Nice a million times better. You are contacting the ball way more in front. Still need to stop muscling the ball so much, which I believe comes from bit using your legs enough.
Over all I am glad you finally made this change keep it up
More left side shoulder prep on the forehand, you also following through to far on a few shots (forehand is ending up on the left side throwing your body weight), probably because you back leg is coming around mid stroke.
Looks better. Good job.
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Its definitely better. I could tell after 1 second of watching. I've said it before but your wife ia pretty good. Thats cool.
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You are hitting your FH's thru the court more than before with more offensive trajectory. You should be able to hit more winners rather than just forcing opponents to make an error. BH still needs some fundamental work. Andy Murray's videos show excellent upper and lower body positioning and movement on 2hbh.
Looks like you have joined the Microgel Radical team. Is that MP 98 or OS 107?
Nice hitting tlm, definitely a more penetrating ball. Have your grips always been this extreme?
Hitting through the court more with lower trajectory is what I have been working on, still have a long way to go.
I just changed to the radical mp98 a couple of weeks ago. I started demoing 18x20 patterns and really like the added control, plus the tighter pattern helps me lower the trajectory. I really don't think I've lost much spin compared to a 16x19.
Your shots bounce high and penetrate. Your right side prepares deep, the left side just isnt following. The arm motion and strike point are great, you seem to feel the ball. I notice you brush up more on the decline etc. The left side is going to give you power, id convert that into spin and control instead of raw power.
Be careful serving with balls in your right pocket, you naturally twist that way on the motion and could hurt, baggy pockets. Always on the left side for me. I made that mistake once and had to laugh
Yes I'm still missing out on some spin and power by arming to much.
She handles them well because she's good. She quick too. She reacts well to the serves and puts a good ball back.Ya she is a solid 4.0 level player and plays on a lot of teams. I'm lucky to have a live in hitting partner. Some probably think my shots are pretty weak because of how well my wife can handle them.lol
She handles them well because she's good. She quick too. She reacts well to the serves and puts a good ball back.
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I think your forehand has indeed made good progress, since the first video's you posted many moons ago. Also, it's cool that your wife hits with you.
This video runs fast. Click Vimeo, click full screen, view single frames around the labels by holding down the SHIFT KEY and using the ARROW KEYS. Negative times indicate time before impact in milliseconds (1/1000 sec)
1) There is minimal knee bend, minimal leg thrust. Maybe left foot not off the ground.
Impact frame labels & notes:
2) Shoulder Tilt. There is not much shoulder tilt. Compare at impact. A line shows the spine for reference. You do not tilt your shoulder girdle as the high level server. Compare the spine to shoulder tilt. Look in the mirror and tilt your shoulder girdle. Compare to high level servers at impact.
3) Upper Arm. Looks as if it goes forward and down. Compare to good practice.
4) Overall tilt to body and hitting arm angle. Compare the alignment of the upper arms to the left legs. You tilt to the right.
NOTE - to make these comparisons much more accurately the same camera angles should be used and high speed video.
5) Racket angle. Your racket angle, from this camera view, looks vertical and your arm looks too low. High level serve has hitting arm to right and racket to left. Compare.
6) Your racket is too blurry and you need high speed video to see if you are doing ISR but it would be the side-arm type ISR technique not like the high level serve.
General impression is that you have a technique as if you held out the arm to the side with some swing, some ISR with a forearm to racket angle and a forceful body turn where the racket was was located well out from the body's rotation axis. Speed can equal the radius X rotation speed. And your radius out is large. But that is a simpler technique than the high level service technique. It has some body rotation at impact but it is smaller and in the wrong direction to add speed to ISR which is very fast. The overall motion is not right and going to checkpoints probably won't work. Study the ISR serve.
For your ground strokes, you also seem to avoid the stretch shorten cycle and rotated your body very forcefully.
"Separation" involves a stretching of trunk muscles and the amount is estimated by looking at how far the shoulders rotate back from the hits. Go through your ground strokes and draw lines between your two hips and your two shoulders. Do the same for high level ground strokes. How much separation do you get in comparison to high level ground strokes? Djokovic uses as much separation as any. He is unusually flexible and may not be a good players to imitate. In other words, study separation and compare to yours.
Excellent tlm, you two have some very nice rallies.
You're hitting the ball as well as I've seen you. Most noticeable improvement for me is your distance between yourself and the ball. Excellent stuff man
The leg action is really missing in both groundstrokes and serve. You have a strong arm and a fluid swing so you can compensate for the lack of legs, but you'd get a bit more spin into the serve if you would bend your legs and move upward into the ball. A lot of your forehands start with a closed base and you swing your leg around. It makes it look like a good shoulder turn but its a just a very closed stance. You want to be neutral or slightly open and turn your body against the less closed pelvis creating a wind up to unwind into the ball.
