Posted to Tennis forum
One of my favorite YouTube channels is Feel Tennis Instruction.
Over the past year, I’ve watched the videos “The Most Fundamental Tennis Serve Drills” and "Swing A Tennis Racket Like A Weight Instead of Using It Like A Tool” several times. Given example of weight: a heavy backpack. Given examples of tool: pen, phone, scissors, dinnerware, corkscrew. To swing the backpack, I’d need to use more than just my hands or arms. The tools require the precision of hands and fingers and no torso movement.
My take home lesson: use the racket like a weight in serves and groundstrokes. With volleys and slices, use the racket somewhat more like a tool with a firmer grip.
I put eight balls in a plastic bag as directed and swung it around, learning the loops of the service motion. After blowing out a few bags, I ran a cord through the balls and kept swinging. I tried to transfer that motion to my serve. Because the eight balls weighed 16 oz and my racket only weighed 11, I didn’t feel the racket as a “weight” so I took off two balls. I could probably pull off another ball, but the effect of feeling the racket as a weight was already much greater.
The next step, was hitting a ball without going back to “tooling” the ball. While trying to feel the racket swing my goal was to swing relaxed and toss the ball so that the ball would just “happen to be in the swing path.” I may be getting easier power, though I think consistency comes from understanding how the racket needs to orient relative to the ball position. I don’t have a coach nearby that that can help with this so I’m making slow progress but it improves over just hitting boxes of balls. The challenge is trying to remember my goal and not fall into the rhythm of hitting balls.
