What tension should you string at? The question is asked backwards
Updated: 2 hours ago
“I string at 24.” You hear that at the club every day, and it means nothing until you say what with. Twenty-four kilos — near enough fifty-three pounds — on a soft string, and the same twenty-four on a stiff one, do not produce the same string bed — nowhere near.
Tension is not an absolute setting. It is a setting relative to the string you tension, which is why a number travels so badly from one player to another.
What tension moves
Raising tension shortens dwell time — the time the ball spends in the string bed. The ball stays in the bed for less time, leaves earlier and flatter. You gain predictability, you lose tolerance and comfort.
Lowering tension lengthens contact. The ball sinks in, the bed returns more, the trajectory rises. You gain yield and comfort, you lose margin of control against fast balls.
Either way, what you feel first is not power: it is launch — the height and speed at which the ball leaves the head.
Why the number alone says nothing
Two different strings tensioned to the same number do not give the same bed stiffness, because they do not stretch the same way under the same load. That is exactly what the elongation curves show: at a given tension, curve height changes from N°1 to N°7. Copying the tension of a player who does not use your string is copying an answer without the question.
It is also why you will not find a tension-by-level table here. A table like that reads quickly and misleads just as quickly: to say anything at all it would have to account for the string, its gauge, the density of the pattern and the head size, all at once. Useful tension is not deduced from an average. It is worked out from what you were already playing: a known string, a known tension, and one variable moved at a time.
The useful zone, and the plateau
Every string has a range where tension really acts, then a zone where it barely acts at all. The N°4.5 in 1.30 is the clearest example in the range: its curve rises by 9 mm between 15 and 20 kg (33 to 44 lb) — over 180 millimetres of stretched section, five percentage points — then stays flat over four steps. Past its useful zone, tightening further no longer changes the bed — only the frame and the arm.
Stringing inside a string's plateau means paying a constraint without getting a setting. The elongation curves of the range's eight strings, published on the Understand page exist first of all to avoid that mistake.
Two rules of the trade
A stiff string is tensioned lower than a soft one for a comparable target feel. That is a compensation, not a preference.
Change one variable at a time. Changing string and tension on the same day means giving up on knowing which of the two produced the effect.
The arm gets a vote
High tension on a stiff string is the most demanding combination there is for the elbow and shoulder. If discomfort has already appeared, that is the first lever to release — before changing setup, and long before changing frame. Equipment has never improved a player who cannot train.
Temperature matters, more than people think
A string is a polymer, and a polymer changes stiffness with temperature.
In the cold the bed firms up: the ball leaves faster and lower, the feel turns dry, and more travels back up the arm. In the heat it softens and loses tension faster. The same setting therefore does not give the same thing in February at nine in the morning and in July at three in the afternoon.
Two practical consequences. First: do not judge a new tension on a session played in unusual conditions. Second: a racquet left in a car boot in summer has lost tension before it has even played, and it will not get it back.
The first setting, when you have nowhere to start
A common case: new frame, new string, no history. A number has to be put down.
The rule is to start from the middle of the range recommended by the frame's manufacturer, not from a figure overheard at the club. That range is not a marketing argument: it accounts for head size and string pattern density, two parameters the string knows nothing about.
Then move one step at a time — a kilo, a kilo and a half — and in one direction only, the one the observed fault points to. Ball too long and too high: go up. Ball short and the feel dry: go down.
How long to wait before judging
Not one session. A new string loses a noticeable share of its tension in its first hours of play, and the drop is not linear: fast at first, then slow.
So what you feel in the first ten minutes is not what you will play the following week. Wait three sessions before concluding, and judge on the third.
It is also why two players can describe the same string at the same tension in opposite ways: one is talking about it new, the other about week three. Both are right.
Where to start
With the string, never with the number. The number fixes feel, structure fixes bite, gauge fixes lifespan — and tension then trims the whole thing inside the chosen string's useful zone. The configurator asks the first three questions; the curves answer the fourth. The range is in the string section, N°1 to N°7.
One clarification that changes how all of the above reads: the tension you string at is not the tension the bed reaches when the ball arrives. What the string bed actually does at impact is measured separately, and that is where the useful zone is decided.
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