Welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast! If you love tennis and want to improve your game, this podcast is for you! Whether it's technique, strategy, equipment, or the mental game, tennis professional Ian Westerman is here to make you a better player. And now, here's Ian! Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, experts, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Today's episode of the Essential Tennis Podcast
is brought to you by tennistours.com. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. On this episode of the Essential Tennis Podcast, I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to download today's show and give it a listen. I hope that it's going to be helpful to you and give you some ideas about how you can improve your tennis game and move up to a higher level of play. That's always my goal when I create each and every one of these shows.
Before we get to today's topics, I want to send a message out there to all of you gear heads, all you guys who are infatuated by rackets and strings and grips and footwear and clothing and all of that stuff. If you're a huge gear head and you'd love to have an outlet for that, I'm looking for a writer to write for my gear review blog at essentialtennis.com. I've had a really hard time keeping a writer for that blog for some reason I've gone through tons of them.
And if you feel like you could be reliable and you would enjoy writing content for that blog, I'd prefer that if you had some kind of certification or experience actually working with equipment, if you're a master racket technician, et cetera, that would be best. But I'm not going to make that a requirement either way, just send me an email to Ian at essentialtennis.com.
I'd love to hear from you if that's something you'd be interested in. And this is something that would essentially make you publish. You could put it on your resume as being a writer on a tennis website. So send me an email and hopefully I can find a new person to start getting some great reviews of rackets and strings and all of their types of tennis gear out there on the blog. All right, let's get down to business. Sit back, relax, and get ready for some great tennis instruction.
All right, let's get started on the first question in today's show. And it's a simple one, but one that's excellent and something that's going to create a lot of discussion here on the podcast. Ben G. in Lexington, Kentucky wrote in and said, what do you think about a podcast of the worst habits you see in teaching? As in, what are the things that a player should go out of the way to not do?
Ben, that's an awesome question. And I thought about having a guest on to talk about that. Another teaching pro, but kind of ran out of time and doing that. And so I'll just go through it myself. And what I've outlined here are in my opinion or in my experience, the top three technical mistakes that recreational players make.
And this is just based on what what I've seen teaching full time over the last, because it's been about six or eight years now spending 30, 40 hours a week on a tennis court trying to help recreational players just like you guys listening improve. In my opinion, these are by far the three biggest mistakes that will lead you guys down the wrong path as you trying to make yourselves better tennis players.
And these are all extremely common things. So top three, number one, a short and tight swing on ground strokes, both forehand and backhand side. And this is definitely the number one technique issue that I battle with every single day as I'm on the courts trying to get my students to to improve. And most often when recreational players try to hit the ball harder on either their forehand or their backhand side, their technique gets shorter.
And this is what I see most commonly not all the time. And in my experience, it definitely depends on what kind of background players have playing other sports. If you're, you know, if you've already played a lot of golf or you played baseball or maybe lacrosse or hockey or some other type of sport or game where a long swing was needed to create really good results.
Maybe you're lucky enough to go ahead and just do it naturally correctly, which is to make a racket path that goes through the ball with good length so that you can really create the most amount of power and racket head speed possible. But from what I've seen with kind of average level athletes and, you know, just your typical person off the street who has decided that they really enjoy tennis and they want to get better at it.
When I see that type of person try to create more power, usually their stroke actually gets shorter instead of longer. And this is due to their muscles tightening and tensing up as they make their swing. And the result of that is a shorter racket path and less racket head speed.
Now, even though the racket moves faster because they're trying to accelerate it more and so, you know, that they try to move it real quickly through the point of contact, even though everything might tighten up and tense up and their overall length of swing might get shorter, it might be that they actually do speed the racket up ultimately.
In other words, compared to kind of an average-paced swing or a rally ball where they're just trying to get it in play, it's very possible that even though they get tighter, the racket might move faster. But in the long term, that technique is not going to serve you very well and it's going to choke off your potential to continue making your ground strokes better and better and better down the road as you keep on working at your game.
And this reminds me, until the story a lot, I think I've only talked about this one other time on the podcast and it was quite a while ago. I was listening to a golf podcast. This is probably a year, a year and a half ago, back when I was really into golf and trying to improve my technique.
