I recently worked with a student who transformed his forehand in just seven days without taking a single lesson.
Now before you think this is some kind of magic trick or clickbait promise, let me be clear about what actually happened. This player followed a very specific five step process that I’m going to share with you, and the results speak for themselves. His forehand went from being technically broken to looking like a completely different stroke in one week.
But here’s the catch: he didn’t just watch a video and get better. He actually did the work, and he did it the right way.
The first step this player took was recording himself. I know this sounds obvious, but most tennis players skip this crucial step because they think they already know what they’re doing with their forehand. After all, if you’ve been playing for years, taken lessons, and won matches, of course you know how you’re swinging the racket, right?
Wrong.
You don’t actually know what you’re doing until you get third party verification. It’s way too easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re executing correctly just because you’re hitting good shots. Here’s the truth: you can hit really good tennis shots the wrong way. You can move your body poorly and still win points. That doesn’t make it right, and it definitely doesn’t make it optimal.
Even if you take regular lessons, your coach is probably missing things unless they’re also using video. Too much happens in too short a period of time for anyone to catch everything with the naked eye. Recording yourself removes all doubt and shows you exactly what’s happening.
The second step was comparing his video to professional examples. I took his forehand and put it side by side with Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Victoria Azarenka, and Caroline Wozniacki. What we were looking for was what movements were similar and what movements were completely different.
This is where things get interesting because even among professional players you’ll see different styles. Federer’s forehand looks very different from Azarenka’s forehand. But there are fundamentals that all high level players share regardless of their individual style.
At the point of contact when they’re balanced, all of these players have their hips and shoulders facing forward because they’ve rotated their body before making contact with the ball. This particular student was way short of that fundamental movement. He wasn’t even close.
You can do this comparison yourself. There’s tons of high quality slow motion footage of professional players on YouTube. Record yourself, grab a clip of your favorite player, and start comparing the fundamental movements they’re making versus what you’re doing.
The third step was creating stepping stones in his training. This is where most players fail in their attempt to change technique.
When you discover something in your game that’s way off from where it should be, trying to fix it all at once is like trying to cross a raging river by jumping into the rapids and swimming as hard as you can to the other side. The current, which represents your old habit, is going to sweep you downstream no matter how hard you fight against it.
Your old habit is strong because you’ve done it thousands or maybe tens of thousands of times over the years. Just because you now know what you’re supposed to do doesn’t mean you can snap your fingers and do it correctly when it matters.
You need progressions. You need to place stepping stones across that river so you can cross it one step at a time.
For this student’s forehand transformation, I gave him three training progressions starting from very easy and gradually getting more challenging.
First, segmented shadow swings focusing on stretching and leading with the body.
Second, smooth continuous shadow swings maintaining that same focus.
Third, dropping a ball to himself while executing the new swing pattern correctly. Each progression was a stepping stone that made the next one achievable.
The fourth step is where the rubber meets the road: you have to actually do the work. And here’s where most players sabotage themselves without even realizing it.
Let’s say you normally play tennis three times per week. You decide to play a match on Monday, another match on Wednesday, and then on Friday you’re going to train your new forehand. If that’s your schedule, you’re never going to develop a new forehand.
Why? Because on Monday and Wednesday when you play those matches, no matter how many times you tell yourself to use the new technique, you’re going to revert to your old forehand. You want to win so badly and you want to hit the ball in the court so desperately that your subconscious automatically takes you back to what you’ve done tens of thousands of times before.
You have to do the new forehand more frequently than you do your old forehand. Period. This student focused only on the new technique and didn’t play matches with his old habit. That’s a big reason why he made such a dramatic transformation.
The fifth and final step was to compare again. If you analyze your stroke once, discover a problem, do a bunch of training, and then don’t check again for six months, you might be really disappointed to find that you slowly merged back into your old habit.
Seven days after starting this process, I received a new video from this student and his forehand looked completely different. It was a massive improvement.
But here’s the reality check: he’s not fixed. Not even close.
He only completed three very controlled progressions under ideal conditions. Now the real work begins, taking stepping stone after stepping stone to make the new technique work under increasingly difficult circumstances until finally it holds up in real matches where opponents are challenging him and pushing him around the court.
How long that takes depends on three things: the quality of your repetitions, meaning actually doing the new movement correctly, the quantity of your repetitions where the vast majority need to be the new pattern not the old one, and your individual athletic ability.
If you’re serious about making real changes to your game, stop fooling yourself into thinking you can do it without video analysis and structured progressions. The players who transform their games are the ones willing to slow down, build the right foundations, and do more training than competing during the change process.
Your forehand can look completely different too, but only if you’re willing to follow the process.
Your coach,
Ian
