How to improve forehand and backhand flicks

[ttQuwerky123]

At the moment my backhand flick works most of ththe time but I am really struggling with my forehand flick. Everytime I try to hit a forehand flick the ball goes straight into the net.
can anyone give me any advice on this?

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Get someone to serve short, short, short to the FH side. Ideally the serve has the kind of sidespin you would get from a BH serve, reverse pendulum serve and a hook or tomahawk serve and whether it is topspin, straight side or backspin is varied. So, sidespin that curves towards the FH side and varying amounts of back or topspin with the sidespin.

They keep serving short to your FH (ideally very short) and you keep flipping. You do several 100 of that every day, and it becomes a good shot.

Practice, practice, practice.

Why is reverse spin good for practicing this? It is harder to flick a serve with the sidespin that curves towards your FH side. When you are solid with that, flicking vs the sidespin that curves towards the BH side with the FH should be pretty easy. Also, it is not so easy to serve a ball that is curving towards the BH in a way where it is short and on the FH side. But in the end, you want to be able to flick either. So, it getting changed up is good too. The real key is, you can't expect to be really good at a shot that you have not done over and over and over again.

 

[ttQuwerky123]

Thanks upsidedowncarl this clarified a lot for me. Now I understand why it was much harder for me to flick a ball with reverse sidespin. Now I guess all I have to do is practice untill my arms fall off. 😂

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Thanks upsidedowncarl this clarified a lot for me. Now I understand why it was much harder for me to flick a ball with reverse sidespin. Now I guess all I have to do is practice untill my arms fall off. 😂

I guess, one more detail:

When you are flipping a ball with that kind of sidespin on the FH, you want to adjust your wrist and your racket angle so that the handle of the blade is closer to the net than the tip of the blade so that you contact the inside of the ball (the part of the ball on the BH side) so that you avoid as much of the sidespin as you can.

If you do this, the shot becomes easier.

With regular pendulum sidespin, you would not want to do this. You would want to contact the outside of the ball (which is much more natural for the FH to do).

You could think of this like how you want to contact under the ball on backspin and on top of the ball on topspin. A topspin ball curves down and you want to contact the top of the ball. A backspin ball would curve up if gravity did not prevent that, so a backspin ball in gravity floats fairly straight, but a little up if it is A LOT of backspin. And with a backspin ball, you would want to contact under the ball. With all of those instances, you are trying to contact the ball on the side the ball is curving away from or trying to curve away from (with backspin).

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

I did not watch the whole thing but this seems like a decent video for the subject:

And the way he is practicing on the push from his serve, from multiball and self hitting all would be ways to practice it as well.