An illustrated guide
Greatness in tennis is a set of solved problems. Every champion is a bet on how to win, and every bet leaves a mechanism behind — buried in a swing that's over before the eye can read it.
We slow those swings down, trace them from real motion capture, and hand you the controls: understand the game if you don't play yet, build it on true foundations if you do, and steal the exact things the pros already know.
Dominating Tennis
Tennis, taken apart
Watch a forehand closely and it stops being one motion. It is three machines working in sequence — a tool, a body, and the air it moves through. This is all of it, slowed right down and pulled apart.
01 — The tool
Built to obey
A hoop, a strung membrane, a throat, a handle balanced to the gram. Nothing here is decoration — every part exists to send the ball exactly where the hand intends. Watch it come together.
02 — The body
Power starts at the floor
Never the arm. The force builds from the ground up — legs, hips, trunk, shoulder, the late snap of the wrist — each link handing its speed to the next. This is real motion capture of that chain unwinding.
03 — The strike
Four milliseconds
Everything the body built exists for this: the strings on the ball for about four thousandths of a second, brushing up the back of it. The swing ends here. The flight begins.
04 — The air
It leaves with spin
Brushed from below, the ball climbs away spinning forward. Ride along in its frame and the air arrives head-on — then splits, doing one thing over the top and the opposite beneath.
04 — The air
The air pushes back
Spin pulls the flow faster underneath and slower over the top. Fast air is low pressure; slow air is high. The ball is pressed down by the very wind it makes — topspin, written as a force.
The whole game
Where power becomes control
Hit flat and a ball this hard flies long. Add spin and the same swing drops it in. That trade — pace for safety, dialed in by the wrist — is the whole game. Take the slider and find it.
You don't push the ball — you push the court, and it pushes back up the whole chain.
Hips open while the shoulders still trail — the coil that lets smaller players out-hit bigger ones.
Three real frames of one forehand: drop, lag, contact — the racquet's own traced path.
Table of contents.
v1.0The Machine · Words
You don't play yet — but you're falling for the game.
Start with what the numbers on the scoreboard actually mean, then see the machine underneath every shot — enough to watch a match and know exactly what you're looking at.
+ 6 more chapters on this path
New to the game, building it right the first time.
Build your game the way the physics demands — up the kinetic chain, then the forehand, the serve, the footwork and the odds — so nothing you groove now has to be unlearned later.
+ 6 more chapters on this path
You already play — now steal what the pros know.
Go straight to the mechanisms the best exploit — contact, spin, serve patterns, the return, the big points and the athlete underneath — the edges you can bolt onto a game you already have.
+ 4 more chapters on this path
The Body as an Engine
The Tool — Racquet & String
Contact — The 4 Milliseconds
Ball Flight & The Bounce
The Groundstrokes
The Serve
The Return of Serve
Net Play & Touch
Movement & Footwork
Tactics & Strategy
The Mental Game
The Athlete
Surfaces & Conditions
Doubles
The Game Itself
The Numbers — Analytics & Data
The Champions
The Minds — Coaches & Analysts
How Tennis Got Here
The author
I started this because tennis is full of things everyone repeats and almost no one can show you — use your legs, brush up the ball, let the racquet lag. I wanted to see the actual mechanism, so I pulled real match footage apart frame by frame until the swing stopped being advice and became physics you can drag. Every champion I've admired turned out to be a solved problem wearing a beautiful solution. This is my attempt to hand you the solutions — one blueprint at a time.
— Felipe
Every swing on this site is real — traced from professional match footage, tracked frame by frame into a blueprint.