An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Sometimes the best tennis training techniques are also the most simple. I am a big believer that every player should spend some amount of time in their practice sessions hitting shots to targets. That includes serves, groundstrokes, volleys, overheads, drop shots, etc. When I go a week without performing target drills, it shows up in my matches. It’s ugly.
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My friend Will Boucek produces a terrific tennis podcast “Doubles Only,” which — follow me closely here — focuses exclusively on tennis doubles tactics and strategy. In a recent episode, he shared a doubles practice drill that he observed on the practice courts at Indian Wells this year while watching Elise Mertens and Hsieh Su-Wei work out. This post shares my own diagram of the drill he verbally described.
In early 2020, I hastily purchased a Perfect Pitch Rebounder for tennis when it became apparent that shut down of my city park courts was imminent due to Covid mandates. Apparently other tennis players simultaneously did the same thing, as the device went on long term back-order shortly after mine was shipped. It didn’t seem sportsmanlike to write about a tennis training device that players couldn’t have, so I didn’t at the time. As we head into the tennis “off-season” this year, the device is once again widely available. It is the perfect time to write about my own Perfect Pitch Rebounder.
One of the most unusual items from a Tennis Channel “Bag Check” video emerged without comment during last week’s post. The jump rope was originally highlighted from the video featuring Edina Gallovits. On subsequent consideration, I should have focused on the bag of oatmeal she whipped out with the description “best thing ever.” That is… not typically how I personally describe oatmeal.
I… couldn’t have picked Edina Gallovits out of a lineup before recently reviewing her Tennis Channel “Bag Check” video from 2010. I knew even less about her. She is a former WTA professional player who achieved a career high ranking #54 in 2008. She represented both Romania and the United States in international play. Her most important distinction is that she was the first player to whip out a jump rope on a “Bag Check” video.
The tennis ball machine is a powerful tool for fine tuning stroke mechanics and building consistency. Effective ball machine use starts with the identification of the purpose for each drill. In the absence of that, machine sessions can regress into simply standing flat-footed while playing easy balls from the center of the court. There is an art to getting the machine settings “just right.” However, the real skill is identifying an objective and coming up with an appropriate pattern to work on it.
The cardio fitness stations that I stumbled across last month at a DFW area tennis court continues to provide fodder for the “Tennis Technology and Training Tuesday” coverage. Last week I started in on “Squats” and assumed that the direction was simply to perform body weight squats. However, in the interim it has occurred to me that for a cardio workout the intended squat variation might have been “Jump Squats” which are also great for tennis.
Last Tuesday we discussed “Wall Sits” which was a cardo fitness station I stumbled across scrawled onto a tennis court with chalk. Today I am exploring another station labeled simply “Squats.” There are a lot of good variations of squats that are good for tennis. Today we will assume that the this station was for the simple body weight version.
A couple of weekends ago I played a practice match at a DFW area high school on a court that had obviously been in recent use as a tennis cardio circuit station. The description of the exercises to be performed were scrawled on the court with chalk. The station for 30 seconds of wall sits was nestled in the corner next to a cinderblock backboard.
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My home gym is equipped with a 10 pound slam ball. A slam ball is distinguished from normal weighted medicine balls because they have thicker and softer surfaces which make them great for high impact throwing exercises. You can wing a slam ball at a training partner or static surface that would be prohibitively dangerous with the harder medicine ball.