4.1 Tennis Forehand Spin Control: Spin Wedge

Hi guys, and welcome back. Today we’re going to do a video all about spin -- whether it’s talking about topspin, backspin -- any kind of spin that you want.

We’re going to talk about the three different factors that go into creating the perfect amount of spin for your individual shot, and we’re going to talk about something called the Spin Wedge.

If you want to master the art of spin, let’s go ahead and get started!

The first thing we’ll talk about is, what are the three factors that create spin? Again, we’re talking about any type of spin, whether it’s backspin, side spin, topspin, any of that stuff.

The three factors are, number one, the angle of the face. Here, if my racket’s straight up and down, the face is pointing directly forward or parallel with the ground.

As I begin to open this up, my face will be pointing more toward the sky. Then if I point my face down, it’s obviously going to be going more down toward the ground. That’s really going to affect the initial angle that your ball takes off.

The second factor is which direction my racket is moving. You can imagine, if my racket is moving up and forward...we’re talking about the center of the racket, which direction it’s moving.

A great way to visualize this, if we turn the racket the other way, then you can see if I’m moving up and forward. This would be up and forward at a 45° angle.

That’s very similar to what you’ll see with the top pros on the ATP tour. They’re swinging up and forward on their topspin forehand about at a 45° angle.

The direction of the face and the direction of the path, or the direction the racket is moving, is going to really affect which way the ball is going to spin.

The opposite of that would be the racket moving down and forward. This would be kind of a backspin shot. We’ll get into the details of that here in a second.

The final factor into this is going to be how hard we’re swinging, or how fast the racket head is moving.

As I mentioned, on a stock topspin forehand from your top pros, what you’re going to see at impact is when the strings meet the ball, the racket face is turned down about 10°.

This would be parallel with the ground. It’s turned down about 10°, and the racket head itself is moving up and forward about 45°.

The faster this is happening, the faster my racket is moving upward, the more spin is going to be put on the ball. Just realize that; the harder you’re hitting, the more spin it’s getting.

You may be doing everything correct, and if you’re not seeing the ball really dive down like you’re seeing with the top pros when you watch on TV, it may just be because you’re not swinging quite hard enough.

Master the technique first, and then you can add some speed to that later, to really perfect it.

Let’s focus on those other two factors here really quick, and I’ll give you a couple examples of how that works.

Whenever we’re creating topspin, we’re going to focus on the path and the face angle.

Let’s imagine for this example that my face angle is going to be perfectly parallel with the court. My strings are pointing directly forward. We’re going to imagine this is a giant tennis ball.

For this example, my racket is going to be up and forward, just like we talked about on the topspin forehand, at about 45°.

As I make contact with this ball, what’s happening is it’s spinning it end-over-end and creating topspin.

Because the ball is spinning forward like this when I do that type of motion, the top of the ball is spinning into the wind.

The bottom of the ball is spinning away from the wind, and that creates more friction on top of the ball and causes that ball to dive downward.

The harder we do this, the faster we swing, the more of that downward curvature it’s going to get.

Again if the strings are level, my racket is moving upward, I’m spinning this ball end-over-end, having the top of the ball move forward in this direction. That’s topspin.

I mentioned that the face is really going to affect this. In this particular example, the face was level with the ground; we’ll have that be our first arrow here, and our path was up at 45°.

The difference between those two angles is what’s going to be called our Spin Wedge. Our face angle is parallel with the ground. Our path where the racket is moving is 45° upward, so we have 45° difference in this spin wedge or this wedge angle here.

If we start to manipulate that, we’re either going to get more or less spin.

The bigger the difference in those two angles, the more spin you’re going to create, whether it’s topspin or backspin. The smaller the difference in those two angles, the less spin you’re going to generate.

Let’s give example number two here of how that’s going to work.

In the first one racket strings were parallel, the face was up 45°, and I created quite a bit of topspin.

Remember, the tour pros are pretty close to that when they’re hitting their topspin forehand. Their racket face is just pointed down a little bit to affect the launch. We’ll go over that in our Height Control video.

Now let’s imagine that I turn my racket to where the racket is 45° open and my path stays 45° open.

Now my racket face is up 45° and my path is also up 45°, so there’s no Spin Wedge. Both those lines are going in the same direction, and you can see how that would create a knuckleball.

