Before I get started on this month's column, here's another story of my journeys. Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump since I've been fortunate to meet so many great athletes and coaches who are at the top of their respective sports.

Here I am at spring training camp with home run king Sadaharu Oh (center) and Chief Operating Officer Mr. Takeuchi (right) of the Softbank Hawks MLB team in Miyazaki, Japan.

After swinging the chains a few times, Mr. Oh said that he could see how it would be good for power as well as being fun to use. It was an awesome experience and a pleasure to train the Softbank Hawk coaches and trainers in use of the chains to increase their bat speed, throwing velocity and intensity of core training.

At this time, I also want to welcome my new Japan-based worldwide baseball distributor, Respect Sports. Their website is www.speedchain.net.

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Want to be a better tennis player? Want to improve your serve or ground strokes? Maybe high technology can help you maximize your tennis potential. Taking a hint from technology prevalent in golf, we can learn a lot by copying some of their methods in maximizing golfers' performance. For over a decade, golfers have had technology that can tell them their clubhead speeds, ball speeds, launch angles, spin rates, direction of the spin, smash factor, etc. And while it was very expensive, as all technologies are at its onset, the cost for this technology has now been reduced tremendously. Thus it is common for many golf shops and instructors to have this technology on hand as part of the necessary tools to do their job.

The hope is that this type of technology can be transferred over to a sport such as tennis so that it is affordable to everyone in the tennis shop and teaching profession. Tennis shops would be able to better assist their customers in the purchase or recommendation of racquets while instructors could measure improvement of performance criteria quantitatively rather than trying to assess it by the number of times the student beats the other guy across the net.

Racquet speed

The book "Technical Tennis" by Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsey has a chapter on spin and trajectory that makes it well worth the price of the book. They discuss the factors influencing outgoing ball speed as an interaction of incoming ball speed with racquet head speed, degrees of upward swing path, horizontal racquet speed, strings, tension, etc. Their conclusion was that the main factor for outgoing ball speed is racquet head speed. So this should be measured, don't you think?

The Sport Sensors radar unit ($95 retail), used for baseball bat and golf swings, can be used to measure dry swings of your tennis racquet. Although it will be measuring tip speed and not ball contact point speed, you can get an idea of how fast you need to swing in order to hit a 105 mph forehand. You probably need a 90-100 mph tip in order to get the ball going that fast.

There are some complicated factors such as racquet contact point being less than the racquet tip speed and horizontal speed will be less than the raw speed recorded since your path will and should be on an inclined plane. The bottom line is, if you want to play in the big leagues, you better have big league racquet head speed.

Ball speed

Next, let's take a closer look at ball speed. Ball speed is important and we see that number all the time on our television screen as Andy Roddick hits another 140 mph serve. For some reason, the sports announcers seem to be overly concerned with serve speed and neglect to mention groundstroke ball speed even though they also have that data.

During this year's Australian Open final, Roger Federer and Fernando Gonzalez both hit forehand winners at 105 miles per hour! Their backhand winners were mostly in the mid 70's to low 80's, which sounds a little low considering how hard they hit it.

Interestingly, there seems to be no noticeable difference between women's forehand and backhand speeds. Women's forehands from Serena and Sharapova were in the 85 mph range while most of their backhand winners were in the mid 70's to low 80's (same as the men).

I'm sure a few people know their serve speed, but how many people know how fast their groundstrokes are? Wouldn't that be good to know? Complicated methods such as video analysis would give you average speed but not peak velocity coming off the racquet.

There are also inexpensive radar units that measure serves and groundstrokes but they are neither powerful enough nor reliable enough to be worth the cost. Baseball scouts use the higher quality and more powerful Jugs or Decatur guns. These are more expensive (approximately$800 but less on eBay!) but will measure your serve and groundstroke speeds accurately.

Launch angle

Golf researchers have discovered optimum launch angles and spin rates for golfers of all abilities. Armed with this information, golfers can now buy clubs that are to his/her ability. This great information is affordable and readily available to golfers at many pro shops and golf courses across the country.

Shouldn't tennis players also have access to this type of information to improve their games with better suited equipment? Wouldn't it be great if you could walk onto a court with five new demo racquets and have a computer tell you your racquet speed, ball speed, spin rate, launch angle, etc with each of the different racquets so you could make an educated decision on which racquet to purchase?

I know I'm dreaming, but it could happen...

So back to your groundstroke launch angle. Do you know what your launch angle is? Do you know what the pros' launch angles are?

Here's Marat Safin at Indian Wells hitting a forehand. I've used dots to mark the path of the ball after it comes off his strings.

