Rotation in Tennis

My week was pretty mundane, however, I did practice tennis and remember some movements involving physics. This week, I worked on hitting the ball out of the air. This is hard to do because you need to rotate your body to generate speed and get the ball to go over the net. I realized that rotating your body makes it easier to hit the ball hard rather than just slapping at the ball because you produce angular momentum as you are rotating towards the ball. If you just try to hit the ball by using you arm, your arm and your shoulder will get sore because you aren’t following the laws of physics by using torque. I think rotational forces are stronger than linear ones, which is why you should rotate your body but also lean forward as you hit the ball because you need both angular and linear momentum to get the ball to go forward and hit the ball hard. This is a pretty simple concept in tennis, but it requires hard work to rotate and hit through the ball every single time. That’s why you have to go back to the basics and think about the rules of physics.