Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to this episode of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to talk about why you miss when you swing hard and more importantly, how to fix it, like exactly. And it's actually not even just shots for you swing hard and miss in the night or long or wide, but all tennis shots. This is how you adjust and fix
every tennis shot. I'm really looking forward to this topic. Let's go ahead and dive into it. This kind of connects to a story of a student who I worked with recently. He's a high school player. A really incredible athlete, big, strong kid, hit the ball a ton during our initial evaluation. I always run through kind of a standard evaluation with players. I had him hit forehands, backhands, valleys, overheads, first serve, second serves. And during that
period, he was just crushing balls. He wasn't making all of them, but I was just immediately blown away by his power and his explosiveness and his athleticism. He was just absolutely killing the ball. Definitely hitting serves over a hundred miles an hour. And again, not making all his shots, but forehands, he was probably hitting 80 mile an hour forehands. I mean, just really crushing the ball. Then we went on to play points. That's also a standard
part of my evaluation. When I work with a new student, I have them run through hitting all of their individual shots. Why record some baseline footage of their habits. Then we play points so I can see how they put everything together. And if you just looked at the data of the athleticism, the explosiveness, how hard the student was able to hit the ball, nobody would hesitate when I make this statement. He hits the ball way better than I do. If
you've watched me play tennis, I have some assets, athletically. I move smoothly and efficiently. I anticipate very well, but I'm not a big, strong kind of athlete. I'm very slim. I'm not a naturally strong person. I'm relatively well coordinated, but man, this kid is a way better athlete than me. Period. Just better all around athlete than me. There's just no question about it. So we went to play our points, our evaluation points. And I just
told him, all right, just played a win. And we played five service games back and forth, his serve, my serve. And out of those five service games, my student won one point. Literally one point. I was on my way to a golden set. I just just because if I had not lost that one point, I probably would have played one more game against him just to say, or just I have the chance to potentially say that I got a golden set. And please don't get me
wrong here. If you go watch the video that has this same title on YouTube, you'll see, I am not at all trying to beat him. It's not like I'm trying to embarrass him, and I'm hitting incredible shots and making him feel bad about himself. I'm just blocking the, especially on his first serves, he had several serves that were well over a hundred miles an hour. And I'm just blocking the ball back and play. And he's just missing. He's just
spraying the ball. He's making tons of errors. So I went through a process with him to show him like he has all the physical traits. He has all the athletic tools in his toolbox. But he can't string shots together. Confidently. Now in match play, his tempo dropped way down. So that's one issue. But then when he tried to be more assertive and hit an air quotes like good shots, he would just miss. You just spray the ball all over the place.
So first things first, we had to learn what technical elements make the ball go where it goes. And so this phrase I've been using for a little while, last couple of years in my content and my coaching, we're going to break it down today. And it's critical for you to understand because it's basically the key. It's like the solution to the puzzle of how do you make the ball go where you want it to go? And that phrase is the face sends
it. The path bends it. So in practical terms, it's important that we're going to keep things really simple today. Okay. I'm going to break down what that means in a second. But if you're one of those many like physics nerds out there that are in the tennis, I love physics nerds. I'm a physics nerd physics nerd myself. So I just want to say like from from the outset, I understand that what I'm about to say is simplistic and it doesn't
take every dynamic like element into accounts. But these first principles are the most important ones to understand and get. And then from there, you can sprinkle in more details down the road. Okay. So what I'm about to say is not 100% exactly accurate, but it's close enough that it's a good starting point to be able to understand what to do, what dials to turn when you miss a shot to put the ball in play. So the ball is only touching the
strings or face. That's what the face means, the racket face for a couple thousandths of a second, which is way faster than the blink of an eye. And in that instance, wherever the strings are facing, wherever the wherever direction, the racket face or the strings are facing, the ball is going to start off going in that direction for all intents and purposes. Okay. And so it's more complicated than that, but we're just keeping it simple for today.
So if the strings are angled upwards, or that's what we call open, the ball will go up. And if the strings are straight or flat at that little tiny instant in time, when the ball touches the strings, the ball will go straight. And if the strings are angled down or closed, if the racket face is closed, the ball will go down. So that's the first part of that phrase, the face sends it. And then at that same instant, the ball touches the
strings. Whatever direction the racket is moving up, down, or sideways will determine what kind of spin is on the ball, which causes the ball to curve or bend as it travels through the air. So for example, top spin is created when the racket is traveling upwards at that point of contact when the ball touches the strings very, very briefly. And back spin is created when the racket is traveling downward as the ball touches the strings.
