Dear Tennis Afficianados,Have your ever wondered about the relationship between the hand power and leg power.
In teaching of both the forehand and the backhand, most coaches invariably look at the swing shape to correct his / her students. I can safely say that very few focus on the legs at both the movement to the ball and effecting pivoting.
While it is important to have a correct swing, coaches may have missed out a important factor in power generation.
Let me share with you what I mean..
Let's say we isolate our power generation to the hands and keep the legs still. To hit a certain distance we will have to swing harder.
Now if include the leg PIVOTING and STEPPING before the swing, to achieve the same distance we need not swing as hard.
Now if we include the MOVEMENT to the BALL as slowing and PIVOTING in time to swing, our SWING power can even be further reduced.
So why is it that we still see players moving to the ball well and still generating lots of hand power to swing the ball.
It is quite obvious that the power generated from the MOVEMENT to the ball has NOT been properly TRANSFERRED into the PIVOTING / STEPPING and the PIVOTING/STEPPING has NOT been properly transferred into the HAND SWING.
However if the energy transfer is done fluently, we will realise that our swing can be very small to give the same power to travel the equivalent distance.
Which effectively means we should concentrate on EFFECTIVE movement to effect proper energy transfer so that our swing is ENERGY efficient.
So there is effectively an INVERSE relationship between LEG power and HAND power.
i.e the MORE Leg power we use , the LESS hand power we need..
and there is a also another paradox..
i.e the BETTER we move, the BETTER are we positioned to hit the ball CONSISTENTLY
So perhaps to become a better player instead of focusing on the SWING shape , we should focus on our MOVEMENT to the ball and OPTIMUM enery transfer
Rgds
