Does topspin bounce high?

Asked by: Maida Pfannerstill DDS
Score: 5/5 [61 votes]

In tennis, because of a net being in the middle of the court, using topspin will increase the player's consistency. Topspin also allows a player a greater margin of error. Because topspin brings the ball down toward the ground quicker, a player can hit the ball higher over the net, thus increasing the margin of error.

Why is topspin important on clay?

Red clay plays slower than hardcourt, carpet or grass. It is harder to hit through the court and will usually favour the more consistent of players. Hence why topspin is favoured on clay.

Why is spin important in tennis?

Ball spin is clearly one of the most important factors related to ball control in tennis. Putting the correct spin on the ball can increase a shot's margin for error and affect the bounce of the ball. All tennis shots are made with some ball spin; even “flat” serves and groundstrokes have some spin.

Do you need topspin in tennis?

The most essential skill in the tennis court has to be the topspin. ... All the pro players pretty much use topspin to keep themselves inside the match at all times.

Is topspin Pro useful?

Topspin Pro is a great teaching aide forcing a correct swing path to generate topspin on the ball. Of course a proper grip also plays a roll in this as well. It's easy to use and gives immediate feedback as to whether your getting it right or not.

22 related questions found

The Topspin Pro works by forcing the user to brush up on the back of the tennis ball, this provides top spin. You can see how much topspin you generate by how much the ball attached to the device spins. The idea is that you are forced to brush up on the ball without hitting the device itself.

If the ball is lower, you have less margin to hit the ball in a straighter line and it becomes much harder to flat hit consistently. ... If the ball is lower, the better option is to topspin the ball. When you topspin the ball you do not need to worry about your margin as the flight of the ball is different.

Although unconventional, the rules allow for underhand serving in tennis. As long as the ball is hit with the racquet prior to hitting the ground, it doesn't matter if it was released in an upward or downward motion.

The spin of the ball will also affect the vertical impact speed. Topspin creates an airflow force known as the Magnus force. ... Topspin balls will therefore bounce faster in the vertical direction and higher than will balls hit flat or with backspin.

Serving. The serve is the most important shot in tennis and the most used as it starts every point.

When a ball impacts a high-friction surface it undergoes a sudden increase in spin, as the bottom of the ball slows down more than the top. ... The friction of clay leads to high bounces, which give players even more time to chase down a shot.

What Is Topspin in Tennis? Topspin in tennis refers to the forward rotation of the tennis ball. Where a slice shot will give the ball backspin or sidespin, topspin will propel the forward motion of the ball, causing it to bounce deeper and higher, while also raising the chance it will stay inside the lines.

• Roger Federer.
• Rafael Nadal.
• Juan Martín del Potro.
• Fernando Verdasco.
• Kyle Edmund.

Back in the early 2000s, Federer struck his forehand flatter [with less topspin] and through a straighter or flatter racket path. This means that he hit the forehand along a flatter trajectory compared to today, resulting in a flatter shot as a result.

Legend. Your basic forehand volley is by far the hardest shot in tennis.

Updated May 14, 2018. In volleyball, a topspin serve does exactly what its name implies—it spins rapidly forward from the top. The server tosses the ball a little higher than normal, strikes the ball toward the top of the back in a downward and outward motion and then follows through with their swing.

TennisOne Lessons

That's the Way the Ball Bounces [two]

Jerôme Inen

Topspin bounces high, slice bounces low, and balls bounce slower on gravel than on grass or concrete. All these things we think we know about a bouncing tennis ball, however, they won't help us to play better — and that's because none of them are true. Here's everything you wanted to know about the bounce but were afraid to learn.

Okay, here is a quick true or false quiz. See how well you do. [Answers are at the bottom of the page].

1. A ball with topspin bounces higher than a ball with slice.

1. A topspin-serve or a topspin shot jumps up because of the topspin put on the ball.

1. Gravel slows the ball down more than grass.

1. You should see the bounce of the ball sharply to improve your timing.

1. With a medium-paced groundstroke, after you see the bounce you have about a second until you hit the ball with your racquet. 

1. With a medium-paced groundstroke, after you see the bounce you have about half a second until you hit the ball with your racquet.

1. With a medium-paced groundstroke, after you see the bounce you have about a quarter of a second [0.25 seconds] to hit the ball.

So, how did you fare? My guess, out of the seven questions, you had one correct answer [I would have, if I had not researched this article!]

 In this article [a follow-up to a my article, That's the Way the Ball Bounces [Twice…]], I want to explain how knowing the bounce of the ball can help you time your strokes better and make less mistakes. I’ll try to do it in layman’s terms but I can’t entirely avoid delving into scientific territory. I will, however, try to keep it as practical as possible.

