A little while back, I wrote a post highlighting the need to serve earlier in practices - check out that article here.
I also discussed this on the BTS podcast with PhD in Sport Science, Jaime Fernandez, who recently published a research paper on this exact topic. His conclusion - serving should happen at some point in the first half of a tennis practice AND NOT at the very end of a session. This will benefit players both from a development standpoint and from an injury mitigation point of view.
Whether you’re a tennis player or a tennis coach, if most of your practice time is spent hitting balls from a basket or hand feed, you might need to rethink your strategy.
Before I dive into this argument, let’s set the stage. There are essentially 2 types of practice balls that a player can receive. A live ball and a dead ball.
There are no shortages of training videos these days. Just open your Instagram or Facebook app and within seconds you’ll be inundated with more drills than you know what to do with.
The question is, will these drills help your tennis?
What does the typical practice in tennis look like? If you’re someone that’s been around the game for many years, it probably follows a pretty similar structure - mini-tennis, groundstrokes, volleys/overheads and lastly, serves and returns.
But what if a player’s priority is to improve the serve? Does it make sense to hit for an hour (or like in many tennis settings, beyond an hour) prior to serving?
And in this post, I wanted to expand on these topics in more detail to add clarity to each.
First, here’s a bit of context. It’s been nearly 10 years since I began my master’s degree in sport science at the University of Edinburgh. It was 2010 and I was an eager young lad (as the scot’s would say).
Before then, I had a lot of ‘in the trenches’ experience - as a player and a coach. But going through a masters programme got me on the research train, and I’ve been on it ever since.
Are you a high-performance player or coach? If so, this post is for you.
You see, I’ve coached in a number of high-performance settings. From academies, to federations and in private settings. One common characteristic that has struck me time and again is training schedules. The typical schedule sees players training Monday to Friday. On rare occasions, some take part in Saturday morning sessions - but this is certainly not the norm. As you can see, these settings follow the regular school and work week schedule.
But is it the most ideal option when developing an elite performer?
When teaching various tactical scenarios to players, I often ask them the following question: “what do you think is the most common rally length in tennis”? Less experienced players jump to answers like 7 or 9 while those that have been playing for many years reply with 3, 4 or 5. Do YOU know what it is? When it comes to professional tennis, according to Brain Game Tennis, it’s 1. Can you believe that? The most common rally length (called the mode, in statistics) is 1! That’s a service ace or a service winner (i.e. the returner makes an error off the serve). This happens about 30% of the time. The next most common rally length is 3 - that’s a serve, return and one more shot.
In last week’s post, we took a closer look at the principle of progressive loading and offered several ways in which we can effectively ‘progress’ a player both on and off the tennis court. To reiterate last week's point, it’s critical that we look at progressions from a long-term macro perspective. Why so? Well, progress is rarely (if ever) linear. Further to that, each of the biomotor qualities that we spoke briefly about last week (speed, strength, stamina, suppleness, skill), improve and regress, depending on which we give greater attention to (i.e. more training stimuli).
