No Strings Power Drill

Good drill now to test A

Hi Ian, this is Charlie from London , England. Great video, and I'd like to add another dimension to it. This summer, I spent a week training with Tomasz from Feel Tennis in Slovenia. What he showed me, which I've been using back in London, is to take a no string racquet and then attach a fishing net to it. You then get fed balls , just like your video, the difference is , that you do your stroke and FEEL the ball catch in the net, what this does is give you a feedback of impact without the impact. After swinging and catching let's say 20 balls, you then pick up you racquet, and it's amazing how nice and easy and relaxed you FEEL hitting balls. As a side benefit, you don't need to be on a tennis court, I do allot of off court training by simply doing a drop and hit(catch), so anytime you fancy a practice hit, just pick a safe place, drop the ball and swing your strokes normally and the ball ends up in the net, voila!! I'd love to hear from you guys/ gals that try it, it's great fun, enjoy, Cheers, Charlie

Truth is that this drill has been around for decades, good to see it getting wider exposure via the net. Try to work on taking the ball on the rise more, staying relaxed with a "go to the ball attitude" vs. backing away from it, ….. a strong opponent with sense that you're timid and take control of points by creating "time and space" pressure.

Excellent. I'll be trying the 'no string' drill when our tennis season starts (hopefully early April). In the meantime I'll have to be content with 'shadow' drills.
Many thanks
Joe

Ian – have an alternative, but similar, tip that I happened upon while recovering (over several months) to a wrist injury. In short – when I had my wrist injury – any shot hit forcefully – especially outside the sweet spot – created a lot of pain in my wrist. When your wrist isn't hurting – yes you notice that you're not hitting the ball cleanly in the sweetspot – but since your non-sweetspot stroke usually results in a shot that doesn't have a lot of pace – your natural reaction is to SWING HARDER instead of focusing on swinging loosely and focusing on hitting the ball in the sweet spot. However, you do the latter naturally when your wrist is hurting, because your mind tells you that the most important thing is to minimize the pain factor. It's amazing how quickly you start to find the sweetspot even though you are holding your grip very loosely and – similarly – your footwork and preparation also tend to get better – as it's easiest to make contact in the sweetspot if you're at the right spot and your timing and preparation are spot on.

You are soon amazed at how easily and freely you are swinging and yet how much pace and spin you are getting by just hitting cleanly (sweetspot and timing etc) and how your wrist doesn't seem to be hurting when you are hitting the ball and you feel like your arm isn't tired at all because you are holding the racquet very loosely and swinging your racquet very freely – just letting coiling and then letting the racquet go — you know – just like you are supposed to do and like you trying to get us to do by your drill.

Of course – once my wrist started to feel better – it was easy to get back to bad habits and start gripping and ripping and missing the sweetspot – especially at the beginning of workouts – and trying to rectify the bad results by swinging harder. I have to constantly remind myself in those instances to loosen my grip and my swing in an effort to find the sweetspot and the attendant pace and spin that comes from a cleanly hit ball.

An interesting idea but hardly different to hitting an imaginary ball with a normal stringed racket – that is what most people do when they want to get their swing relaxed.
It was interesting to see that you did not really had a very consistent racket swing pass when you used unstrung racket despite the ball machine obviously feeds a very consistent ball. Then the very first ball you hit once you changed your racket back to the stringed one was quite a mis-timed attempt and the more balls you hit with the stung racket the better your shots your were hitting…
To be honest I think that the benefits of this exercise will be very different depending on where the player is in his or her development and it will be very useful for you to point out at what level of players an exercise is aimed at .
I would not recommend this exercise to those who is not yet developed a well established technique or suffer with mis-timing balls often. By the way Ian I also noticed that you are not closing the racket face well enough. On your backswing on some forehands the racket face was almost perpendicular to the ground – some room for improvement here 🙂
Once again thank you very much for ( as always! ) an interesting video providing plenty food for thought

Omg…brilliant, and so simple! Even sitting here in my office watching the video, I could actually imagine how this is going to FEEL on court…and oddly enough, my shoulder quickly relaxed right now! I didn't realize how much tension I was holding as I'm writing, but the vicarious tennis imagery "fixed" it. All my rackets are due for stringing, and I'm going to keep one of them unstrung for the spring season. I'm going to experiment with using this as a regular part of a warmup for couple of minutes, each time, until that particular feeling of relaxation / looseness / range of motion is encoded into muscle memory.