The Walkabout Exercise
 

The walkabout exercise is designed to develop a perfect acceleration and strike combination in isolation. It is also a key exercise to measure how cleanly you are striking the ball. The exercise is illustrated in the video below. In this video, Becky is feeding a ball by gently tossing it across the net. I am standing inside the service box. The objective is to be able to drive the ball to the baseline at a moderate speed by just walking over to the ball and casually knocking it away. There is no takeback or contraction stage and minimal rotation. Note that my left arm is almost idle, demonstrating that there is very little effort in doing this. However, the ball is easily driven deep to the baseline. The keys to this exercise are: The elbow is in front of the body plane. The shoulder is used to control the movement. The racquet is driven straight forward into the oncoming ball at contact. The motion has three contributions from different parts of the body. The shoulder starts the racquet forward with the wrist joint held fixed (the wrist always leads the racquet head). The upper arm begins a rotation movement to bring the racquet face into the path of the ball. The forearm is extended forward by extending at the elbow joint at contact. An interesting aspect of this exercise is that you will have a perfect classical follow-through when you hit a clean ball. This is why we never teach the follow-through: if the strike is right, the follow-through takes care of itself, but the follow-through can be right without clean contact.