The Key To Consistency In Tennis – Smooth Strokes

You may have admired some pros hitting the ball with very smooth strokes and at the same time generating powerful shots with high consistency – all with seemingly no effort.

Just to clarify, by “smooth strokes”, I mean that the player’s movements are fluid rather than jerky.

These strokes also don’t look that fast, yet the ball almost always flies off the racquet extremely fast.

So, what is the secret behind very smooth strokes, and why should you look to develop them?

Why We Don’t Have Smooth Strokes And How That Hurts Our Game

The main reason you may not have smooth and fluid strokes without any jerky contractions is that you associate the word “hard” with hitting a tennis ball.

You may also interpret tennis strokes as hitting hard because you observe other tennis players hitting the ball.

But that interpretation and the idea of hitting the ball “hard” will most likely trigger a very jerky response of your body and arms.

As you swing towards the ball, you will contract many muscles in order to produce a “hard” or “strong” stroke.

While it may seem very obvious that that’s the way to hit a tennis ball and make it fly fast, it is in fact not the case.

A tennis ball weighs less than 60 grams.

Even when it’s flying towards you with a certain speed and therefore carries more energy, it is very easy to hit it back with almost no effort if we transfer our weight (which is typically 1000x more than the weight of the ball) against it and hit it in the ideal contact point where the kinetic chain of our stroke produces the most force.

While it is easy to hit the ball back when we time the weight transfer and our stroke properly, it’s not easy to achieve that accurate timing, which takes a long time to master.

But, even if you do hit it at the right time, if you are still thinking about hitting it “hard”, you’ll probably tense up too much during your stroke and make it very inconsistent.

There are two main reasons we’re very inconsistent if we have a jerky move in our stroke:

1. As we line up for the shot and our brain calculates the timing and the swing path to the ball, we may tense up or contract during our swing.

In response, we will pull the racquet slightly off its ideal swing path since contraction literally means making something shorter, in this case our muscles – therefore, the racquet is pulled slightly closer to our body.

That’s why we keep slightly mishitting the ball and lose consistency in the process.

2. As we contract our muscles, not only do we pull the racquet closer to the body, we also change its angle.

There are many muscles in our arms. When griping the racquet more tightly, muscle contraction and tension change the racquet angle during the stroke.

Most of the time, the racquet actually closes down and the resulting shots end up in the net.

Therefore, we must try to avoid contraction and jerky movements during our strokes in order to maintain a steady swing path through the ball as well as the proper racquet head angle that will direct the ball over the net.

How To Develop Smooth Strokes

Most professional tennis players have developed very smooth strokes through massive repetition.

They are also extremely athletic and coordinated. They know how to use their bodies very efficiently in order to produce power in their strokes; therefore, they are able to relieve their arms of a lot of effort.

That automatically makes them swing much more fluidly.

While we will never have the same amount of practice and same skills as the pros, we can significantly improve our ability to swing smoothly and eliminate jerky movements in our strokes by simply being aware of this process and by looking to make our strokes smoother.

As with many of the topics on feeltennis.net, this one doesn’t include any revolutionary exercises but simply requires you to become aware of any jerkiness in your strokes and attempt to get rid of it.

You need to feel how tight your stroke is and look to make it more fluid and smooth.

The first step in doing that is slowing down your stroke and seeing at which speed you can actually achieve fluidity.

Once you do that, you gradually increase the speed of your strokes and look to stay “tension free” even at higher speeds.

This process is quite a challenging one especially if you’ve been used to tensing up very hard when hitting the ball.

You may realize that you’re able to swing fluidly, for example, at 50% of your usual speed. However, as soon as you increase the speed to 60% or more, the jerky movement may reappear.

One of the most obvious and common situations where you realize that something is wrong with your strokes is when you’re trying to finish off very slow balls from the middle of your court, the so-called sitters.

Because that ball doesn’t give you much energy and bounce of your racquet by itself, you must generate more power to hit it fast towards the other side. If you tense up in the process, you will make a lot of mistakes or hit the ball in but without much speed.

You’re trying very hard, yet the shot is really not fast. The slow speed allows your opponent to reach it and possibly pass you at the net.

If that’s happening to you, then that’s a sure sign that you’re tensing too much when hitting your strokes.

Looking to make your strokes smoother should be your priority in the near and long-term future.

What you’re basically looking for is to hit the ball fast (and not hard!) with a very smooth and comfortable stroke.

Remember that the ball weighs 1000 times less than you and that it’s no contest when “you” and the ball collide.

Imagine hitting “through” the ball rather than “at” the ball. Remain very comfortable while swinging smoothly and breathing out.

Remember to “smooth” your strokes also in the warm up before competitive tennis matches.

Match pressure will surely affect your body and make it more tense. As a result, your first line of defense against that is immediately getting the feel for very smooth and fluid strokes at the beginning.

In summary, while proper stroke technique is the foundation of good tennis strokes, it IS really just a foundation upon which you need to develop higher level skills such as timing the ball well, being on balance and making your strokes smoother.

It is something I’ve personally been working on for years, and it has helped me play with high consistency and very little effort expended in the process.