Use your weight for better ground strokes

One of the most common phrases used by instructors is the admonition for students to put their "weight into their ground strokes"—or, as it’s sometimes said, "step into the ball."

There’s no denying this is good advice, but many players appear to have a hard time getting the hang of it. To get a better feel for using your body weight to produce more solid baseline shots, imagine you’re at the beach and walking into the water. As you get waist-deep in the surf, you see a chest-high wave approaching. Anyone who’s been in this situation before immediately knows what they should do: widen their stance, brace themselves with their feet, bend their knees slightly and then move forward at the same time the wave strikes their body to counteract the force of the water.

This feeling is much the same as what you should experience when you properly step into your ground strokes. So the next time you go out to play, imagine the oncoming ball is a wave and your goal is to use your stance and weight to move into it to keep from getting knocked over.