Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

Often, all a player needs to do to improve their groundstrokes is to better understand the various components of the stroke and understand the particular function of each part. THERE ARE 3 PARTS TO A SWING   There are 3 parts to a swing. The 3 parts are (1) The Back-swing (2) The Contact, and (3) The Follow Through. Here is a breakdown of each of these 3 parts of the swing. THE BACKSWING:  The purpose of your backswing is to supply power to your Contact. The bigger the backswing the more power you can generate. A return of serve, for example, doesn't require much back-swing because the power you need mostly comes from your opponent. Strokes where you commonly want to generate most of the power yourself are general groundstrokes, and it's common to see players taking big backswings on high balls and mid-court "put-away" shots because they want to generate extra power. The amount of backswing you take determines how much available energy (power) you can ta...

Many years ago I was watching a match in Japan between Andres Gomez and Aaron Krickstein. I was sitting close to the court and realized that I was watching something very different from anything I had ever seen before.   I was watching a table tennis rally!   Both Gomez and Krickstein were trying to produce a rally that was dominated by the flight of the ball rather than where the ball was bouncing . They were controlling the ball inside a tight “funnel” of arc through the use of topspin. Today that might seem normal but back then it was the beginning of a new era in tennis. Long before this, Bjorn Borg had changed our perception of topspin in tennis.   Borg hit the ball with much more arc than any other player at that time and years later while watching   that match in Japan I was witnessing the beginning of a post Borg era. The younger players coming through such as Krickstein and Jimmy Arias were hitting tremendous topspin on the ball and in the pr...