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VOLUME 1: THE FOREHAND
Part 8: Aggressive Backfooting & Timing a Loop:
Previously we saw Mats Wilander hitting off the back foot, which he does from a kind of neutral position, with his weight perfectly centered and going nowhere. This is because Mats is directing the lion's share of his efforts up the back of the ball. And because he's hitting mainly upwards, there's no need for him to get body weight travelling forward.
Lleyton Hewitt is also about to hit off the back foot, but his intentions are different from those of Mats Wilander.
Aggressive Backfooting
I like the way Hewitt plays tennis, both mentally and emotionally. His stroke play is also very efficient and he hits most types of shot consistently well.
Roll over the first 4 buttons and you'll see that Lleyton's forehand wind-up is a large loop, which he kind of throws into action with his left hand in the first frame.
By using your non-playing hand to shift the racket into the loop, you lighten the work load of the playing hand... oh, and you also help get your shoulders fully turned.
You can see at the start of the sequence that Lleyton has taken a full body turn, to move across and cover this ball. However, pretty much simultaneous with the looping of the racket head, Lleyton's back foot is setting up a perfect contact (which 'opens' his stance), and we can see it sliding closer to the line of the ball in 2 & 3.
In 3 & 4 Lleyton drops his racket down, the back foot settles and he sinks down onto that back foot.
But is the weight centered neutrally on the back foot?
In 5 we see that it is not.
Lleyton has angled his efforts forward off the back foot. This suggests the weight is being similarly angled through for a flatter, more powerful groundstroke.
I want you to run the full stroke and see how Lleyton ends up shifting everything through off the inwardly, aggressively angled back leg. First of all he cranks up his racket head and then unloads it with forward-shifting aggression. This could be described as attacking off the back foot, or aggressive backfooting.
Cast your mind back to the Michael Chang forehand: do you recall Who Flung Chang?
Well, this is as an Australian relative of the 'Who Flungs', their long lost convict-cousin, Who Flung Digger!
What we are seeing is an aggressive right side of the body, from the hitting shoulder down. Watch again as the racket head is driven through: the elbow and shoulder follow the racket head, then the upper right side of the body gets kind of sucked in to the vacuum, and eventually the right foot, too, which then catches his forward shifting efforts at the end of the stroke. It pans out from the top down.
This is once again the after-shot fall out from a player's efforts, which occurs when a player has stuck additional types of force onto the forward swinging racket head: namely, shoulder spin and some muscular force. Both primary and additional are types of force that we shall come across time and again (see chapter 10), as we navigate a path through the wonderful world of tennis excellence.
But what has Hewitt done to ensure this aggression succeeds?
What variation in Hewitt's stroke has allowed this aggression on a topspin forehand?
What in particular is essential to it’s success?
You should be able to answer this one straight away: if you can't, then you're not absorbing the really important stuff, in spite of my best efforts at brainwashing!
I have once again highlighted the racket head/face, as it travels up n' over on the follow through. As aggressive as this shot may be, it still contains heavy topspin.
Forehand Variations: Timing a Loop
Properly timing a loop can be problematic because you have to cover more air space than you would for a straight, Connors-like take back ...and you still have to meet the ball out in front. So, having someone hammer balls at you from the other side of the court is not an ideal situation in which to develop a loop.
Children can initially struggle with loops because they don't have the necessary strength to whip the racket through the air quickly, so loops for kids are best developed on easier, slower balls, fed by a sympathetic practice partner, teacher or parent.
From a coaching point of view, they can also be developed and overseen in stages, starting with a straight take back of the racket for the very young, and gradually working in stages to the full enchilada.
But if your child or pupil shows talent from the outset, and plays quite naturally with a looping of the racket head, then let the talent flourish.
Good coaching is about letting the talent within the individual find its true form, and this is best achieved by encouragement and oversight, rather than strict enforcement.
What is for sure is that when you rise above club level, loops are an essential part of whipping up racket head speed, for both power and topspin, so if you're destined for greatness you're going to need one. Now let's take a quick look at how Jim Courier times his loop.
When Jim makes his way into view in 11, you can see he's set the racket off into his loop with the left hand, just like Lleyton.
Unlike Lleyton, however, Jim Courier uses a really compact loop. His elbow stays quite low on the wind-up and the racket head barely gets up to head height.
Jim's style of hitting is muscular and quite brutal, almost like he's trying to pummel the poor ball to pulp, using just strings and shoulder strength.
I mentioned previously in these pages that a loop requires very precise timing. If you start the loop too soon, you will either stop mid-way to let the ball come to you (in which case it ceases to be continuous, therefore it ceases to be an effective loop), or, in an effort to let the ball catch up, you'll slow the loop down to such a speed that it becomes useless for giving you additional racket head speed. Or when you get a faster ball, you may struggle to get the racket 'looped' through the air fast enough to meet the ball in front of your body, in which case the loop will be the cause of a late contact.
In the second and third frames of the sequence, watch how Jim's racket rises into a loop pretty much in sync with the rising ball: Jim's racket rises into the loop as the ball rises from the bounce.
This isn't a hard and fast rule, but on slower, more manageable balls it gives you something to concentrate on when trying to hit with a looped wind-up.
First of all you turn and move to cover the ball, like the players do in both of these photo sequences.
Then, begin your loop the moment the ball begins to rise from the bounce, mirroring the rising ball with your rising racket head.
As the ball starts to fall you also drop the racket head, speed it up accordingly and swing through to a forward contact, roughly at waist height.
Note that this is intended as an aid to developing a loop only when hitting a friendly, falling ball, which gives you far more time to consider what you are doing, and also the time to develop your loop in more of a comfort zone (than the battle zone of competition).
Different Strokes: Late and Swift
Steffi Graf had one of the fastest loops I’ve ever seen which, in comparison to most other players, she started late. So late, in fact, that many coaches would’ve corrected it early in her junior career, thus ruining one of the games greatest ever strokes.
Run this sequence of Graf again in the final 5 frames Steffi’s loop (largely) takes place after the ball has bounced. As I’ve said, this would be considered way too late by (way too) many coaches, but obviously not by Steffi’s dad.
And it was the very lateness of her loop that encouraged a swifter loop, and the speed at which she loops the racket head makes up for any lateness...and also increases her racket head speed.
Project Forehand Loop
What I'm striving to do is give you, the reader, the knowledge to both understand tennis technique and apply that knowledge to your own game, or those of your friends, kids or pupils.
If you've made sense of my writing, your knowledge of the technical side of tennis should be rising fast. So, here's a project to test your ability to expand your own knowledge base, and also put it to good use.
Next time you watch TV tennis, make some recordings of players' loops and study them. See how each player times the loop, in relation to the oncoming ball, and whether they use a shorter, shallower loop on a faster ball, or no loop at all when returning a fast service.
Then, apply what you learn from these professional player techniques to your own game.
When I was coaching and writing regularly about tennis technique, I had a library of televised matches to complement my collection of hi-speed sequence images, on both clay and hard courts, and I'd study the tapes regularly. Television pictures shot from directly behind the court will provide the best angle of how individual players time the loop, and slow-mo's are always good to have...but these days you can just slow them up yourself.
