Don't Feed the Forehand
by: Mark Winship @ In Touch Tennis

Frustrated at not being able to dominate points from the back of the court? Looking to generate more power on your forehand groundstroke? One of the best ways to do this is to use more upper-body rotation to drive the swing. You might want to try pointing to the approaching ball with your non-playing hand. This will encourage you to turn your upper body and present the back of your leading shoulder to the opponent.

However, to say that we can generate more racket speed simply by rotating our upper body around a horizontal axis is not only an over-simplification of what needs to happen, but may not actually produce any more power at all.

The key to producing more racket acceleration on the forehand (as with several other strokes, including the backhand and serve) lies in being able to rotate the shoulders further than you rotate the hips (check out the photo below). This is called 'angle of separation' as you are effectively separating the shoulders and hips rather than turning your body as a single unit.

This twisting of your trunk stores elastic energy which, when unleashed, can be used to accelerate your racket through the contact point.

First, try a few 'shadow strokes' in front of a mirror so that you can see how your hips and shoulders align and then take it onto the court and see how much more racket speed you can generate.