The Forehand Swing Path

The swing path is the path your racket travels along from start of your forehand through contact and the follow through. The key element of the swing path is that once you release the racket with your other hand the racket should never stop moving.

The racket needs to move continuously once you release it with your other, non-hitting hand. You want the racket to be moving as fast as possible when you hit the tennis ball (in most circumstances). The tennis racket doesn’t start to slow down until after the ball is off your strings. If you stop the racket at one, or several, points after you release it with your other hand, not only do you lose any momentum you’ve created but also it makes timing your forehand more difficult.

At 37 seconds in the video we present a montage of tennis pros hitting forehands. What you’ll see is that their tennis racket never stops moving after they release it with their other hands.

Although the five fundamental steps we have outlined in this section may seem simple, the fact is that very few club-level players do all five of these things correctly, so we caution you against not paying close attention to these aspects of your forehand. Once you feel like you have a very solid grasp on the fundamentals, we recommend that you explore the Advanced Tennis Forehand Techniques section of our site.

We would also like to extend a special thanks to the Washington Kastles World Team Tennis organization and Qorvis Communications. We were granted media passes in the Summer of 2008 to photograph matches and videotape player warm-ups even though we are not technically a tennis news outlet. Much of the great player hitting footage and still shots that we used in this section to teach you the tennis forehand are the fruits of the opportunity the Kastles and Qorvis offered to us. We are looking forward to next season!