What strategies do you use to improve your backhand?

[leottsense]

What specific drills or exercises have you found most effective in honing your backhand skills? Do you focus on footwork, timing, or spin control?

 

[Amayzde]

Footwork and timing are probably the most important for backhand.

Since your reach isnt as big as with the forehand, its hard to hit a good backhand when you are out of position. You need to get behind the ball and use your legs to get proper power on your shots.

After positioning comes timing. Lots of people hit the ball way too far in front of their body. So even if you get your footwork right, if you don’t wait for the ball to get in your ‘sweetspot’ the ball will still lack power. The sweetspot should be about a forearms length in front of your belly.

Spin control comes last. The positioning and timing is important for all shots: topspin, blocking, punching and even chopping. If you do it right then spin control will automatically be better as well.

 

[Amayzde]

To answer your question about which drills you can do you should start with just backhand to backhand and focus on getting your body exactly behind the ball every time and hit the ball at the right timing (as mentioned above).

Once you can do that you can do some 2-2 drills (2 forehand-2 backhand, repeat). The focus here should be to get back behind the ball with your backhand after playing a forehand. Focus on spin and consistency on the first backhand and then maybe a little more power on the second ball.

You should also train 3rd and 5th ball. So you serve backspin, perform topspin against backspin and then topspin against block. Once again focus on spin and consistency for the topspin against backspin. Then on power for the next ball.

Hope this helps 🙂

 

[leottsense]

To answer your question about which drills you can do you should start with just backhand to backhand and focus on getting your body exactly behind the ball every time and hit the ball at the right timing (as mentioned above).

Once you can do that you can do some 2-2 drills (2 forehand-2 backhand, repeat). The focus here should be to get back behind the ball with your backhand after playing a forehand. Focus on spin and consistency on the first backhand and then maybe a little more power on the second ball.

You should also train 3rd and 5th ball. So you serve backspin, perform topspin against backspin and then topspin against block. Once again focus on spin and consistency for the topspin against backspin. Then on power for the next ball.

Hope this helps 🙂

Thanks a lot for sharing these, really appreciate that!