And if the path of the racket isn't traveling up past the ball or down past the ball, if it's just traveling forward directly through the ball and in line with the angle of the strings at contact, the ball won't have any meaningful spin in either direction at all. And we can talk about side spin and stuff too. And there's a lot more details here. But I'm, again, I'm just keeping things simple for this conversation. So again, the face sends it. That's what
sets like the starting trajectory or path of the ball. And then the path of the racket bends it. Whatever direction up, down, or sideways, the racket is traveling as the ball touches the strings. That's what gives the ball spin and that curves or bends the ball. So with that information, you can reverse engineer any tennis miss and figure out specifically what adjustment to make on the next swing to hit exactly the type of shot that you want
to hit and make the ball go exactly where you want it to go. So here's a quick example from this student, this high school player. I asked him to hit five forehands in a row. Now we're kind of in training together. And I asked him to hit five forehands in a row, cross-corret and pass the service line. So kind of the back corner of the court in No Man's
Land. And one of the shots that he attempted to hit there traveled too high over the net and didn't have enough spin to curve back down into the court before it went too far. So went too high, traveled too far, passed the baseline, he missed the shot. On the very next swing, he slightly closed his racket face. So he tilted the strings downwards. By the way, he didn't change his grip. He just turned his hand downwards a little bit. And
by a little bit, I mean like a couple of degrees. And he dropped his racket head a little lower than the swing before to create a little bit more vertical or upward path. And the result was a lower shot over the net. Still plenty of clearance, but lower than the one where he missed long. And it had more curve and spin, which the combination of those two things kept the ball in play. So that's the solution. In a nutshell, you can use either
element, the face, the angle of the face or the path of the racket. And you want to pick the one that fits how big of a mistake you just made. If the ball goes way up over the top of the net, way higher than you wanted, it goes way too far. You're going to have to adjust the angle of the strings or the face of the racket. On the other hand, if you hit your net clearance, I keep your aiming three or four feet over the net. And that's
the height that you hit. But the ball just goes a couple inches too far. You can keep the racket face the same, but just swing from a little bit lower drop point with the racket head, swing a little bit more vertically. You'll make a little bit more spin. And that'll be enough difference to keep that same shot in play. Now, on the other hand, when you hit the net in tennis, it's all, it almost always means that your racket face is too close
or angled downwards too much. So on the very next shot, if you turn your hand a few degrees upward to open the racket face slightly, you'll clear the net on the next shot. And that applies to ground strokes, to volleys, to serves, to overheads, all tennis shots. Now, again, physics nerds, we're keeping this really simple, okay, for the sake of just learning these principles. There's more variables and there's more dynamics to play than what I'm choosing
to talk about today. But just wrapping your head around the fundamentals of these two critical elements is going to be enough to get you moving in the right direction and to be able to start making the right adjustment in real life, like in real time, from swing to swing. And that's the most important part. It's just kind of getting this fundamental, like foundational
starting point. And then we can always make it more complicated later. But this is enough for like 90, 95% of situations to make the right adjustment and put the ball in play. Now, one more key element at play, I will add one more element and it's a really crucial one. It doesn't relate to the phrase, the face sends it, the path bends it. But the third kind of critical part of this is the speed of your swing. How fast the racket is physically
moving. The slower the racket is moving, the less sensitive those other two variables are. But also the less competitive, your shot is going to be. So in other words, when your racket face is slightly more open, then you wanted it to be, your strings are angled upward a little bit more than what you wanted. But if you swing really slow and carefully, the ball is still going to go in play because it's just not moving very fast.
