FOOTWORK FOR IMPROVED GROUNDSTROKES

Poor footwork will significantly impact your ability to hit your ground stroke targets accurately, and your ground stroke game will never reach its full potential if left untouched.

There are two main components involved in the relationship between your Footwork and your Ground strokes:

THE TECHNIQUE

To achieve consistency and accuracy in your ground strokes, you must set up the ability to hit each ball with balance, timing, and inertia. Achieving these three elements allows the racquet-head to work through the ball uninhibited and without contamination. 

This is all hitting great ground strokes involves, but each element is fundamental to achieving a controlled and powerful stroke. Let's break each element down separately;

• Any lack of balance creates contamination because if you are falling uncontrollably during the stroke, the path of the racquet is affected (contaminated). A solid platform allows you to execute the stroke smoothly and consistently.

• Any lack of timing during the stroke will mean your swing is disjointed and prone to mishits. Timing is simply your interaction with the ground. The "Ground" tells you when it's time to start your swing and eliminates the biggest error for players worldwide: using the arm to hit their ground strokes. Timing is a tennis fundamental and comes from the ground, not your arm.

• Inertia is needed to generate power in your strokes, and the ground is also your source of inertia. 

Often, you don't have much time to organise your interaction with the ground to produce balance, timing and inertia, but that's the job of what we all call "Footwork". 

The purpose of footwork is to create balance, 

timing and inertia for every situation you are 

faced with during the point.

THE TARGETING

You can strike the ball perfectly, but your ground stroke game will be ineffective if you're unaware of on-court targets.  

There are 7 target zones on a tennis court. Mastery over those 7 target zones is crucial to applying pressure on your opponent or defending effectively during a point. Often, the ability to transition from a neutral situation during a rally to an offensive situation is a single well-placed shot.  That's all it can take if you understand the target zones of a court.

Likewise, if you are on defence, all it takes is a single well-placed shot to get yourself out of trouble; otherwise, you can scramble around the court defending four more balls when it could have taken one shot.

The problem is, however, that target accuracy and being technically correct need to go together. You can know where to hit the ball but won't achieve your target if you are technically poor.

You can see now that the technique you use 

when hitting groundstrokes and your ability 

to find the correct targets on the court are 

equally important; both go together. 

One can't exist without the other. 

You must simultaneously work on these two areas, technique and targeting, to achieve reliable Ground Strokes. Eliminate the dozens of non-fundamental things you've been watching on YouTube and condense the "noise" in your head to just three fundamentals.

Fundamentals will triumph over "Form" every day and has enabled me personally to help hundreds of advanced players overcome ground stroke problems quickly.