Doug Kegerreis: Hi! I am Doug Kegerreis, President of Chantilly International Tennis, and today we are learning how to play tennis.

We are currently looking at the four essentials necessary to hit forehands and backhands.

In this tip the skill is developing a lifting racquet path. Now, you may play on lots of different tennis courts, it might be a hard court, it might be a clay-court, they might have cracks in them, they may not, but one thing that you certainly will always have will be a net between you and your opponent. You must calculate your shot and your stroke production with the net in mind, and what that means, is that you need to have an aim point or a target over the net and you need to lift the ball over the net plus you have to have a lifting racquet path. Now, you should calculate an actual spot above the net, somewhere between four to six feet above the net in most cases.

It's sort of like when you are bowling, when you aim for the arrows in order to get the ball down to the pins. In tennis, you want to aim for the spot above the net to get the ball to spot on the court where you wanted to go.

The lifting racquet path is primarily determined by your beginning point and that is, where is the racquet on your backswing, and it should drop pretty low below the level of the ball, and your finish should be significantly higher than where you started. You can have all kinds of different lifting racquet paths. You can have a slight lifting racquet path, you can have a more severe lifting racquet path, and those are more advanced skills, determining which one, but nonetheless you should have a lifting racquet path with a low backswing, down below the level of the ball and finishing significantly higher than where you started getting the ball to travel approximately four-six feet above the net. You always want to eliminate net errors, if you are going to miss in tennis hit it beyond the baseline thats a much easier mistake to correct than hitting it into the net. Low backswing, high finish, four-six feet above a net is your aim point and that is your lifting racquet path.

Next, well move on to body rotation and the role it plays in forehands and backhands.