The message usually arrives about three weeks after a lesson. A coach told them their backhand grip was wrong, or their forehand clear was all arm, and they believed it and changed it. Now they're losing to people they used to beat. The new stroke feels like it belongs to somebody else. The old one is right there, one bad night away. And the question is always the same: should I go back?
If the change was worth making in the first place, almost always no. But I understand why they ask, because nobody warned them about this part. Changing a technique you've used for years makes you worse before it makes you better. Noticeably worse, for weeks, sometimes a couple of months, and it shows up in your results and your mood.
I'm a 7× US National Champion and I've spent the last decade coaching adults. Between me, Kevin Barkman and Imran Wadia, we've watched a lot of adult players try to rebuild a stroke. The ones who get through it usually aren't more talented than the ones who quit halfway. They knew the dip was coming, they picked the right thing to change, and they had some way to tell whether it was working when it didn't feel like it was.
If you want the week-by-week process for building a new pattern, that's the four-week protocol in the plateau guide. This post is about everything around it: whether to start at all, what the bad weeks actually look like, and how to avoid quitting in the middle.
Why changing technique makes you worse first ¶
Your old stroke is the fastest thing your body knows how to do. You've hit it tens of thousands of times. When the shuttle is coming back in under a second, your nervous system reaches for whatever it can retrieve quickest, and for years that has been the old version.
The new stroke starts slow. You have to think about it, even a little, and thinking costs time. Against a gentle feed you have that time. In a rally you don't. So for a while you're caught between two patterns, the new one you can't produce at speed yet and the old one you're trying not to produce, and you hit a lot of shots that are neither. Those are the ones that end up in the tape.
There's a second cost people don't expect. The old stroke, flawed as it was, came with years of calibration. You knew roughly where it would land and how hard to swing. The new one has none of that. Even when you execute it correctly, your length and height will be off for a while, because you haven't learned yet what the new mechanics produce. A correct clear that lands at mid-court feels like a failure. It's a correct stroke you haven't calibrated yet, which is a very different problem.
Motor-learning people separate performance from learning. Performance is what you can do tonight. Learning is what you'll be able to do in two months. During a technique change, those two point in opposite directions. The practice that builds the new stroke fastest makes you look worst right now, and the thing that makes you look good tonight, going back to the old stroke, sets the change back.
Should you change it at all? ¶
Before you sign up for the dip, make sure the flaw is worth it. Plenty of adult technique looks wrong and costs almost nothing.
The test I use is simple. Film two or three games and count the rallies where that specific stroke is the reason you lost the point. Not the rallies where it looked bad. The rallies where it cost you: the backhand clear that landed at the service line and got smashed, the forehand drive that went into the tape because the racket face never squared up in time.
If it's costing you two or three points a game, it's worth changing. If you can't find it costing you anything on video, leave it alone for now. I've watched players spend a whole season rebuilding an ugly-but-reliable forehand because someone at the club said it looked wrong. They came out the other end with a prettier stroke and the same results.
There's a second question, which is whether the flaw caps you. Some technique survives at your current level and stops working one level up. The backhand hit with a rotated forehand grip is the classic case. At club level you can live with it by running around your backhand. Against someone who can put the shuttle deep into that corner on purpose, you can't, and the grip is the reason. I went through the thumb grip that replaces it in the backhand technique guide. If you're planning to climb, a flaw that isn't costing you points yet can still be worth fixing now, while nothing much rides on your results.
Change it: it costs you points now, or it will clearly cap the level you're aiming for.
Leave it: it looks wrong, costs nothing you can find on video, and nobody at the next level will punish it.
Most adult players I review have one or two flaws in the first group and five or six in the second. They usually try to fix all of them.
Why the new stroke feels wrong when it's right ¶
The most useful thing I can tell you about a technique change is that your sense of feel is unreliable for most of it.
Feel is calibrated to what you've always done. The old stroke feels right because it's familiar. When you do the new one properly it feels strange: the grip feels weak, the elbow feels like it's in the wrong place, the shot feels like it has no power behind it. So most adults do the natural thing and adjust until it feels better. The version that feels better is almost always partway back toward the old one.
That's how you end up with a hybrid. A lot of the players who tell me they've changed a stroke haven't, quite. They've got the new grip with the old swing path, or the new preparation with the old contact point. The pieces were designed to work together, and half of one plus half of the other is often worse than either stroke on its own. From the inside it feels like you made the change and it isn't working. On video it's obvious you made half of it.
This is why a phone on a tripod matters more during a change than at any other time. You're not asking whether it feels good. You're checking the two or three positions that define the new stroke, and whether they're there.
