Looking to add more power to your forehand??? Today we show you how a hammer can make you hit your forehand harder. This video is for players with a PlayYourCourt rating of 60 and up.
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Here’s a transcription below for those who like to read ????:
– [Nate] Hey guys, it’s Nate from Play Your Court and today we’re gonna talk about how this hammer can help you get more power on your forehand. Today we’re talking about forehand power and the hammer technique. This is for players with a player court rating of 60 and up. If you’re not familiar with the player court rating, this is for an advanced intermediate with a USTA 3.5 rating and up. Alright guys, so what are we talking about today? How can this hammer help us get more power on our forehand technique? Alright. So first let’s just talk about the dynamics in how a hammer actually works. Most of you know this, but let’s just talk about something that maybe we take for granted. We know that if we’re using a hammer straight ahead or up above, so let’s say we’re hammering a nail into the wall, that we’re allowing the weight of the head to lag back and allowing our wrist to stay loose until contact where the wrist becomes taut, all right? Now what about if we were hammering at a door frame and we couldn’t get low enough to hammer straight on? And we started using this hammer from the side. The same technique applies, right? But what we’ll notice is if I wanted to get a little bit more power through the strike of the head of the hammer, I’m going to allow this lag to get a little bit further behind and again allow it to come taut, all right? And this is creating the slingshot effect that we actually use on our forehand. And what this is called is getting into the slot. S-L-O-T. One of the most important parts of the forehand. Okay guys, what is the slot? Alright, the slot is this part of the groundstroke, specifically on your forehand that when we’re getting the racquet back through the unit turn, we’re allowing the racquet to get behind the hip here. All right? And just like we showed you with the hammer, this creates an extreme amount of force to where the racquet head catches up to the ball much like a whiplash effect. All right? So what we can do here to practice this, is first initiate with the racquet slightly behind the hip. All right, and this is important, we don’t want the racquet all the way back on the other side of the body. It’s just slightly behind the hip to where we’re going to catch up to the ball through contact. So to practice this, you can start with the racquet here and swing to the ball. Now, ideally we get this to happen organically. And what we really want to focus on is not putting the racquet anywhere. So that little exercise is just to get you to help feel where the racquet should go. So let’s talk about the dynamics of this stroke and how it actually happens organically. So through the forehand, through the unit turn as I’m taking the racquet back, what’s gonna happen is once I’m in this position here with the racquet take back, as I’m moving forward and creating force through the kinetic chain, we know that’s from where I’m exerting force through the ground it pushes back up through my knees, my hips are going to start firing forward and that’ll happen automatically, right? Yeah, that’s right, how nice is that, that this is actually going to be something that you don’t have to think about. But here are the keys. One, my hand has to be light enough, I have to have a loose enough grip that I’m not controlling the racquet. Let it go where it wants to go. It’s a lot like a cartwheel. If you imagine doing a cartwheel and the left hand hits the ground, the right hand goes no matter what. It doesn’t have a choice, right? So as I pull the racquet back through this position, and my hips rotate, you’ll notice here this is the slot. This is the position in which all power is created, right? With solid contact, the racquet now catches up to the uncoiling of my hips and the racquet comes all the way through, all right? With this slot, if we can play with this and kind of examine what that feeling is and focus on contact. Your forehand is going to pick up just tremendous power. I think by exercising this and practicing a few times your forehand is gonna be a monster in no time.
– [Scott] So guys, I hope you enjoyed that video from Nate with some great instruction. I’m sure it really helped your game. But the bottom line is, as good as Nate is he doesn’t really know you or anything about your game. So what I want you to do, click the button below answer some questions for us about your specific skill level. We’ll then send you some custom video coaching with things that you need to be working on. Just click the button below, Nate and I’ll do the rest.
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