, timing on forehand and backhand and make lists of differences. Let me know what questions you have about the differences.

On your backhand drive at 44 sec you use more shoulder joint motion than ATP players and much less uppermost body turn. Estimate the angular motion of your uppermost body and compare it to the ATP pros from similar camera views. It is only a fraction of the uppermost angle the ATP one hand backhand technique uses.

This backhand technique flaw is discussed in detail in this long thread. Also, other sub-motions were observed in high speed videos for most top one hands backhands and are discussed and illustrated.

Both the forehand and most used backhand are two phase strokes where first the legs and trunk turn the uppermost body and then, before impact, the shoulder joint is used. Details of angles and timing are observed in high speed videos.

Keep in mind that the high level ATP stroke techniques have videos and analyses available, my analyses and others. But lower level ground strokes have very little information available.

Overall, good preparation and good mechanism. Got many good advice already.

If I add,
relax your shoulder when your forward-swing your forehand and let your arm go. Your tense shoulder is breaking the kinetic chain that can generate more power without much effort from your arm. Though taking smaller steps is definitely worth a try, I think your footwork is pretty good actually. In this video, you are mostly moving laterally and I didn't see how you move back and forth.

Your bh looks solid also. But for fast incoming balls, you tend to abbreviate your backswing too much and end up missing or slicing weak. Try to do better backswing so that you can hit with the aid of recoiling and arm/racket weight as you do with easier incoming balls.

Thx all for the feedback! I'm going to go practice in a bit so I'll see if I can apply the things mentioned. I always knew my backhand needs more work but I desperately needed to hear other people to echo it.

And for those that are asking about my rating and experience... I started playing tennis about 12 years ago as a freshmen in highschool. I'd say out of the 12, I did not play about 5 due to injuries, moving to cold places, and just life getting in the way.

Last time I was playing competitively (7 years ago or so) I was winning USTA 4.5 mens singles tournaments as well as most doubles in a 4.5 league (played in soCal). Given that I believe my overall game has improved since then, I would like to think that I am now a strong 4.5 / weak 5.0 (4.75 if you will) player assuming that the standards have not changed since.

Ball Watching

We have a long thread on looking at the ball during strokes.

There is a lot of variety in use. I can't say what is best.

One very interesting option is to look through the back of the racket strings at impact. Federer appears to do this and some others also. Percentages in ATP to be determined.

On some of your forehands, I would say that you would be able to look through the back of the racket strings so that impact would appear inside an oval of the racket head frame. But you appear to be looking out in front of the racket when impact occurs, feet away from impact. I saw this on two forehands and another forehand was not clear. See forehand at 2:45. Another camera view better showing where you are looking would be good. See ball watching thread.

Suggest your read the thread and consider trying looking through the back of the racket strings at impact. Impact then has a clear line of sight to your eyes. We realize the images will be burry but give it some consideration and a try with an open mind. Hitting a little more out in front may make the oval a little bigger and the motion blur of the ball a little smaller. Try to observe what ATP players are doing. Their forearm to racket shaft angle may be important.

See Federer backhands in next post to get an idea of what Federer is seeing at impact.

papahamster said:

Looking for any advice that can help my game. I feel like my footwork is in slow motion as well as my strokes.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say your footwork is slow-mo; you could be more dynamic but you're split-stepping and furthermore, your timing looks good. Nice hitting!

What I noticed is that you are almost completely arming your BH: starting at 0:44, you hit 3 BHs in a row, all about the same. Your body is pointed to the side fence before you start your forward swing and by the time you contact the ball, you have hardly rotated at all, which means you are relying predominantly on your arm.

Compare that to, say, Federer [or pick Wawrinka, Thiem Gasquet, Tsitsipas, etc]: Fed rotates past the side fence and is almost showing his back to his opponent. Then he uncoils as he's hitting and ends up maybe halfway between side and opponent. That's a massive difference in rotation that Fed is using and you are not.

If you can start to incorporate a bit more rotation into your takeback, not only will you get more power but it probably will also stabilize the stroke since you'd be relying more on the big muscles, not the small ones.

papahamster said:

Looking for any advice that can help my game. I feel like my footwork is in slow motion as well as my strokes.

Click to expand...

Search for Patrick Mouratoglou's video. A lot of the videos and shorts he posted is very good you should try them out.

I thought you were Papa Mango, since I'm looking thru a tiny cellphone screen.
Forehands similar, but he has a great backhand...and 4.5.