Oh yeah, I'm discovering right now that he key to going forward is to maintain a forward lean, so I'm working on it now!
In fact, I just had back-to-back sessions with my 2 training partners tonight. This was the first training session with the focus on maintaining a forward lean, and I feel like I've already learned a lot. First is that it's not actually really about leaning forward, it's more about kicking the butt backwards a little. Your upper body will naturally bend down a bit to maintain balance. Focusing on leaning forward actually puts you a bit out of balance, a bit too much weight resting on your forefoot. You do want your heels up a bit while playing, but not that much.
The second main thing is that there are a surprising number of adjustments that you need to make to actually make it work. On the FH side, kicking the butt back brings the racket a bit further back on the backswing, so you need to adjust your timings by waiting a bit longer. As the body bends down the racket angle also closes with it, and the swing path of the arm becomes more back-to-front than before. These two things combined to result in a lot of shots hitting the leading edge of my racket at first, so much so that my FH rubber on the leading edge started peeling off! The adjustment here is to open up the racket a bit.
The third thing is that there are more upsides to this adjustment than I expected. Once I got used to it a bit, the more back-to-front FH stroke with a more open racket actually resulted in much improved contact as well as better control in the direction of the ball. Rotating the right hip back while your butt is already kicked back also naturally induces your body to shift weight onto your right leg. I've always had trouble reconciling between rotating only at the hip with placing weight on my right leg during backswing, they just never seemed to work great together, but this solved it! It even made coming in for a short push easier, as before I would need to step in and bend my body over the table, but now since my body is already bending forward I only need to step in. This saves a lot of time and allows me to get to a short ball much easier.
On the BH side, the kicking back of the butt gave me a lot more space to backswing. This makes adding power to loops a bit easier and more natural. The most significant advantage I found, however, is during loops vs. backspin. A common tactic people employ against me is to serve short to my FH then push long to my BH. I get jammed by that a lot. But maintaining a bit of lean gave me sooooo much more space that I feel almost un-jammable!
I'm working on a few other things as well, like the cementing the grip change further up, blocking more with my body, lead with my elbow more on the BH, and simplifying my arm motion on the FH side. Basically aside from the grip I'm trying to add one more adjustment in addition to the forward lean. For the forward lean itself, I also need to focus more on kicking the butt out, which I haven't been able to do consistently yet.
