Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

This article aims to provide you with 5 ingredients to help simplify the  two-hander and give you more control and versatility.       1. THE BOTTOM HAND The bottom hand on the grip controls the length of your contact zone.  The further on top the knuckles of the bottom hand are positioned, the longer your contact zone. The further around to the front of the grip the knuckles of the bottom hand are positioned, the shorter the contact zone will be. The Djokovic bottom hand is positioned almost on  top of the handle.  This would indicate that he intends  to hit down the line.   Positioning the knuckles of your bottom hand on top of the handle makes it a lot easier to hit your down-the-line shots, while placing the bottom hand in the front of the handle makes it easier to hit extreme cross-court angles. Y ou  need to play your backhand in various grip positions on the handle. The important thing is not the position of your hands on the...

You would think that Novak Djokovic hardly knows what it's like to lose. After multiple Grand Slam and ATP titles, he must enter each tournament with a high degree of confidence that he will win. Maybe not! Last year, 2018, Djokovic was the best player in the world. The combined percentage of points won overall matches he played during the year was 55%! This was his average for the entire year, which he dominated! That's a lot of losing for the best player in the world.  You have to realize from this surprising statistic that in tennis, you will lose a lot of points, even if you are the better player, as Djokovic was in most cases. But here's the problem... many players can't handle losing many points! Like most players, you probably go through a roller coaster ride with your confidence levels during a match. The momentum in a game can swing back and forth often. It's these momentum swings that test our perseverance and our resolve du...

A coach can only do so much with a player who is experiencing destructive mental issues related to tennis competition. Players who find competition mentally too much to handle and suffer from choking, low levels of self-confidence or an inability to close out important matches are generally the victims of their environment. They reflect the environment they live in daily when they compete in matches. Prolonged and repeated negative mental issues in matches when competing as a junior player also continue to be a problem for the player much later in life, even though the environment that caused the mental issues in the first place might have changed for the better. Considering a majority of competitive junior players suffer from an almost crippling mental war inside their heads, it would be fair to say that this is why  a majority of players never fully reach their true potential. It, therefore, becomes clear that the environment we grow up in when we start our tennis...

The Korean guy in the front row was losing control.  It was 1991 and Beijing was the venue for the Asian Games.  We were playing for at least a Mixed Doubles bronze medal and Thailand hadn’t won an Asian Games medal in tennis for almost 40 years! Personally, this was the biggest match of my tenure as Thai National Tennis Coach.   The Thai team of Wittaya Samret and Orawan Thampensri were in a match with a typically tough Korean team.  You can always count on Koreans to make it a battle.  They are always in great shape physically, mentally very strong, and always 100% committed.   I had encountered the Korean attitude in many events prior to this. Players from Korea could sometimes overstep the boundary of what was considered good sportsmanship.  This didn’t make them any friends on the tennis circuit and I had even witnessed Korean coaches physically abusing players several times. I’m not sure whether or not the guy in t...

WHEN YOUR PARTNER GOES INTO HIDING... If your friends go into hiding each time you look for a doubles partner, it's probably because your serve sucks. There's nothing more frustrating in doubles than having a partner who constantly double-faults.  Or that feeling of wanting to run for cover to protect yourself every time your partner serves one of their weak serves. Nobody wants to play with a partner who has a weak serve. But it doesn't have to be like that because improving your serve can happen quickly just by improving your wrist. Your wrist plays two very important roles when you Serve. It not only helps make the ball go faster, it also works like a "target finder", helping direct the ball to your target.  If you can keep the wrist loose while serving, it will take all the pressure off your shoulder joint, and prevent injuries in the long-term.  So these are the advantages of using your wrist to serve, but how do we make the wrist supple and relaxed when we...

Eighty percent of all the mistakes you will make in tennis will be either in the net, or out over the baseline (the other 20% of the mistakes will come from hitting too far right and too far left). We can address these two most common mistakes directly, because contact is responsible for both of them. If you hit the ball too short, your racquet face was too closed on contact with the ball.  If you hit the ball too high and out over the baseline your racquet face was too open at the moment of contact. WHY PEOPLE GET CONFUSED W hen trying to master feel for net clearance don't ask topspin to give you feel for height accuracy, that's the job of contact, not spin! For height accuracy you need to send your awareness to your racquet face, and particularly the degree that your racquet face is open or closed. An open racquet face increases the height of the ball and a closed racket face decreases the height of the ball. This should be your sole method of achieving net...

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...