How long the dip lasts, and what each stretch looks like ¶
Adults always want a number, so here's the honest range. For one clearly defined change, practiced two or three times a week, most club players I've worked with come out the other side somewhere between six weeks and three months. A grip change sits at the short end. Anything that touches your preparation or the footwork into the shot sits at the long end, because more pieces have to move together.
The dip has a shape, and knowing it stops you from misreading where you are.
The first couple of weeks. The new stroke works in shadow and against a soft feed, and vanishes the moment anyone hits hard. That's normal. It isn't evidence you're failing.
The ugly middle. You can produce the new stroke in drills, you're starting to use it in games, and your results in games get worse. This is where people quit. It's also where most of the learning happens, because every attempt at match speed teaches the new pattern to come out under time pressure.
The patchy stretch. The new stroke turns up in some rallies and not others. You'll have a session where it clicks and then two where it doesn't. The good sessions get more frequent, but you won't notice unless you're counting, because the bad ones are more memorable.
The crossover. At some point the new stroke overtakes the old one in matches, not just drills. It rarely feels like a moment. You realize a few weeks later that you haven't thought about it in a while.
How to move through those stretches, with isolated reps first, then protected reps in games, then free play, is the four-week protocol, and I won't repeat it here. The point for this post is that the ugly middle is the stretch doing the work. If your results drop during it, that's the plan behaving as expected.
Where the old stroke comes back, and in what order ¶
The old stroke doesn't disappear. It sits underneath the new one for months and resurfaces whenever conditions get hard enough. That's annoying, but it's also useful, because it resurfaces in a fairly predictable order.
In the players I watch, it usually goes like this:
- When you're late. Arrive a beat behind the shuttle and there's no time for the new preparation, so the old stroke fires. This is the most common one, and it often isn't a technique problem at all. It's your footwork.
- When the exchange is fast. Flat drives and defence against a smash are where the new stroke drops out first, because they leave the least time to retrieve it.
- When you're tired. The new pattern takes attention, and fatigue takes attention away. Watch the last game of the night.
- When the score matters. 18-all, game point, anything that makes the outcome feel expensive. The reliable old version wins that vote.
That order tells you where you are. If the new stroke holds in slow rallies and only collapses in flat exchanges, you're further along than you think, and the next job is faster preparation rather than more work on the stroke itself. If it collapses every time you're late, put the stroke down for a week and look at how you're arriving.
This is narrower than the general gap between how you play in practice and how you play in matches. That gap is mostly structural, and I covered it in why you play worse in matches than in practice. Reversion is one stroke going back to one older version under one kind of pressure. Knowing which of the two you're looking at stops you from treating a reversion as nerves, or nerves as a failed change.
One change at a time, and pick your moment ¶
Nearly every adult I've seen stall on a technique change was changing more than one thing. A new grip, plus new footwork into the backhand corner, plus a new follow-through. Each of those alone might take a couple of months. Together they often never finish, because when a shot fails you can't tell which piece caused it.
Rank your flaws with the points-lost test, pick the top one, and leave everything else alone until that one is through the crossover. It feels slow. It's still the fastest route I know.
Timing matters too. A technique change and a tournament you care about don't mix. The tournament is exactly the condition that brings the old stroke back, so you'll either revert under pressure or lose points protecting the new one. If you have a competitive season, start a change right after it ends. The worst time is three or four weeks before an event you've been building toward.
If you play a league or a club ladder that runs all year, you have to make a call. What works for most adults is protecting the change in practice games and social sessions, where a lost point costs nothing, and allowing yourself the old stroke in the handful of matches where the result genuinely matters. That slows the change down a bit. It beats abandoning it after one bad league night by a distance.
How to tell if it's working when you can't feel it ¶
Since feel is unreliable through most of this, you need something else to go on. Two things work.
A position check. Film the stroke every couple of weeks from the same angle and pause at the key frames. If you changed your backhand grip, pause at contact: where's the thumb, is the face square? You're not judging where the shuttle went. You're checking whether the mechanics are present.
A count in games. Once a week, film a game and count how often the situation came up and how often the new stroke showed up. The trend in that number is the most honest measure of the change you have. It'll feel like nothing is happening for weeks while the count creeps from one in five to three in five.
Both have a ceiling, and it's the same one you hit in any self-review. You can see whether a position is there. You usually can't see why it isn't, or whether the thing you're fixing is the thing that matters. The hybrid is the classic trap here: a player films themselves, sees the new grip, and decides the change is done, while the swing path that was meant to come with it never showed up.
You'll spend weeks being worse at something you used to be decent at, on the promise that it eventually turns. That's what makes adults quit, far more than the drilling does. The players I've seen give up halfway mostly weren't short on discipline. They had no way to see the change happening, so the ugly middle looked exactly like failure. Get yourself a way to see it before you can feel it. Then a bad league night is just a bad league night.