‘All’ Bouncing Balls Have Topspin

A quick tip: if you are playing an opponent with a mean nasty slice that ‘stays low’. Your reaction — after the first few teeth grinding experiences — is to try to pick up the ball as soon as possible. Don’t. Let the ball bounce. And wait for the ball to come up. Because it will come up!

That seems contra-intuitive. A ball hit with slice stays low, right? Yes, before the bounce…but not after the bounce. Here’s a fact that many tennis players aren't aware of: A ball that bounces after it has gone in a horizontal, parabolic line over the net [which happens a lot with tennis] always has topspin after the bounce… even when they were hit with slice.

What happens is that a tennis that bounces on a given surface, flattens itself… and the bottom of the ball skids on the ground for a short time [if it’s gravel] or long time [if it’s grass or another slick surface]. If the ball that landed was spinning backwards on arrival [underspin], the ‘flattening’ on the ground will reverse the rotation of the ball. The bottom of the ball, as to say, overtakes the top of the ball. If the ball was spinning forward, the top of the ball overtakes the bottom of the ball.

The effect is that a ball with slice will bounce away from the ground with a steeper angle than it arrived, [higher] and a ball with topspin will bounce away from the ground with a more shallow angle [lower]. So. Slice arrives low, bounces ‘high’. and topspin arrives high and bounces ‘low’.

So, if you've been paying attention, you might say, "The question at the beginning of this article was a ruse?" Not exactly. In theory, it is possible to hit two balls, one with topspin and one with slice, that arrive with the same height. But in reality, that won’t happen. You have to hit a slice low over the net, otherwise it will fly long. On the other hand, you want to hit a topspin-ball high over the net; otherwise it will land short or in the net.

The ITF Court Pace Rating [CPR] measures the effect of ball-surface interaction. This concept includes: friction, which primarily determines the reduction in the horizontal component of post-impact ball velocity, and vertical restitution, which determines the time between successive bounces.

What throws off our timing dealing with a slice groundstroke or, exactly the opposite, a kick-serve, is that we anticipate the trajectory of the ball after the bounce as if it’s the same as the trajectory before the bounce. And that is only partly true. A slice-ball will ‘stay’ low, in our perception, because it arrives low. A topspin-ball will jump ‘up’, because it arrives high.

This also influences our impression of the ‘speed’ or ‘slowness’ of a court. Grass courts and hard courts are ‘faster’ than gravel, right? Well, the ITF has a special procedure [and a special machine!] with which to test tennis-courts. Basically, they shoot tennis balls at the court at predetermined angle, and then measure how fast the ball bounces, at which angle it bounces, how fast it slows down, and so forth.

The results of those tests can be rather surprising. Gravel, for example, takes less speed from the ball after the bounce than grass and hard-courts. The balls on these last courts, however, take less time after the bounce to reach the player.

How is that possible? Well, because of the surface, the angle at which the ball bounces on gravel is much steeper than on grass and hard courts. On the latter courts, the ball takes a lower flight. Which takes away time. So the ball flies slower through the air, but wins the race to the player because it has to cover less distance.

Can You See the Bounce?

The bounce of the ball on your side of the court takes about as long as the contact between the ball and the strings on your racquet, about 0,05 seconds to be precise. The human eye just can’t see events that happen that fast.

The truth is even worse, in some ways. Your eyes can’t even see a ball approaching. Your brain tells you that you see a ball approaching from the other side. But in the two seconds or so the ball flies towards you, you actually see about seven or eight ‘snapshots’ of a ball flying through the air.

Why? Now I have to explain something complicated, and as I promised, we have to dig into some science, but be assured, it will get practical… pretty soon.

Our eyes can follow moving objects if they do not move faster than about three miles per hour. A tennis ball, unfortunately, moves a lot faster. What does the human eye do when stuff happens faster? It basically switches off… and on… and off and on again; like a movie-camera with a very slow shutter.

The reason is something called "saccadic suppression". Our eyes jump involuntarily about, when we are watching something. Those jumps are called saccades. We can fix our gaze on an object and we can fix our gaze on an object that moves. But if that object [or person] moves faster than three miles per hour, our brain suppresses our view for about a millisecond. Very short, but still: our eyes are switched off.

"Yet that millisecond," as Duane Knudson writes so eloquently in his article The Impact of Vision and Vision Training On Sport Performance, ‘is long enough for a snapshot of the retinal image to be stored, and to enable its further processing. In another quarter of a second, after the image has been processed by the brain, one actually ‘sees’ the freeze-frame image.

So perhaps players can see the bounce, if they want to. But maybe they don’t want to.

