Most players and teaching pros agree that you should use your hips when executing the groundstrokes. But how many players do this? In analyzing hundreds of players, I have found very few who truly use the hips to produce force in their hits. This is understandable because use of the hips is not stressed in the early stages of learning forehands and backhands. For example, if you recall your first days of learning a tennis groundstroke, you were shown or taught the grip and arm movement. The next task was to make contact with the ball. You bounced or were tossed a ball which you then attempted to hit swinging the arm with the racquet. In essence, you learned how to swing the arm to make contact with the ball. As you learned to hit the ball harder, you increased the range of motion over which you swung the racquet, which then brought in shoulder rotation together with the arm swing. This is how most players hit the ball today. They turn the shoulders and the arm to make contact with the ball, but the hips remain in place or turn together with the shoulders. The net effect is basically the same. An early hip turn can greatly increase the amount of power that you exhibit, and the more you rely on the hips, the less you will have to rely on the arm movement. In the long run this will help prevent shoulder and elbow problems. To learn how to get the hips involved is not easy if you already leave a well-developed stroke. But it can be done if you do not compete for a few weeks and do specialized exercises for learning and enhancing the actions involved. For maximum effectiveness, it is necessary to separate the hip turn from the shoulder turn. Since all groundstrokes start from the bottom up, the hips should be the first to be put into motion after forward weight shift. As the hips begin to rotate forward, the shoulders should remain in the side-facing position. Some players can actually rotate the shoulders to the rear as the hips are being rotated forward. This produces more efficiency and power. The greater the separation the greater the power that can be generated. After the hips start forward, then the shoulders should begin rotating forward. The more you can separate these actions, the more force you can generate, but the key point is to get the hips started before the shoulders, even if it is a small range of motion. This will still give you considerably more power. Then, after the shoulders rotate forward, you begin the arm action to contact the ball. To learn the feel of rotating the hips forward, you should do specialized strength exercises that develop the feel of this movement as well as strength of the hip muscles that are involved in the action. To learn the feel of the movement for a forehand, attach the non-slip hip belt from the Total Athlete System™ set around the hips (not the waist!) with one end of the Total Athlete System™ attached to the D-ring located on the right buttock and the other end attached to a stationary post or beam. Turn your body into the cord so that it comes around the front of the body. You are now in a side-facing position to the stationary attachment of the tubing. Stand back sufficiently far so that there is ample tension on the Total Athlete System™. When you are ready, rotate the hips slightly to the rear and then begin rotating them forward. The cord will then pull the hips around for you. As you do this, you learn the feel of the hips rotating forward while you keep the shoulders in the same basic side-facing position. Once you have developed the feel for this movement, then you can do it against resistance for greater strengthening of the muscles. In this case, attach the Total Athlete System™ to the right hip so that your hips are in line with the Total Athlete System™ or slightly in front of the right hip. Then, when you are ready, rotate the hips forward while keeping the shoulders in place. With ample resistance on the cord when first starting, you should feel great tension as you rotate the hips. Doing one or both exercises for a period of time will enable you to transfer this movement into your forehand. For more information on getting your hips into the forehand and/or backhand, see Explosive Tennis: The Forehand and Explosive Tennis: The Backhand.