Category Archives: Tension
Understanding String: A Short Video
This short video will begin to open up the mystery and myths of tennis string.
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Three Important Things
When dealing with tennis racquets, there are many significant performance parameters. We are going to list our three (3) most important ones:
- Swing Weight
- Overall Weight
- Effective Stiffness
These particular parameters are based on machine testing, physics, and experience.
- Swing Weight: we refer to this as a dynamic weight, meaning how heavy or light the racquet feels during the swing to the ball.
- Overall Weight: This is normally considered to be the weight found on a scale, electronic, or balance. Weight is your friend if properly associated with your capabilities and stature.
- Effective Stiffness: is a calculable and measurable stiffness of the ball hitting the string as you are holding the racquet and hitting a ball.
Why is it Important?:
- Swing Weight: contributes to power and stability, which contributes to control. A higher swing weight of, say, 320 to 340 will handle most incoming balls with ease. Swing weights of 300 to 319 will be easier to maneuver and require a little more energy from the player to handle aggressive incoming balls.
- Overall Weight: contributes to ease of movement and long play time and must be associated with the stature and style of the player. The heavier racquet will provide more power with less energy expended by the player.
- Effective Stiffness: this is a metric we use to ensure the racquet is within the stiffness range needed by the player. For example, if you come into the World Headquarters of Racquet Quest for the first time with your current racquet and the strings are intact, we can determine the effective stiffness and, based on your satisfaction with the current playability, arrive at a corresponding effective stiffness…not on a reference tension. A range of 24 to 30 pounds is acceptable. Anything over 30 becomes quite stiff and should be avoided by most players.
If you look at our racquet reviews, you will see a lot more than three (3) performance parameters! We believe they are all important, but players should understand the three (3) described here.
To Pre-Stretch or not to Pre-Stretch?
What is Pre-Stretching, how is it done, and what does it do?
What follows is a brief, limited, and non-technical explanation.
- Pre-stretching is simply applying tension to the entire length of a tennis string.
- The best Pre-stretch is a tension of 25-30 pounds for 30-35 seconds.
- Pre-stretching stabilizes the string and reduces short-term creep (tension loss).
Over the years, especially in the last decade, concerns have been raised about the potential damage pre-stretching can cause to certain string materials, mainly polyester. We have found that this is not the case, and most strings, including polyester, benefit from a well-done pre-stretch.
Two material properties important to this discussion are elasticity and elastic limit.
- Elasticity, a fundamental material property, refers to the string’s ability to return to the original length after applying a load (tension). Understanding this concept will give you insight into the string’s behavior. An Elastic Limit is when the string has passed the point of no return…in other words, the string has been stretched too much and will never return to anything close to the original length. When the string has reached this spot, it has entered the “plastic” (opposite of elastic) stage.
We test every string for several properties, one of which is UTS, Ultimate Tensile Strength, which ranges from 120 to about 200 pounds. Not once have we experienced the string reaching the elastic limit before failing!
When pre-stretching is properly administered, it poses no danger to the string.
Pre-stretching offers numerous and significant advantages. These include better tension retention, stability, consistency across the string bed, and ease of handling a string with a high recoil memory.
As a player, you can ask your racquet technician to use or not use pre-stretch. It should be your decision based on performance and benefits.
It won’t hurt the string!
Racquet Quest, LLC
