Over these past 3 weeks, I’ve worked on everything here, but mostly my forehand. My forehand has always been a big shot for me, but I’ve never had true confidence in it. Not like my backhand. My forehand has always been a shot for me that’s high risk, high reward, but in college I always had doubt in the back of my mind about it.

After having a disappointing practice on Tuesday (I think), it was because of my mentality which affected my footwork which really affected my forehand. But, the reason why my forehand has developed into a real weapon is because my fitness has risen a whole few levels and I’ve worked on simplifying my swing technique.

I was really caught up on that one bad practice. The only bad one in like three weeks. Horacio didn’t want to talk about it because he wasn’t concerned, but I was still caught up on how I performed.

Without even thinking I said something like, “I just need to trust it and not think about it so much. Trust myself. Trust my fitness and muscle memory.” And it seemed like everything clicked after that. As soon as I said that out loud, I smiled internally because that’s one of my favorite sayings to remind myself off the court.

I’ve been fascinated by a dude named Alan Watts. When I was talking to Horacio, I quoted Watts without realizing it. This is the type of video that I love watching:

Today

This morning I hit with Jesse Levine again and he is rock solid. It was incredible to hit with him not only so he could expose my poor conditioning, but he also gave me some great tips. He reinforced one recurring piece of advice that I’ve been trying to absorb, which is to be more effortless. This point is exactly what I realized a day before.

He told me that I look like I was using a lot of effort each time I hit, and I was like “You can tell?” But, this goes back to my initial point of just trusting my strokes. I don’t need to muscle the ball or hit it harder than I need to. My swing with my body weight and footwork is all I need, and I don’t need to do more. I’m not going to force my swing in any direction, I’m just going to let the racket and momentum do the work for me.