And I heard an excellent quote from one of the top instructors in the U.S. and the person who's interviewing him asked him, what was the number one mistake that the amateur golfers made as they tried to hit a good golf shot? And he said, amateur golfers too often try to hit the ball. That should strike you as odd right off the bat. He said, amateur golfers try to hit the ball and that's a huge mistake.
And this 100% applies to tennis as well. And in my experience, really transfers over for amateur tennis players as well. And what he means by that is rather than making a high quality swing and using a high quality technique and simply letting the ball be in the middle of that swing and kind of just letting the ball get in the way of that good technique and just focusing on the technique, both golfers and tennis players tend to consider the contact point as being all important.
And don't get me wrong. I mean, the contact point is hugely important. And what happens just before and just after contact is, you know, the massive part of what makes the shots successful. But what this instructor was talking about was having the contact point be the number one focus for a golfer or in this case, a tennis player.
And so these players can just focus on just that part of the swing. And the result is kind of a bracing for impact. And, you know, the racket is being accelerated towards the ball just to make contact with it. And very often tennis players kind of have this this the kind of bracelet here comes the ball and I'm going to hit it. And there's just this like quick jerky acceleration towards the ball and everything just comes to a halt.
As soon as contact gets made and there's a lot of tension there and everything gets shortened up. And that's no good both on the golf course and on the tennis court. And I'm going to go ahead and stop using golf references now. I know a lot of you guys out there aren't big fans of golf. But there's a lot of techniques similarities between golf and tennis, which I found really fascinating as I was really trying to improve my my swing about a year ago.
Now so so that's number one. That's big habit or worst habit. Biggest mistake number one is a short and tight ground stroke. Do yourself a favor by focusing on having a lawn swing, a relaxed swing. And being nice and loose and don't even really think about the contact point. Make sure the racket moves through that area smoothly like you're just not even really thinking about it. Just focus on the finishing position.
You're you're finishing spot of your swing and accelerate to that point. Don't accelerate to the contact point. Don't accelerate up to the ball and then have that beer goal and then everything stops as soon as you make contact. Accelerate all the way through to wherever you're finishing your swing and make that your number one goal on your forehand and your back end.
All right, worst habit number two is that recreational players move their racket a lot on volleys. If I could cure one technique mistake in tennis across the entire world, it would be this. It just it agitates me so much volleys should be very simple. They should be very straight forwards. There should be no extra stuff in terms of technique and that they should be a calm and relaxed redirecting of the ball.
And that just doesn't happen for so many players. This is definitely in my top three. In fact, this may be number one. I don't know. It's close between this and the short tight ground strokes on both the forehand and back inside. It's a close call for me. But this is a huge one and two two things that you should not do on your volleys number one. I hate the word punch for volleys. Don't punch at your volleys. Punch. I mean, just think about a punch.
If you're watching boxing or mixed martial arts or whatever and you see somebody punch somebody else or you see somebody punch a heavy bag, you know, in training for boxing or martial arts or whatever, you'll see a short, abrupt, intense contact between the fist or the glove of whoever's doing the punching and the bag or the body of whoever that they're trying to punch.
And this is not good technique for volleys. You should also not swing your racket, meaning your racket head and your racket face is moving back and forth, you know, across your body, like it would for a ground stroke. That's not something you want to do either.
What we want is something in between again, a dislike punch a lot. You also should not swing out of volleys. That's not a good idea either because that's where things start to get sloppy. What you want is a smooth and relaxed guide of the ball. You're trying to guide the ball towards your target and your racket face should be facing towards your target during most of this technique.
Ultimately, what this means is that you want to use bigger muscle groups instead of smaller ones. Here's what I mean by this. When you move the racket head around a lot and you move the racket face around a lot and you're trying to kind of accelerate through the ball and swing your racket towards the ball.
Ultimately, that's from using your hand, your wrist and your forearm a lot to kind of move, you know, maneuver the racket, swing it back and forth like you would on a ground stroke from, you know, your right side of your body to your left side of your body or vice versa. That's from using a lot of smaller parts of your body. If you use the bigger parts of your body, your legs, your core, your shoulder to move the ball, I'm sorry, move the racket smoothly through the ball.
You can guide it towards your target very accurately and still with reasonably good pace doesn't have to be a weak shot if you use the bigger parts of your body to tell the ball where to go. You want to take the momentum that's already on the ball. Typically, when you're hitting the ball, your opponent or your partner has driven the ball towards you. They've hit a forehand or a backhand ground stroke or maybe you're in a quick net exchange back and forth and there's already pace on the ball.
