{"id":828,"date":"2008-03-18T19:41:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T03:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=828"},"modified":"2008-03-18T19:41:30","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T03:41:30","slug":"which-has-more-reach-the-one-hander-or-the-two-hander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/which-has-more-reach-the-one-hander-or-the-two-hander\/","title":{"rendered":"Which Has More Reach: The One Hander or the Two Hander?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you think a one-handed backhand has more reach than a two-hander, you might be surprised.<\/b><\/p>\n

031808-two-handed-backhand.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n

When I walked into the Media Center here at Indian Wells yesterday morning, I ran into Andy Fitzell<\/b>. I first met him at the now defunct San Diego WTA event last August and he confused me when he casually mentioned that the two-handed backhand has more reach than the one-hander. I hadn\u2019t seen him since and I certainly never figured out how that could possibly be true.<\/p>\n

Andy should know what he\u2019s talking about. He\u2019s a tennis coach, researcher, and one of the owners of The Vic Braden Tennis College<\/a>. He sets up his motion capture equipment at courtside to record tour players then uses the video to analyze their strokes. To see why Ana Ivanovic<\/b> is the top seed at Indian Wells, look at Andy\u2019s analysis of her hammer of a forehand.<\/a><\/p>\n

Ana\u2019s skeletal body looks like any other motion capture figure. It looks like she put on a bulky bodysuit with various sensors attached to it and a computer downloaded the sensor data and created the skeletal 3d figure you see. To see how motion capture works, look at this footage of soccer star Ronaldinho<\/a> doing some dancing, juggling, and a few things that, believe it or not, he doesn\u2019t do so well.<\/p>\n

And Ivanovic did not agree to put on one of those bulky body suits, however, and neither did Roger Federer<\/b> or David Nalbandian<\/b> or any other top tennis pro. Andy sat down and inserted the sensor points frame by frame and that\u2019s a huge amount of work.<\/p>\n

All the more reason we should pay attention to him. Luckily the two-hander\/one-hander issue doesn\u2019t require anything nearly as complex. All we need is two tennis rackets. Put a racket in each hand and position one of them where you\u2019d make contact with the ball for a one-handed backhand, and the other where you\u2019d make contact with the ball for a two-handed backhand. Andy is demonstrating this in the photo above.<\/p>\n

The two-hander meets the ball later and the racket is farther away from the body \u2013 it has further reach. If you\u2019re lunging for a ball, you need a one-hander because you end up twisting your body to reach with the racket, but that’s why we have the one-handed slice. The one-handed volley is better at the net than that ugly two-hander because you often have to lunge, but on most shots, the two-hander has a lot of benefits.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been wringing our hands and squawking non-stop on this site about the death of the late and lamented one-hander. All is not lost because young players like Richard Gasquet<\/b> have beautiful one-handers, but the two-hander is a solid shot that makes sense so I hereby declare that I will never whine about it again. Two-handed volleys, though, that\u2019s another matter. There\u2019s no way around it: they are just plain ugly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you think a one-handed backhand has more reach than a two-hander, you might be surprised. When I walked into the Media Center here at Indian Wells yesterday morning, I ran into Andy Fitzell. I first met him at the now defunct San Diego WTA event last August and he confused me when he casually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}