So there's very little risks to hitting the ball too far when you hit it very slow. And this keeps a lot of tennis players trapped and handcuffed at their level. Like they're too afraid to break through to the next level of acceleration and speed because they know that there's more risk of missing long. So instead of learning how to adjust the face and the path, they just turn the dial down on the speed of their swing and it gives them
their goal of putting more balls on the court. But it also keeps their level of play lower than it could be because they never hit the ball hard enough or with enough spin to be competitive at the next level of play. On the other hand, if you swing really, really fast and the strings are just a little bit too open, like if your strings are a degree or two angled upwards too much and you swing really fast, then you're going to overshoot
the court by a ton, unless you also have a lot of topspin. So this dynamic of swing speed and angle of the racket plays off each other. And the faster you swing, the more precise you have to be at the same time with the angle of your strings. And if you don't understand the correlation in the connection, then a lot of times tennis players will kind of get
brave and they'll try to hit a faster, harder, more high quality shot, miss it long. And instead of adjusting the angle of their strings, instead, they dial the speed down, which also works. It keeps the ball in the court more easily, but it keeps a lower ceiling over their potential for improvement because they get handcuffed to a slower swing speed than what they could potentially do. So throughout my training together with this high school
player, I was encouraging my students to commit to a six out of 10 swing speed. So what I mean by that is 10 out of 10 is like as hard as you physically can swing the racket. We all know that's going to result in a lot of mistakes because it's just way too hard to control those variables of the angle of the face and the path of the racket when you're trying as hard as you can. But here's the thing. If I allowed him to stay at a three out of
10, he's not going to reach his potential as a player. He's not going to beat the players that he should be beating because the quality and the competitive level of his shots is just not going to be very good. So for me personally, six out of 10 is right about the sweet spot to where you can hit a solid ball, but also it's not so fast that you lose control
of the angle of the face and the path of the racket. And just for context, during our evaluation together where I didn't give him any target or any goal or not playing points, I just said, here, hit four hands. Before we started keeping track of score or anything or I started asking him hit five in a row, he was pounding shots at like a eight or a nine out of 10. And he would make some of them, but other ones would literally hit the
middle of the back curtain. If you go watch the video, we're putting together about this. You'll see that he would hit like a laser into the middle of the wall like the back curtain during his initial evaluation swings. The ones he put in the court were really impressive and incredible shots, but he had no consistency or precision being able to repeat a quality
shot. And then on the flip side, when I gave him the challenge of making five four hands in a row, he was swinging like a three or a four out of 10, like less than half the speed what he was before I gave him the goal. So if you want to get better at tennis, you need to avoid hopping back and forth and back and forth between the extremes, hitting a couple really hard and spraying the ball and then hitting a bunch really slow and super careful
where you're not really challenging your opponents. It's critical to learn how to develop control and precision in your tempo and kind of hit the sweet spot in between. And the best players at your local courts are able to do that. They're able to maintain steady
confidence swing speed without having to slow down to keep the ball in play. And the reason why they're able to do that is because they understand how to, they might not be able to explain it, but they have figured out how to adjust the angle of the racket face and the path of the racket at contact to get the right combination of trajectory of
shot and curve or amount of spin. So with those principles in mind, my student was able to put five four hands in a row cross courts and pass the service line with a six out of ten tempo, really solid ball. Then he did the same thing hitting his forehand down the line. Then we applied that same concept to his serve and he was able to put a bunch of serves in play in a row without slowing down like he was doing during our match play.
In our match play, he was hitting these super careful, tentative second serves and still missing a lot of them. But even when he made it, like it wasn't a competitive shot. See, that was the only dial he knew how to turn in order to put the ball in the box. But then he'd go for like 110 mile an hour for a serve and just pound it and sometimes like hit the baseline with his serve. Other times he would hit it in the box, but it was only like
one or two out of ten. And then on a second serve, he was taking his foot way off the gas to put it in play. But when I taught him these principles, he was able to start with the confident yet controlled shot, just put the ball in the box. So after practicing these principles, we went and played some match play again. And it was literally like playing
against a different person. Now that he had the ability to adjust and he understood the connection between the angle of his racket face and the path that his racket was traveling on. Earlier in the day, all I had to do was just get one or two balls in play and really didn't even matter how good a shot I hit. If I just put it inside the lines, I would just win every point because he would just miss for no reason. Super impressive, like
athletic, you know, strong guy, but no ability to put a sequence of shots together. It definitely not competitive speed. Now afterwards, my student was actually engaging and controlled and competitive rallies with me. We were setting up patterns and he was winning points. Whereas before, I couldn't believe the streak I went on against him. And again, go watch the video, not doing anything fancy at all. Five games, he won one points. I did nothing
to really earn any of those points. But afterwards, it was night and day difference. We had multiple games that go to do back and forth. And like we were fighting for games back and forth, completely different. Super exciting to see that transformation of very short, just within a span of a couple hours working together. Now if you want to actually see him hit those shots and see the contrast, just go to YouTube, go to the Essential Tennis YouTube channel,
or do a search for Essential Tennis, why you miss on hard swings. And you'll see the actual real life examples of me working with this student. But for you, moving forward, the bottom line is remembering the magic phrase, which is the face sends it, the path bends it. And also sprinkle on top of that. The concept of tempo control, you combine those
three things. And man, that opens almost every door. We still need to be able to understand how to move our body and use the kinetic chain and swing the rack in, rack a path and stuff like that. But this is so, this is a huge chunk of being successful in tennis. So I hope this opens your eyes up a little bit, gives you some things to think about, go practice, controlling these different variables, turning these different dials, experiment with it,
ideally get a ball machine and just experiment with it. Hope this is super helpful. Thanks so much for listening today. I'll talk to you again in the next episode. For more free, game improving instruction, be sure to check out EssentialTennis.com, where you'll find hundreds of video, audio and written lessons. Also, be sure to subscribe to Essential Tennis on iTunes and YouTube, where we are the number one resource in the
world, providing passionate instruction for passionate tennis players. Thank you so much for listening today. Take care and good luck with your tennis.