It hasn't bounced yet. You're taking it right out of the air and you've got some momentum to work with already. You want to take that energy that's already on the ball, put your strings behind the ball and send it back towards the ball. Back towards your target. I like the word guide for this to send the ball towards the direction that you want it to go.
This is as opposed to the two biggest mistakes. Number one biggest mistake on ball is too much moving of the racket and swinging it back and forth. The second mistake that I feel is, listen, I'd rather that you guys punch at your ballies than move your racket around a lot. That's definitely the case. If you guys are going to make one mistake or the other, I'd rather that you're abrupt and short and you punch at your ballies.
Rather than that by far, then you guys move the racket around a lot and actually swing the racket towards the ball. Please punch it if you're going to do one or the other. I don't like punch either because it's abrupt and short and tense and I don't like that for any shot in tennis. So make it a guide. Hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully my terminology there is not too vague and I've explained that well. But that's definitely in my top two mistakes that recreational players make on the court.
So let's go ahead and go to number three. And this is in my number three out of my top three worst habits that recreational players make. Number three has to do with the serve and I've done this on purpose. I've done my best to try to spread this out. I did one on ground strokes, a worst habit for a ballies or net play.
And now a worst habit for serves. In my opinion, the worst habits, overall that recreational players have on their serve is serving two straight or even downwards towards their target. A good serve is an upward swing. Even on a flat serve, your technique and your motion should be accelerating the racket upwards towards the ball upwards, not straight.
It's definitely not downwards. A serve is not like a jump serve in volleyball or a spike, but we're not trying to hit the ball down at the net. I don't care how tall you are, you should not be trying to hit the ball down at your target. And many recreational players hit their serves in that direction, either accelerating their racket path, the direction that the racket is moving either horizontal straight out towards their target, or they actually accelerate the racket down towards their target.
And the only way to make a serve doing one of those two things consistently is to have a slightly open racket face. So a forward motion and a slightly open racket face, the result of the ball is a ball flight that travels straight or slightly down. It has kind of a straight trajectory right towards its target, or as I said, even a little bit downwards. Now, it is possible to make a serve this way.
So all of you guys thinking about sending me an email right now saying, well, with the force of gravity and the drag of air. And if you're a six foot player with this reach, making contact from this height, I've seen all the physics reports and all the different equations and what speed and what height over the nets and all of this stuff.
I've seen all that stuff. I'm totally aware that at a certain contact height, it is possible to actually hit the ball straight or hit it down and make the serve. And I see players do it every single day, especially when they hit with a little bit slower pace. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a serve that way. What I am saying is that when you hit in that direction, the trajectory that the resulting shot travels across is extremely low percentage.
You don't want to hit a shot from behind the baseline that has to stay inside the service box, which is 18 feet inside the baseline and try to hit it straight. That's a problem because a straight trajectory carries with it a very low margin for error. If you hit just a little bit too high and you hit the ball across a relatively straight line, it's going to go out very easily.
If you're hitting across a very straight line or trajectory towards your target and it's a little bit too low, you're going to hit the net. This is the same thing as with ground strokes. This is why I always teach players first to make an upward swing towards the ball. That's so that they can curve the ball back into the courts. High level tennis players make contact all the way at the very peak of their technique on their serve.
It's an upward swing. In preparation for their service swing, they bend their knees, they drop their entire body downwards. The racket drops. Those of you who have studied service technique at all online with slow motion video know that there's a position called the racket drop as to get the racket dropped to get it down below the ball as far as possible.
When you watch professional players in slow motion, you will see that the tip of the racket drops well below their waist. They're dropping it way down below where the ball is. Number three, they tilt their shoulders upwards towards the ball. Big servers have almost a vertical angle from their dominant elbow. If they're right hand, they're right elbow up through their left hand. They're non-dominant hand as they tilt back and create an angle upwards towards the ball.
All of those things, the knee bend, the racket drop, the shoulder tilt upwards towards the ball. All of that is preparing to launch the racket and launch their body upwards towards the ball. All of that accelerates upwards towards the ball and contact is made at the very peak at the very top of this technique. A lot of times I've had players say to me, yeah, well, but they finish low. They make contact and they come down. Yes, but that's only after contact has been made.