But I'm not an accredited coach and you can take anything I have to say with a very large grain of salt. But if I was your, I'd be working on my setup to the ball and leg action. There are some things that should be posted on every tennis board:
"Bend your knees"
"Eyes on the contact point"
"Loose grip"
"Turn your shoulders"
"Low to high"
These fundamentals don't really ever change. So the two simple things I see in your practice session is the knee bending and the shoulder turn.
the starting position of his left hand definitely has a gulbis quality to it...The good news is you already have the skill part covered, simply moving your left hand with your right (like handcuffed) will explain this more than i can do in a book
the starting position of his left hand definitely has a gulbis quality to it...
definitely muuuuch better hitting (driving through the court vs. excessive topspin) from your earlier vids.
at least one drill tip i have, especially since you have such a consistent training partner... try positioning yourself with one or both feet inside the baseline... it will teach you to prep earlier (and smaller), which will set you up for when you're playing harder hitting players (or in general players that don't give you as much time to prep).
Ya shoulder turn and keeping good balance are two things I need to improve.
TLM, is it ok to post a couple of your pics (screen grab with snipping tool) to discuss shoulder turn? I sent a PM, but it would not allow ... perhaps your setting.
You are letting go of your non-dom hand too fast on the FH
There is really nothing "wrong" with your game. It just depends on how it scales against tougher opponents. You can just leave it as it is and continue at this level for life.
I think if you prepared earlier and don't wait for the ball to bounce before taking back the racquet, you have sufficient consistency, direction control, and footwork to be a someone no one wants to play.
I'm no coach, so consider the source of these comments. Your strokes look good... I think a bit more shoulder turn could smooth out the strokes a bit. I say this, because it's fresh on my mind. When changing to the 2hbh, I briefly (ok ... longer than briefly) forgot to have enough shoulder turn ... too many other things in the learning curve (not to mention timing). Then I moved back to the frickin Flip project ... and once again, the "enough shoulder turn" took a backseat. As soon as I took a bit more shoulder turn, pace was easier to hit, therefore everything smoothed out a bit. I naturally have low tension in my swings, but it didn't matter if I was starting from too short a shoulder turn ... I had to try and make it up with the arms.
The actual coaches here can for sure give better guidelines for shoulder turn goals ... say per stance, but here is my take:
- the shoulder turn is relative to your stance and hips. You hit most neutral stance FHs in your video, but you did have one open stance FH. IMO, that open stance FH shoulder turn was good... and the neutral stance FHs needed more. A shoulder turn facing the back fence in an open stance FH is good shoulder turn. A shoulder turn facing the back fence (wall ... you are indoors) with a neutral stance can be no shoulder turn at all ... i.e. in line with hip. IMO, your open stance FH looked smoother because of the shoulder turn. It certainly works out that way for me. I try to hit mainly semi-open FHs for that reason ... the shoulder turn takes care of itself ... i.e. more automatic.
In the first pic, neutral stance, shoulder turn is actually less than the hip. You can check the video, I might of got it a bit late. But in the second pic, open stance, that same shoulder line to the back wall represents good shoulder turn. You can go a bit more (feel the tension) on the shots where you want to go max. That's how I look at it ... I have base full shoulder turn shot ... and then I add more shoulder turn tension to go for max.
You have to watch a lot of pro FH video to find a neutral stance FH, but Nishikori came through for us, plus was helpful with the shoulder stripes on his shirt:
Check out your neutral stance shoulder line to Nishikori's. Back shoulder pointing past straight back. Also note it's like hitting a 2hbh ... looking over his lead shoulder. And then, his open stance shoulder line is pointing to the back fence. Good enough for Kei ... good enough for us I think.
Backhand:
I think the same thing here ... a bit more shoulder turn where you are looking over your right shoulder will be helpful.
That guy in the middle has lost a step (ok ... lots of steps), but I did finally learn the 2hbh shoulder turn lesson. But then I look at the pic on the right, and I think ... TLM and ByeBye still have some work to do. Probably wouldn't hurt to have a flexible back. I will say this ... the number one thing that made the 2hbh "fun" for me was the day I had good enough timing with the ball machine to actually take the full shoulder turn. I really wanted someone to see what was happening ... in case it was just a one day occurence.
Relaxed shoulders and arms with enough shoulder turn ... those were not optional in my learning curve. BTW ... have you ever tried starting in your 2hbh backswing with your racquet up like Nishikori above? You go straight back to the slot. Obviously it works for you ... but you might find the racquet drop adds a nice relaxed start to the swing. Since my pic above (looking the video that came from), I had a good preset with racquet angled up like Nishikori, but I was getting my hands behind me. That's why you just have to look at video of yourself ... you don't even know you are doing some things. An example, I saw I was hitting almost every 2hbh with a very closed stance. I have no idea where that came from ... probably my 1hbh habit. Easy change though ... set the hands closer to where Nishikori is above, and just go to a more neutral stance for my standard go to stance. The pros do hit more closed stance 2hbhs than I thought ... but I like pretty neutral like your stance.
EDIT: on the 2hbh... look at 00:35. A bit of butt cap towards the ball will create some lag ... rather than the racquet starting it's swing early.
EDIT2: just saw your March video. Outstanding improvement. That's fast.
Cheers ... enjoy your tennis.
Good stuff, looks much better. I guess even the most stubborn people can be convinced to change their opinions
You have nice power but can become better by hitting the ball sooner and discontinuing backing up from the ball.
Forehand looks solid and simpel (which is not a necessarily a bad thing in tennis). More of a loop though on the forehand would lead to more power and a smoother stroke.