 Hey, welcome back if you've already been here before or you're a subscriber and if you're new to the channel, pop a comment below and let me know you're watching. My name's Ashley Neves and I run the Instagram and YouTube channel The Tennis Mentor, giving tips and tutorials to tennis players, tennis coaches and tennis parents. In this video I'm going to be talking about the rule of ten and how you can control the rally speed to help you to win more points. If you've seen my video on the return of serve, I'll pop the link up above me here. You will have heard me mention the rule of ten and how it can help you to return better, but not only for the return, it can help you win in a general rally as well. In simple form, this rule talks about your opponent's ball speed and the amount of force that you put onto your shot. The faster your opponent hits their shot, the less force that you have to put onto the ball and the slower your opponent hits their shot, the more force that you need to put onto your next ball. The reason why I call it the rule of ten is because we score your opponent's ball speed out of ten. We score your force out of ten and when adding the two scores up, it should equal ten. For example, if your opponent sends the ball towards you at a five out of ten speed, a normal rally pace where neither of you have the opportunity to attack or defend, then the amount of force that you should put back on the ball should also be a five out of ten. Their ball speed being five, your force being five equals ten. Now if for any reason your opponent hits a slightly slower ball in the rally and they go down to a three out of ten, then you have more time on that next shot and you have the opportunity to add speed. So your opponent's hitting a three out of ten, you should try to put a seven out of ten force onto that next ball, hitting more aggressively and applying pressure to your opponent. On the flip side of this, if your opponent in the middle of the rally hits a slightly faster shot and they hit a six out of ten speed, then because they've hit the ball slightly faster, you have slightly less time and you need to get yourself into a better position by slowing your speed down slightly. Your force only needs to be a four out of ten. You can utilize the speed that they've put on the ball to get yourself back into the point. Mistakes start to creep in when the two scores add up to more than ten. If your opponent hits the ball harder to seven out of ten and you try to match it at a seven out of ten back, then adding up to more than ten you're very likely to make a mistake. On the flip side of this, if your opponent hits a slow ball at a three out of ten and you return the ball at a slow four out of ten, then you're going to give your opponent a big chance to attack because your scores have added up to less than ten. During the rally if you can recognize your opponent's ball speed and understand how much speed that you should put back on the ball, you're going to be far more consistent and you're going to be attacking, rallying and defending at the right times. Playing tennis in this smarter way is going to allow you to minimize the risk and maximize the pressure on your opponent. So technically when talking about force, a big factor in adding speed to a shot or absorbing some of the speed on a shot is the size of your backswing. Now I mentioned it in the return of serve video as well, but if you want to add more force to a shot, a bigger backswing is going to allow you to accelerate through the ball more. A smaller backswing won't allow you to hit as much power, but it will be able to add control to your shot. So when we talk about the amount of force you put on the ball out of ten, you could directly link that to your swing size. If your opponent hits a slow two out of ten, you have more time to have a bigger backswing, so your backswing can be an eight out of ten. That way you can put eight out of ten force onto your next ball. When receiving a faster ball you have less time, so if your opponent hits a seven out of ten speed ball towards you, because we're not looking to apply force to the ball, we would take the racket back to a three out of ten size, a much shorter backswing, so that we can time our shot better, take away some of that speed and get back into a good position. So when we're talking about receiving fast shots, we want a shorter take back to add more control to our ball, and if we're receiving a slow ball, that's when we can go for a bigger backswing to accelerate through the shot more and hit with more power. This directly links into return of serve. If you're receiving a very fast serve, a first serve for example, then you should intend on having a short take back to ensure that your contact point is out in front of you. If you're receiving a slower serve, maybe a second serve, you have more time to take that racket back further to apply more power to your shot. So that's the way that I like to think about ball speed or rally tempo. There are tons of other ways that you can think about it. Let me know if there's a certain method that you like, or if you like the sound of the rule of ten. Have a go at it yourself and let me know how you get on. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you like this video and you want to check out some of my other content, and hopefully I'll see you soon.