Why Use On-Court Drills to Improve Tennis Conditioning
For the majority of tennis players, traditional ‘aerobic training’ is useless.
That’s a pretty bold statement, I know. But hear me out.
In tennis, successful players need to be skillful. They must possess technical mastery across a number of strokes. They require a strategy. And tactics to implement said strategy.
Even though I have a bias towards being very prepared from a physical standpoint (as long time readers of Mattspoint would know), technique and tactics are still top priority.
Having said that, the gap between skill and physicality is narrowing. And at times, it looks blurry. Allow me to elaborate.
Tennis Movement in a Nutshell
In tennis, players must be able to react to the oncoming ball and move explosively to track it down. Then, as a player is setting up for the oncoming shot, they must decelerate rapidly.
Once they’ve executed their shot, a recovery movement is needed to get into the most ideal position for the next shot. This recovery action is often quite aggressive - but that will depend on the tactical scenario.
Because of the unique dimensions of a tennis court, movements occur in a relatively small area - about 3m of one another (Kovacs 2006).
Beyond that, the velocities of tennis movements (measured by GPS technology) are quite low - 75% of them occur under 3 m/s!
While that might seem slow, it’s the aggressive nature of stopping and starting that is so stressful on various structures of the body.
On top of that, our muscles and joints get into various lengths + positions. Sometimes, deep knee flexion is required. Other times, the hamstrings are under high stretch. To say that tennis has high movement variability is an understatement.
The icing on the cake - this scenario might happen 3 times during a point, or 23 times. And during a match, it’ll occur hundreds of times.
There’s optimistic news though…you have some rest in-between these bursts of highly explosive efforts - 25 seconds between points, 90 seconds on changeovers, 2 minutes between sets and 5 minutes if a bathroom break is requested.
Did you sense my sarcasm there?
On top of stressing the musculoskeletal system, it’s obvious that these constant start/stops and short rest times also place a large demand on the cardiovascular system.
But given what I’ve outlined above, does it seem appropriate to ask players to get into tennis shape by performing low-level aerobic training?
My stance on this is an emphatic NO.
I will even argue that if a player performs ‘cardio’ AND matches (to some extent) the work to rest intervals seen on the court, we’re still not training in the most ideal way for tennis.
Recall that in order for a quality to transfer, it must be highly specific. You won’t get good at tennis if you only play golf.
So when it comes to improving tennis-specific movement + conditioning, we need to match the work to rest ratios AND the movements. In sport science circles, this is called time-motion characteristics.
Time-Motion Training
At this point, you might be thinking “I get it, all I have to do is play tennis to improve my ‘tennis conditioning’”.
That line of thinking is partly correct. But there’s a caveat to that. It’s not enough to just play tennis.
Here’s what I mean by that. Most players, when hitting tennis balls for practice, aren't too focused on their movement. They’re typically thinking about their striking ability or their technique or something related to the stroke/shot they’re hitting.
Similarly, if a player is competing, they’re also probably not thinking much about their movement. They’re likely thinking about tactics (or at least I hope they are).
Why is this a problem? Well it’s not really a problem unless your goal is to improve tennis conditioning and movement abilities.
That’s where specific movement drills come into play - ones that involve very similar ‘time-motion characteristics’ to an actual tennis match…but can be structured in a way to emphasize certain abilities over others.
Below are some specific benefits to this type of training:
You can focus more on the split-step action by asking the player to time their split appropriately. And provide them with adequate rest times as the key here is to be highly reactive (it’s difficult to train a quality in an explosive manner if we’re fatigued).
You can emphasize the recovery action by asking players to beat the hit (a topic/cue we’re going to tackle in another post).
The setup can be challenged - i.e. a player can be asked to be balanced while hitting, instead of striking the ball while in motion.
And finally, you can demand that they do these things during extended rallies (time-based) or for a certain amount of shots (like in the video above - the goal was sets of 10 in a row).
Again, the work to rest ratios can be adapted to meet the objective. Are we aiming to tackle the movement quality side of things or are we targeting conditioning/capacity?
Here are 2 examples - in the first vid, the emphasis is more on the split-step + first step. In the second vid, there’s a greater emphasis on recovering towards the center of the court after being stretched wide. The work to rest ratios can be adapted in both drills (or like I mentioned previously, we can count the number of balls).
In this drill, one player is being moved (at random) and hits back down the center of the court. As the ball speed increases, so too do the movement demands.
In this drill, the player is being asked to recover towards the ideal position (notice the line drawn on the clay to provide feedback to the player).
A Base of What?
When asked about ‘building a base’ during the early periods of training, my mentor Dan Pfaff always replied with ‘a base of what?’.
In tennis, we need a base of explosive first steps. A base of efficient decelerations. A base of aggressive recovery actions. It’s hard to separate movement + energy system training…they’re intertwined.
There might be times when getting on a stationary bike to do intervals is appropriate. Perhaps when coming off an injury or if big training gaps need to be filled.
But with most healthy players, I prefer using on-court drills - compared to traditional energy system development - because of what I wrote in one of the first sentences above…tennis is a technical, tactical, mastery-driven sport.
If we spend too much time off the court, working on things that could be tackled on the court, we’re missing the boat. It’s my viewpoint that tackling movement, work capacity, skill (and even tactics), should be done in an integrated manner.
Our movement will get better.
Our skills improve.
Our decision-making sharpens.
And yes, so does our ability to withstand long rallies…and recover faster between them.
The added benefit is this - we don’t have to beat players up with suicide drills, additional running or needless boot-camp types of workouts.
To me, that’s a BIG win.
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