Almost every intermediate player I meet in Singapore has the same complaint about their forehand: it works in the warm-up and disappears in the third game. The instinct is to change the swing. In my experience that is almost always the wrong place to start — the swing is usually the symptom, not the cause.
I am Parekh Pratim, a high-performance coach with TAG International Tennis Academy in Singapore. Before coaching, I played as All-India Under-18 No. 1 and Maharashtra State No. 1, and won the Singapore Open. Over twenty-plus years of coaching, the diagnosis below is the sequence I have come back to more than any other.
Diagnose in this order: feet, then contact point, then grip
Players want to check the grip first because it is the easiest thing to see. But the grip only makes sense in relation to where you meet the ball, and where you meet the ball is decided by your feet. Work backwards up that chain and you fix causes instead of symptoms.
1. Footwork: are you arriving early or arriving late?
A simple self-test: film thirty rally forehands on your phone from behind the baseline. Watch only your feet, not the racquet. If your last adjusting step happens after the ball has bounced, you are arriving late — and every fault downstream of that is a consequence, not a cause.
Late arrival forces the body to compensate: the swing shortens, the contact point drifts back towards the hip, and the ball comes off with no depth. Fixing the swing will not help. Fixing the split step and the first two steps out of it will.
2. Contact point: in front, or beside you?
On the same footage, pause at the frame where the strings meet the ball. On a clean drive forehand, contact should be clearly in front of your front hip, with your hitting arm extended and the ball out ahead of your body line.
If contact keeps happening level with your body, the racquet face is still opening or closing at the moment of impact, and the ball direction becomes a lottery. That is why a player can hit ten beautiful forehands in the warm-up — where the ball is fed to a comfortable spot — and lose control the moment an opponent moves them.
3. Grip: only now is it worth changing
If the feet arrive early and contact is genuinely in front, and the ball still sails long or dumps into the net, then the grip is a fair suspect. A grip that is too continental makes topspin hard to generate; one that is too extreme western makes low balls and flat approaches very difficult on fast indoor courts.
Grip changes are the slowest of the three to bed in — expect several weeks of feeling worse before feeling better. That is precisely why it should be the last thing you touch, not the first.
Why the diagnosis matters more than the drill
Players plateau not because they lack drills but because they apply the right drill to the wrong problem. A footwork problem treated with grip changes produces months of frustration. This is the single most common pattern I see among adult players who tell me they have not improved in two years.
It is also why I build sessions around technical consistency under pressure rather than static feeding. A stroke that only holds up when the ball arrives politely is not yet a stroke you own.
Where to take this next
Once the forehand holds up in live rallies, the next constraint is usually stamina or tactics rather than technique. TAG colleague Coach Vince Geo has written a useful rally-based fitness test for exactly that stage, and Coach Jeffrie Jumawan covers why rallies tend to collapse around the eight-shot mark.
Players wanting a competitive test of their technique can look at tournament preparation with Coach Israel Abarquez, multiple Singapore Open singles and doubles champion, or train alongside Coach Bo Alburo, career-high ITF Men’s 35+ World No. 2 in singles. For a change of racquet sport that sharpens hands and net reflexes, the TAG family’s PickleChoo pickleball courts and coaching are a good complement between tennis sessions.
Book a technical assessment
I coach across the East and Central regions of Singapore, for beginners through to tournament players. Lessons can be arranged through CoachX Tennis or TAG International Tennis Academy. Contact: +65 8962 8400.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to fix a forehand?
A footwork or contact-point correction often shows improvement within two to four sessions. A grip change typically takes several weeks to become reliable under match pressure.
Can I diagnose this myself?
The phone-footage test above will usually tell you whether the problem is upstream of the swing. What a coach adds is the correction sequence and live-ball pressure to make it stick.
Does this apply to beginners?
Yes, and earlier is better. Building the correct contact point from the start avoids years of compensations that later have to be unlearned.
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