Top 5 Tennis Drills For Intermediate Players – Top Tennis Training.
Making the most out of your time on the tennis court should be one of your main priorities if you want to speed up your improvements.
Too often, intermediate tennis players will simply rally up and down the middle of the court with no focus or goals in mind.
In this video, Top Tennis Training coaches Simon Konov and Alex Slabinksy will show you the top five tennis drills for intermediate tennis players. Players at the 3.0-4.5 USTA range tend to struggle with these common problems in matches:
1. Hitting the ball short, which allows your opponent to attack.
2. Weakness being exposed (tends to be the backhand) or not being able to hit consistently to the opponents weaker shot so you can’t exploit their weakness.
3. Not attacking the net when you have the setup ball to do so.
4. Hitting too many balls into the middle of the court which allows your opponent to dictate play.
5. Lack of consistency on the serve.
With these five tennis drills, we’ll work on improving each of these five problems and hopefully make you a more complete tennis player.
Drills
Drill One
In this drill, rally up and down the middle of the tennis court working on maintaining good length. The target is to hit twenty balls in a row (ten shots each) between the service line and the baseline. If someone hits the ball short or misses, reset and start again. Twenty consecutive shots that land between the baseline and service line. Focus on getting good net clearance which will help you to hit the ball deeper. Topspin will allow you to lift the ball quite high but then dip the ball before the lines.
Drill Two
Player one stands in the backhand corner and can only hit backhands. Player two has to cover the entire court but can only hit into the advantage side of the tennis court. There are a few variations of this drill. To begin, player one can only hit slice backhands. Play out the point and count to five, seven or ten. Swap roles so that both players have a chance to be the slicer and deal with slice shots. Variation two is to then drive your backhands but once again, avoiding the forehand so some recovery steps will be required. Variation three is then hitting mainly backhands, but looking to run around and hit an inside-in or inside-out forehand.
Drill Three
In this drill, player one stands just inside the service line and hits volleys back to player two who is on the baseline. The net player has to hit ten balls in a row between the service boxes and the baseline. If the baseline player misses, the net player stays on the number they’re on and continues.
Drill Four
Taking the middle of the court out of play. In this drill, set up a triangle as we demonstrate in the video and play points with the middle area of the court out of play. Drop shots are also not allowed. The aim of the drill is to move each other around the court using the width of the court.
Drill Five
Serve consistency drill. In this drill, hit serves to one service box only and start on the number ten. Every serve you get in, you go up one number. Every serve you miss, you go down one. The goal is to get from 10-20 in as few serves as possible.
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