Even though I’m swinging it up, I’m brushing up on the ball, it’s not getting any topspin. It’s just knuckling forward.

That may be one of the mistakes that you guys are having if you’re working on topspin and you’re being told to hit up on the ball.

Every time you hit up on the ball, the ball just flies higher in the air and you don’t get any more topspin, so you hit it long or out of the court, and you’re frustrated with it. Well, we need to create that wedge.

We have to get the racket strings, instead of facing up as you’re swinging up and the ball’s not getting any topspin, shooting really high, we have to turn those strings down just like the top pros.

Now, the ball is going to come out lower and it’s going to have that topspin. That Spin Wedge is really going to determine how much spin you want to have on there.

If I were to turn my racket strings down and now I swing up 60°, even more steeply, I’m going to get more topspin.

Remember, the strings have to be parallel or even about 10° down, if you want to hit one of those good forehands.

If we turn that wedge the other direction, now let’s imagine for the same scenario that we’re going to hit a backspin shot or a slice type shot.

Now my racket face is going to be moving -- the path of the racket, the first part of the wedge -- is going to be moving down 45°, but the face is going to be moving up 10° now.

Again, we have that same wedge. The path is moving down 45°, the face is pointing up 10°. If we can imagine that on this ball, now the ball is going to be spinning backwards.

That’s a pretty good-sized wedge, down 45° and up 10°, we’ve got 55° Spin Wedge, which is going to allow us to create a lot of backspin.

If we do the same thing there, where we’re hitting down and the racket face is pointing down 45°, now we’re going to be hitting the ball straight down into the ground. We’re not going to get any spin, it’s just going to be going straight down.

Again, if you guys have been practicing hitting your slice shots and often what happens is you’re hitting the ball into the ground, you’re probably swinging down really well. You’re generating the path correctly, but the face just needs to be turned up a little bit more.

Or vice versa, if you’re swinging down and the ball is floating too high -- you’re getting good spin but it’s floating up in the air -- your face is probably too far open. We’re going to adjust that as we go forward in our Height Control video.

We just need to understand, before we start any of this, that the bigger that Spin Wedge, the more spin we’re going to have. We’re going to control that in our more advanced shots.

Now let’s go ahead and do some drills to really start practicing with that, generate some good spin, and then we’ll move on to the next steps.

Now let’s do a few drills to get really familiar with this and comfortable with this motion.

Again as I mentioned, in your top pros when they’re making contact on a forehand, they’re going to be swinging up.

The path of the racket is going to be moving up about 45°. The face is going to be down about 10°.

We’re going to practice doing this, swinging up on the shot. We’ll go ahead and toss a few balls up in the air.

Nice, smooth; we’re not really trying to kill the ball. You’re just trying to see the ball go about 3 feet over the net and then really dive down.

If you’re hitting the shots too low, that’s greatly dependent on where the face angle is. Your face angle may be turned down a little too much.

If it’s curving but it’s just going too low and hitting the net, your face is too far down. You’re going to want to open that up until it’s about 10°.

If you’re getting it too high and now the ball’s starting to float, it’s going 7-8, even 10 feet over the net, your face is too open. You need to get that turned down.

That could be a little bit dependent on your grip. Check to make sure you have the correct grip as you’re doing this.

Hit a few shots, about 100, and really try to get that ball 3 feet over the net and turning down quite a bit. Again up 45°, down 10°, so we get a nice 55° spin loft.

Once you’re comfortable with that, we’re going to then reverse it. We’re going to get some backspin, or a slice forehand.

We’re going to be going down 45°, and now our face is going to be up about 10° or even a little bit more than that, because gravity’s going to want to be pulling this ball down.

Let’s go ahead and try a couple of those. Just hit nice, easy shots.

We’re going to be going a couple feet over the net with these and they should have some good backspin on them so when they hit the ground they should be checking up.

Again, if they’re too low, your face is pointing too far down. If they’re too high, then your face is pointing too far up.

We don’t want to get those to really float up in the air because it’ll give your opponent too much time to get under that ball and hit a hard shot back to you. Let’s go about 2 feet over the net with the slice forehand.

Another 100 repetitions of those, then you’re ready to go ahead and start practicing this with a playing partner. Then we’ll talk about how to adjust height control in our videos coming up.

Go ahead and get in some hard work, and I’ll see you guys soon!