On a low ball, his launch angle is 9.9 degrees.

On a waist high ball, his launch angle is 6.7 degrees.

Here's a backhand launched at 8.5 degrees.

Here's Ivan Ljubicic launching a missile at 3.7 degrees.

Here's Ljubicic hitting a high backhand at a 2.0 degree launch angle.

That should give you a general idea of the different shot heights and the different launch angles needed to clear the net and still land in the court.

Measuring your Launch Angle

This type of launch angle analysis is pretty simple. I use my JC video golf computer and download tennis strokes from my camcorder. Then I draw circle around the ball, forward one frame, and then repeat till I have three frames done. I can draw a line using my protractor tool and it automatically gives me the angle.

You can do this by taking a video with a camcorder that's set on a tripod (be sure your tripod is level) from the same perpendicular angle that I have used. You'll need a good camcorder with high-speed shutter so you can see the ball without any blurring. I use 1/4000th of a second shutter speed setting on my Panasonic GS29 model camcorder ($239 or less on eBay). Use a dry erase marker to draw a line on a flat panel monitor or television and measure the angle with a protractor. Simple enough?

Spin Rates

Spin rates are much more difficult to measure. In the high tech world of golf, a launch monitor called the Vector uses high-speed cameras that can snap two photos in one millisecond. The computer then calculates the launch angle, ball speed, spin rate, sidespin rates from this data.

Now can this be applied to tennis? Yes, but at this time, this type of technology is a bit expensive ($4000) and I'm not sure whether or not anyone has figured out how to use this technology to capture a moving ball. I do know that Fastec Imaging is coming out with high frame rate cameras (not to be confused with shutter speeds) specifically designed to be used in sports. It's equipped with simple USB connections for your computer or memory card. With capture rates of up to 500 frames per second, you would be able to measure spin rates. The cost on these cameras will be between $6000 and $8000. While this may seem expensive, these are far cheaper than previous high frame rate cameras, which were upwards of $30,000. So hopefully with some trickle down technology and more manufacturers entering the market, the price may drop even further in the future.

So what can you do in the meantime? Think about this from Technical Tennis -- Federer's forehand is spinning at 95 revolutions per second or roughly 5700 revolutions per minute. That is even faster than Pete Sampras' second serve spin rate that was measured at around 4600 rpm. Does this give you an idea of how much topspin you need to hit the ball at 100 mph and still keep the ball in the court?

Luckily, most of us won't have the problem of a100 mph shot so we won't need as much topspin.

Putting it all together

The top men pros are hitting the ball faster, launching at lower trajectories and hitting at higher spin rates than recreational players. That is a given. But the gap between the pros and recreational players doesn't have to be so wide.

Compared to the golf world, tennis is lagging in its use of technological advances in information, measuring devices, training methods and training equipment. So let's get this technology movement going so everyone can improve their games.

First, the information is out there but you might have to work a little to get it. Because the TV announcers cite serve speed most of the time, you can't expect to get the info just by watching TV. The groundstroke speed information is available on PointTracker, which is used at the major tournaments and also on the tournament websites. By watching a major tournament live via PointTracker or studying PointTracker after a match, you can also see the speed and trajectory of the shots. Here's a screenshot of PointTracker below.

In this point, you can see the 105 mph forehand from Gonzalez and the low trajectory shot that was fired at Federer's backhand corner (Gonzalez's shots are the lines in yellow).

Also, get a copy of the Technical Tennis. Armed with the information in the last chapter on spin and trajectory, you can begin your journey to be like Federer.

Two, start gathering information on your own game. Buy a Jugs or Decatur radar gun so you can measure your speed. Better yet, ask your tennis pro to buy one. Shouldn't he/she have an interest in his/her students' performance factors? Also, having speed data can help players measure performance increases or decreases caused by technical changes in their strokes. It will also help determine whether or not the conditioning program is helping or hurting. (Hint, hint . . . .)

Third, measure your launch angle so you know whether or not you're hitting the ball on a trajectory similar to that of the pros. Sure, many will say that you must launch it higher and clear the net more to be consistent but if that were true, why is Federer consistent? If you want to be a real player, you can't hit it like a pusher.

Fourth, you can estimate your spin rate by how much your ball is dipping (or hitting the back fence) and then start to modernize your game. Remember, the ball speed must be high, the spin rate must be high and the launch angle must be low in order to hit the modern forehand and backhand.

Last, train like a tennis player and not a football player or a 10k runner. Do specific exercises to increase your racquet head speed as well as your ball speed. Visit www.tennisspeed.com to find out how you can improve your serve speed or groundstroke speed in only minutes per day using the SpeedChains.

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