Top 5 Tennis Drills For Advanced Players.
The quickest way to improve your tennis is to make sure you maximise your training and practice time. This means that you spend your time on the court in the most productive way and use drills that will help you improve the things you’ll need in real-life matches. This is especially true during the cold, winter months where getting court time can be extremely hard.
Too often, tennis players at club level but even more advanced players will waste their court time. They’ll spend fifty minutes of their hour slot hitting up and down the middle with no goals in mind and then finish off with a few points. This is far from an ideal training session.
In this video, Simon and Alex of Top Tennis Training will show you five of the very best tennis drills that you can do on the practice court to help you speed up your improvements.
Drill One
Tempo. In this drill, rally with your partner and try to keep the ball rising through the baseline. A ball that is rising through the baseline is a hard shot to attack, even for stronger opponents. If your ball is dropping by the time it reaches the baseline, this type of shot could and would be punished by stronger opponents. If the rally breaks down, simply feed another ball in and continue your score. Roger Federer is known to get fifty-two in a minute with strong partners. Most pros will get around forty-five in a minute, Simon and Alex managed to get forty-two in the minute.
Drill Two
Volley and Smash. In this drill, the net player hits one volley followed by a smash into the same corner. Repeat this cycle for as many balls as you can in a row. If you can get to around 15-20 shots in a row, you’ve done very well. Make sure you swap roles with your partner so you both work on your net game.
Drill Three
Aggressive Serving. In this drill, the server has to try to win the point within four shots after the serve. So after they serve, if they end up hitting four balls (serve not counting as one), they lose the point. This will force the server to be aggressive and construct points using their serve as the setup. The returner is looking to make four shots in a row as they’ll instantly win that point. Swap roles after you play a tiebreak with one player serving the entire time.
Drill Four
Serve Targets. In this drill, pick a specific target out of the four main serve targets which include the out wide serve to both service boxes and the down the T serve to both sides. Hit ten serves to that same spot and see how many you make. If you get 6/10, 7/10 or 8/10 you’ve done very well.
Drill Five
Point Play. In this drill, play a tiebreak or games where you have only one serve. No second serves. This means that you lose the point if you miss that one serve. This will force you to develop a reliable, consistent second serve that you can call upon in real matches. Too often, tennis players will hit their first serve as hard as they can and then push the second serve in. This strategy won’t work against stronger opponents who would simply crunch those second serve returns.
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