Fatso Tennis

Posts Tagged ‘Roger Federer’

Are you seeing the drop shot lob combinations Roger Federer is using against Robin Soderling? Roger is serving for the match right this moment, but in the third set roger hit a drop shot and then a backhand slice lob into the wind and had Soderling running around like a puppet. It’s triple match point and just ended with an Ace.
Yipee.

Get out there and practice those kill patterns!

Well, I’m heartbroken again. Roger lost to Robin Soderling who certainly deserved to win. Did you see him pounding serves and forehands? Which brings me to the post I had in mind for today anyway.

I haven’t been happy with my forehand because when I hit really hard the ball goes long. So yesterday I experimented with a more western grip. This put more topspin on the ball and I could hit pretty hard and still keep control.

Ok, no big deal. A little grip change, so what? The very simple yet important point I want to make is that I could have changed a couple things like dropping the racket head lower at the same time changing the grip. By doing this I wouldn’t have known what worked or what didn’t. I just took my time and tried the grip change with everything else being as similar to my old stroke as possible.

In my next practice session I’ll try the old grip, but lower racket head and see what that does.  Then maybe I’ll try both and hit even harder. The point is to be patient and experiment with only one thing at a time.

BIG NEWS: Coach Kyril from http://www.coachkyriltennis.com and his main colleague coach Mauro Marcos are coming to my house to shoot videos and give me private lessons. I’m more than psyched! I should have video and still shots of the training next week. Watch for it.

How come I feel so bad when Roger Federer loses?

I wonder why I feel so bad when Roger Federer loses…..especially to the likes of Tomas Berdych. I was watching the Sony Ericson Open in Key Biscayne, Florida last night on the tennis channel and I really thought Federer was going to crush Berdych in the last set. When he didn’t. I was crushed.

Maybe it’s because I relate to Federer so much….certainly not with my tennis skills, but with my admiration for his generosity, humble character and great sportsmanship.

I’m glued to the tennis channel most evenings with my laptop on my lap where I’m either working or logged on to one of the many tennis membership sites I belong to like http://www.CoachKyrilTennis.com . As I watched Roger lose I did notice one thing that I think we could all learn from.

When Roger really cranked his first serve he was hitting it into the net. It was like you could see that he wanted to put Berdych in his place. You could see his entire body tense up to hit the serve as hard as humanly possible ……and then. Boom! Right into the net.

The lesson for all of us is that if the number one guy in the world can’t play tense, then how can we expect to play tense and try to overhit. For us big people we have to totally remind ourselves to STAY SMOOTH both to conserve energy which is critically important for us and to execute our strokes properly.