Contact is made at the very top of all of that accelerating up towards the ball and then the racket comes down and then the body comes down. Contact is not made with the racket and with the body coming downwards. It's made at the very top of all of that momentum carrying up towards the ball. The serve is an upward hit. Get that into your guy's head. It's true. High level players make that upward acceleration and at contact the racket face is flat or at least very close to flat.
It might be close to tiny bit, maybe a couple of degrees, but it's definitely not open is my point. It's either flat or closed a little bit. The resulting shot has curved to it, whether it's a flat serve, quote unquote flat serve, which any tennis shot is always going to have some rotation on it. Whether it's a flat serve or a kick serve or any other kind of spin serve, a high level player after hitting a good serve creates a trajectory that has some curve in it.
Again, just like a top spin ground stroke does. That curve adds margin for error. It makes it safer because you can hit the ball up over the top of the net and that curve will bring the ball back down into the service box again. That's a huge, huge benefit when you're trying to hit a ball aggressively and still keep it in play.
That's a topic. I really feel strongly about it. A topic that recreational players probably fight me on the most when I have students who just aren't buying into something that I'm trying to teach them. This is probably the number one thing. A lot of players resist changing their technique to a more upward swing. It's just not something they're comfortable with or used to. But it's a really big difference between your average recreational player and a high level player or a professional player.
Okay, so in review, top three worst habits that I see in teaching short, tight ground strokes. A swing on a volley or a punch on a volley. Again, I don't mind a punch that much. It's definitely a lot better than a swing. That's for sure. And number three, hitting four words or downwards on a service on a serve technique. So, Ben, those are my top three mistakes and top three things that all of you guys listening should avoid at all costs.
If you're not sure if you're doing these things, get a video camera. You know what? All of you guys should have a digital video camera. You can get a regular flip cam for like $80.90 now. You can get an HD flip cam for I think they're like 130, 140 on Amazon.com. You can plug that right into your computer and see high resolution video. It's not super fast frames per second or anything, but it's more than good enough so that you guys can see what you're doing wrong and go from there.
All right, so Ben, great question. Enjoy talking about it. And hopefully this has been helpful to you. If you'd like any more feedback, please let me know. Good luck as you continue working on your game. All right, before we get to our second question on today's show, I want to remind you all about the official sponsor of the Essential Tennis Podcast.
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All right, our last question on today's show comes to us from Vajran in Croatia. And Vajran, I'm really sorry, I'm probably killing your name. And so I'll go ahead and just apologize up front. I'm not sure what the correct pronunciation is. So please, please forgive me.
Vajran is a 3.5 player again in Croatia. He wrote and said, the thing that I want to get advice about is an experiment that I tried on my serve and trying to develop a more aggressive and powerful first serve while maintaining my second serve at its current level. I decided to change my toss and throw the ball a bit lower and significantly more in front of my body to be able to create more pace and more spin, but more pace mainly.
Unfortunately, this experiment led to losing my consistency on my second serve and producing a whole lot more double faults than before. So my question is this, is it recommendable to have two different types of service toss? Is it even possible considering the problems that I've developed and keeping in mind all those problems that pro players often have with only one type of ball toss and various parts of their careers?
All right, so Vajran, do I recommend two totally different ball tosses and techniques because that's what that would mean when you put, basically when you put your toss and it's totally different spot, it changes the whole rest of your serve as well.
You can't just make a big change to your toss and use the same technique. Everything else has to change to accommodate that new location. So we're really talking about a completely different swing. And short answer is no. I definitely don't recommend that you do that.
Most likely, mostly for the sake of consistency and unity in your game, and it would mean twice as much work for you to continually try to improve two totally different serves than if you used, you know, basically the same toss and small changes to your technique between your first and second serve.
If you tossed in essentially the same place between your first and second serve, you could keep, you know, things like your rhythm, the rotation of your body, your contact points, you know, again, relatively speaking, all of those things could remain the same. Whereas this big change that you're talking about much lower and much farther in front, all of those big technique elements have to be different.
And so we're talking about trying to develop two completely different service techniques and at doubles your work as a player as you try to continue to become better and better on the courts. And I give this same answer when players ask me about something like maybe developing both the one handed and two handed backhand, something else that I really don't recommend for the same reason. It's two totally different swings.