Tennis scientist Howard Brody once calculated that if you want to hit a ball into the court and want it to drop purely because of gravity, the maximum speed is about 80 km/per hour [50 mph]. Or, you can say: if you want to hit a ball faster than 80 km/hour, you have to add topspin. For a ball that flies over the net with 108 km/per hour, you have to add a lot of topspin.

So let’s assume a situation.

Let's say you are 6 meters away from the bounce, of a ball that arrives traveling 80 km/per hour through the air. After the bounce, the ball slows down to about 50 km/per hour [31 mph]. That is still 14 meters [42 feet] per second, and the ball only has to cover 6 meters [or 18 feet]. Which means you have 0,352 seconds to hit the ball.
If you use 0,250 seconds to process the image of the bouncing ball, that would leave you with only 0,102 seconds.

This is why, after you play tennis for a while, you learn to call a shot ‘in’ or ‘out’ after you’ve hit the ball back, especially with a ball that is fast, like a serve. If you wait to judge the bounce before you hit the ball, you will be too late.

Click photo: Just before the hit, Federer seems to shift his focus from the ball to the contact point. Is this what David Mann means by looking into the future?

All things considering, it seems a miracle that humans are able at all to hit a tennis ball at all, even if it’s only flying at 31 mph. How do we do it? How do the pro’s hit balls that fly at them with double that speed [or more] we just showed in our simple calculation?

The answer is: predicting trajectory. And top-athletes are very, very good at this aspect of hitting, according to research by David Mann, of the Dutch Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, published in the article The Head Tracks and Gaze Predicts: How the World’s Best Batters Hit a Ball.

Mann was curious about the visual strategies of top-batters, because existing research in this field did not study top athletes. Mann and his team examined the eye and head movements of two of the world’s best cricket batters. Not only does his research imply that some sportsmen CAN see the ball on their bat or racquet, but they do something very remarkable with their head and eyes. They don’t look at the ball. They don’t look precisely at the ball. They seem to look in the future!

Mann and his team set up an elaborate rig, with a ball-machine, a movie-screen showing a bowler [the pitcher in cricket]. Then he took top-bowlers [two of the best 43 guys of 2645 international players since 1877], and a group of amateur-players. He placed a special camera on the head of the subjects, that could measure where the head was pointing, were the eyes were pointing and how the oncoming ball was angled towards the central vision.
As you might know, in cricket the ball is thrown as it is in baseball, but it has to bounce first [interesting for us tennis-players].

What was shown in Mann’s research, is that the two elite-batters always had two saccades, the jumps of the eyes mentioned earlier in this article. And get this: the two ‘eye-jumps’ were flying ahead of the actual ball. The first ‘jump’ was to the place where the ball was going to bounce, the second jump was ahead where the bat was going to hit the ball.

The amateur-players, in contrast, could only make two of those eye-movements when the ball landed ‘short’, so when it bounced far away from them. If the ball landed closer, they could only get one ‘shot’ of the incoming ball… and a late shot. The amateur-players basically looked at the place the ball had just been, they followed the wake of the ball, while the elite-batters looked at where the ball was going to be.

Conclusion

If we humans can’t see the actual flight of the ball, and can’t see the bounce and the flight of the bounce [Manns research implies we don’t even want to do so, if we want to be really good], we have to practice predicting the bounce.

My advice:

1. Try to see how high the ball flies in the air towards us [it is going to predict the height of the bounce].
   

1. Try to determine how much topspin or underspin the ball has. [it is going to predict the angle of the bounce. Topspin: low, towards you. Slice: high, hanging away from you.
   

1. Find your own timing regarding the bounce. Some pro-players [Federer, Nadal] only start lifting the racquet up [to bring it back] just before the ball is going to bounce. Other players [ Djokovic, Sampras] seem to have the racquet all the way back when the ball crosses the net. Find out what works for you.
   

1. Find your own way to watch the ball. There is no ‘best way for all’, even though David Mann’s research seems to suggest that. Elite-batters are elite because they are not us. Watch the ball as well as you can, perhaps read this article about finding your own: Don't lose Your focus!

Click photo: Djokovic	Click photo: Federer
Everyone's timing is different. Federer, has a more compact swing pattern than Djokovic, therefore he can wait slightly longer after the bounce to fully take back his racquet.

Answers to questions: 1-false, 2-false, 3-false, 4-false, 5-false, 6-false, 7-true

Your comments are welcome. Let us know what you think about Jerôme Inen's article by emailing us here at TennisOne.

Jerôme Inen of www.lijftennis.nl is a novelist, academic teacher and, ofcourse, a certified tenniscoach in the Netherlands, Europe.

"I’ve learned tennis the traditional, form-oriented way — and it is not the right way!

Lijftennis is my attempt to show other people a way to learn quicker, with better results and less frustration. If I have one message: don’t copy others, play and learn from your own body and perspective!"