Footwork, Grip, And Learning About The Shots In Tennis

Spontaneous and correct footwork is the main thing for making your entire body well-balanced and playing the best shot against the moving ball. This rule applies to all other sports such as Tennis where you need to strike a ball which is moving.

You cannot play a shot properly or even serve for that matter without the presence of a firm and proper grip on the racquet handle. When you are playing a forehand drive, the natural grip is best while a weaker or lose grip would be best for a backhand stroke, with a chop shot considered to be the most natural stroke.

To get a perfect forehand grip, you should hold the racquet keeping its face perpendicular along the court with handle positioning towards your own body along with the frame pointing towards the ground. For a natural and comfortable grip hold the handle, your hand, arm and the racquet in a one direct line. As you play or swing the racquet, your arm should aligned with the head of the racquet such that racquet seems as an addition to arm.

While playing a backhand shot a change in grip is necessary. To play you need to rotate your arm 45 degrees anticlockwise (considering you are a right hander) while continuously turning your body, and positioning yourself perfectly to meet and hit the ball back. This would make your hand move over the handle of racquet with your knuckles positioning upwards letting the stroke travel plainly across your wrist.

Though the grip described above forms the foundation for the grips used for various drives, you can change it slightly to suit your playing style while always making sure that it stays close to the logics involved.

Once you get acknowledged with the basic principles of handle gripping, the next principle or step to learn is body position. You should learn playing strokes in a proper sequence and not in arbitrary manner.

An important condition to play any given shot is that your body should be at 90 degrees on to the net where as your shoulders should be parallel to the direction of the flight of ball that is coming. You need to transfer the weight of your body from the back on your front foot in the same angle and direction of the shot at the exact time of impact. Even as your arm swing assesses the speed of stroke, it’s the weight of the body which you transfer to your stroke at the point of impact which determines the “pace” of the ball.

Now let us take a look at the difference between pace and speed which is used above. Pace is the power from which the ball jumps up from the ground, where as speed is the ratio (for example miles per hour) with which your ball travels in the air. However, there are times when a ball hits the turf at comparatively slow speed but jumps up with an astonishing force because of the weight that’s behind it.

There can be few players who only have either one of the two (pace or speed) in their strokes while some players may have both in their shots.

You need to learn strokes in tennis in a proper order that starts with Drive after which Forehand comes and then Backhand. Disturbing the order could put you into some serious trouble because you will not be able to counter attack from net if you don’t know how to play the drive, which gives you the only available success chance through a passing stroke. Moreover, till the time you do not have a nice ground shot to lay the ground work by proper opening, you will never be able to come to a point from where you can build upon an effective attack from the net.

As soon as you have a sound grasp of the fundamentals mentioned above, you can move to Service. After this, you should proceed to learn about Volley, than Overhead Smash followed by Half volley which is also termed as the Chop Stroke along with some minor ornamental shots.

By: John B Mayall

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