And it's just that much more to work on and try to improve as you try to get yourself to be a better player. And the benefit almost never outweighs all that extra work. And this is especially since most of you guys listening, I assume, probably over 90% of you listening are recreational players, you know, people that have a regular, you know, job during the day, or maybe you guys are students and you have school during the day.
And you might have a couple of hours a week to practice and to play maybe two or four hours at the most. And so you guys want to be smart about how you use your time. And when you start really spreading out your asset of time, especially on the practice courts, as you try to improve your technique, doing things like this is just not something that I recommend.
Now, this is unless your previous toss, Vydron, if your previous toss was really high and it was far behind you, you know, where you were constantly like leaning backwards to get to the toss and it was super high. So you had kind of busted up your rhythm and you had to wait till long time for the ball to get down.
And unless that was the case, your change isn't going to lead towards better technique anyway. It sounds to me like you're trying to toss it low and kind of right in front of you, you know, out in front into the court, a couple of feet and probably making contact lower.
And basically exactly what I was describing in my first topic today when I talked about bad habits on service technique, it sounds to me like you were trying to put it low right in front of you so that you could make a low contact point and hit the ball just straight out in front of you into the box with a slightly open face to make sure that it makes it over the net.
This is really common technique, but it's definitely not a very athletic motion and it's not going to give you a lot of potential as far as developing a higher level serve in the future. Now a lot of players are very consistent hitting the ball this way, but it's not a technique that I like again because it's just not very good as far as fundamental use of your body goes for creating pace and spin, et cetera. It's not going to leave you a lot of room for growth.
Now there's one exception to all of this and I've told you that I don't like your idea. I don't like you having two totally different, you know, motions and tosses in general. I also don't like the idea of the specific technique you're talking about. However, there's one exception to both of those things. Previously, you were just really struggling with your first serve and weren't making it very often and this big toss change made an immediate improvement.
And Vadran has told us already that this hasn't worked out very well for him, but this is more for the rest of you guys listening. If that big toss change makes an immediate improvement and ultimately you're happy with the results and in the long run, you're going to continue being happy with it, then fine. Go ahead and do it. Go ahead and make the change and have fun playing.
I don't think it's the best idea and I also don't think it's the best technique, but if you see an immediate improvement and confidence and consistency and you're happy with where it's at and you don't mind sacrificing some long term potential for short term success, then go ahead and do it. I want to make sure that I don't get too rigid and too strict about my views with technique. I know I have the tendency to do that both on the podcast and in person.
Ultimately, all of you guys listening, it should be your goal to enjoy the game, to have fun and if you can make a quick immediate improvement by even if it's not the best technique and you're going to be okay with that, you're okay with the fact that it's not the best technique and it might limit you as far as potential a little bit down the road.
Go ahead and do it, but just keep in mind, it's not going to be my number one suggestion. My number one suggestion is always going to be to learn the best possible technique and work hard at it and give yourself the best ceiling, you're best chance to continue making yourself a better tennis player.
I'm always going to be upfront with you guys about what changes will lead to the most long long term benefits, basically. That's always going to be my, the direction that I come at with my answers to your questions on this show. Those of you guys who come out and work with me in person at a clinic, etc. That's always going to be my perspective because that's just the way I think I don't like shortcuts in general and tennis is no exception.
I want you guys to learn the best possible technique. I just want you guys to know where I'm coming at in regards to that. So, Vadran, thank you very much for your question and hopefully you got a good idea of what I recommend here. I'm sorry that your change didn't work out very well for you.
In general, yeah, I do recommend that you have some kind of unity between your first and second serve that it should be slightly different techniques, but I don't recommend that you use totally different serves for those two. If you have a video camera, feel free to send me an email with a video clip showing me your serve and I'd be happy to give you some, some input, some further input as far as specific technique is concerned.
But thank you very much for being a listener in Croatia. I appreciate it and hopefully this, this episode has been a help to you. Alright, that brings episode number of 136 of the Essential Tennis Podcast to a close. Thank you very much for joining me on today's show. I hope that you enjoyed it and it's been informative and helpful to you.
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Just personal updates. Alright, so that brings today's show to a close. Again, thank you guys so much for listening for downloading the show. I really appreciate it. And I'll be talking to you guys again next week in the next installment of the Essential Tennis podcast. Until then, take care and good luck with your tennis.