Richard's 2009 Forehands

This was Richard's forehand when I first recorded him even before I started coaching him. From the start his Unit Turn wasn't as good as it should be. The Unit Turn is one of the most important concepts for a player to develop a solid and compact technique. The Unit turn is the first part of the preparation. It starts with the turn of the shoulders with no independent movement of the racket, hand or arm. As you can see on the first forehand, Richard moves his racket first and the shoulder turn comes after. The last three, four years since I've been using this great concept in my coaching,(thanks to John Yandell and his site tennisplayer.net) I've been looking at it with deeper eyes and normally I can detect an imperfect unit turn On most of my students straight away. Sometimes though I need the assistance of the high speed camera to be sure and for the student to see it.
As a result of an imperfect unit turn, the shoulders that start to turn a bit late in the swing, don't turn as much as they could. On his full turn, Richard has his shoulders perpendicular to the net and you can't see his back. If you compare it with my forehand (see Forehand 3) you can see that my shoulders turn more than perpendicular to the net and you can see part of my back.
There is so much more about his forehand, but let us see the new way that Richard found to hit his forehand a year later


08/02/09




08/02/09 (500 fps)



20/11/09