Do Tennis Players Actually Improve With Video Analysis?

Why Contact Point Is Where Video Wins

Contact is the moment you strike the ball. On a serve it lasts about four thousandths of a second, and it happens above and slightly in front of your head — the one place you can never look while you are doing it.

You can feel a bad contact. You cannot see it. You certainly cannot tell whether you are meeting the ball five centimetres lower than you did last month, which is the difference between a serve that clears the net comfortably and one that keeps finding the tape.

This is precisely the kind of fault a camera fixes instantly. And the data reflects that: contact position was the biggest single improvement we measured on the serve, with around four in five players getting better at it. On the forehand, contact point and follow through were the two components that moved most.

None of these are coincidences of a small sample. We tested each one by randomly shuffling the order of every player's videos and re-running the analysis, to see how much apparent improvement you would get from luck alone. These results comfortably survived that test.

The Serve Trade-Off Nobody Would Notice

Here is the finding that surprised us most, and the best argument we have for looking at a stroke in pieces rather than as one number.

Players improved their serve contact position substantially. At the same time, their hip and shoulder rotation went backwards by a similar amount.

In plain terms: players were getting up to a better contact point by reaching higher with the arm rather than by driving up through the legs and trunk. The ball was being struck in a better place, but the power to get there was coming from the wrong source.

The overall serve score across those same players barely moved. If we had only tracked that single number, we would have reported "nothing is happening" — and been badly wrong in two directions at once. One thing improved a lot, another declined a lot, and they cancelled out.

A player working from feel alone would notice only that the serve felt cleaner. They would have no way of knowing they had quietly stopped using their legs.

Why the Forehand Responds Fastest

Around eight in ten players improved their forehand over a month or more. The serve, over the same period, was flat.

The reason is chain length. A forehand is short and direct — improve where you meet the ball and the whole stroke improves with it. A serve is a sequence of dependent movements: toss, trophy position, knee bend, rotation, contact. Change one link and you disturb another, which is exactly what the rotation trade-off above shows happening.

If you are new to filming your strokes, start with the forehand. It is where you will see change soonest, and that early confidence matters.

More Shots Will Not Make You Better

We expected the opposite. The reasoning felt obvious: the more shots the system sees, the better it understands your stroke, and the more you should improve.

It is not true. We found essentially no relationship between the number of shots analysed and how much a player improved. The same held for the number of videos uploaded, and for how often players filmed.

What did matter was elapsed time. Every single result in this study got stronger as the gap between videos widened, and weaker as it narrowed. Compare videos taken a few days apart and you are looking at noise. Compare videos a month or more apart and real change appears.

That makes sense once you think about how technique actually changes. Improvement does not come from the analysis. It comes from taking one clear fault away with you, working on it for a few weeks, and coming back. The video tells you what to work on; the court is where the work happens.

One practical note in the other direction: very short videos give unreliable scores, because a single poor repetition drags the average down. Somewhere around ten to twenty-five shots gives a stable reading. Beyond that you are gathering precision you already had.

Beginners Gain the Most

Players who started with a low technique score improved in more than nine cases out of ten, and by the largest margins we recorded. Players who were already scoring well tended to plateau.

We should be straight about one thing here: part of this is a statistical effect rather than pure learning. An unusually poor first video has nowhere to go but up. But the direction is clear and the practical advice holds — if you are early in your tennis, this is the point at which video feedback pays off most.

If you are already technically sound, the score itself becomes a blunt instrument. Consistency between sessions tells you more than the average does.

What Video Feedback Cannot Fix

Spin generation is the weakest component in the amateur game by a wide margin — well below every other part of the forehand — and it is close to immovable. Only around three in ten players improved it at all.

We are including this because it cuts against our own interest, and because it is genuinely useful to know. Video feedback excels at faults you can correct the moment they are pointed out: where you meet the ball, where your racket finishes, how your feet are set. It is far weaker at faults requiring you to rebuild a movement pattern from scratch.

Generating heavy topspin means changing your swing path, your grip pressure and your racket-face angle together. Seeing that on a screen is not enough. That needs a coach, a basket of balls, and repetition.

One Player's Six Weeks

Averages hide what improvement actually looks like, which is rarely a straight line.

One player in our data filmed their forehand five times across six weeks and improved by more than ten points overall. Their second video scored lower than their first — a longer clip that caught more weak repetitions. A player judging themselves on that single reading would have concluded they were going backwards and possibly stopped.

Underneath the headline number, their contact point improved dramatically and their balance improved almost as much. Their footwork, wrist position and preparation all moved forward. And one component — spin generation — quietly got worse while their attention was elsewhere.

That is what real improvement looks like: uneven, with something usually slipping while you concentrate on something else. It is also why a single score, checked once, tells you very little.

How to Get the Most From This

Film the same stroke twice, at least a month apart. This is the highest-value thing in the whole study. Every meaningful result depended on it.

Start with your forehand. It responds fastest and it will show you change soonest.

Read the component scores, not just the overall number. The serve trade-off proves why. A flat overall score can hide a large gain and a large loss pulling against each other.

Take one fault away at a time. Improvement came from players working on something between videos, not from filming more.

Get a coach for your spin. The data is clear that this is not something you fix by watching yourself.

How We Did This, and What We Are Not Claiming

This looked at every completed tennis analysis on the platform between November 2025 and August 2026 — several thousand strokes across hundreds of players. We only counted players who filmed the same stroke at least twice with a meaningful gap between videos.

Every headline claim was tested against a shuffled comparison: we randomly reordered each player's videos thousands of times to see how much "improvement" pure chance would produce. This mattered. Our best-looking statistic — comparing each player's best-ever score against their first — showed a large gain, but shuffling produced almost exactly the same result. It was an artefact of taking more videos, so we dropped it rather than publish it. The findings above are the ones that survived.

Two honest limitations. First, we have no control group of players who filmed nothing, so we cannot fully separate the benefit of video feedback from the benefit of simply playing more tennis over the same weeks. Second, the number of players with a long enough history is still modest, and the backhand in particular does not yet have enough data to say anything useful. We will revisit this as more players build up a history.

We would rather publish numbers that hold up than numbers that look good. If you have been filming your strokes for a few months, the data says you are very likely meeting the ball in a better place than when you started — and that is a real improvement worth having.