Court time is an incredibly valuable commodity in tennis. Unfortunately, there are times when access isn’t possible due to personal schedules, weather, or just availability. Finding creative ways to work on your game off-court is an essential tennis skill. Consequently, a book that promises to provide off-court exercises to improve on-court performance is highly appealing. Improve Your Tennis IQ: The off-court workout for on-court skills by Charles Applewhaite promises to deliver just that.
This book uses a “Question and Answer” format that is used in many tennis instructional books. However, Improve Your Tennis IQ is structured as a quiz where the questions are posed to the reader to select the best option or combination of options from multiple choices. As I worked through the material, I repeatedly muttered to myself that I was not told there would be a test. That’s what reading this book felt like to me.
Nevertheless, it contains a lot of valuable information. I particularly appreciated that in addition to the requisite chapter on serving, there was also one dedicated to the return of serve. That is a critical aspect of tennis that is frequently neglected. Similarly, the advice rendered in the Tactics section is solid. I also enjoyed the short segment on tennis etiquette, which will be good fodder for the next time I do a series about the unwritten rules of tennis.
Unfortunately, Improve Your Tennis IQ suffers from some curious editing decisions. The questions are encapsulated on one page, and the reader must flip to the next to access the answers. While that approach encourages tennis players to think critically about the answer, which can help develop the independent decision-making required for on-court success in the sport, the mental workload was taxing.
Additionally, rather than highlighting the questions and corresponding answers in the headers, short abbreviations such as “Q1” and “A1” were used, which makes it hard to skim through the book quickly to find a relevant topic. I also found the wording of the questions to be unnecessarily lengthy and lacking clarity. It seems like piling on to also observe that the photos used throughout the book were frequently out of focus and of low resolution. However, those things added to my overall sense that this book could have been so much better with just a little more attention to the details.
Improve Your Tennis IQ: The Intelligent Workout to Improve Your Skills on Court (<- Sponsored Link)
Improve Your Tennis IQ was published in 2003. Consequently, some of the advice is slightly dated. Getting a question “wrong” on topics where conventional wisdom has evolved is mildly annoying. That said, there is still a lot of great information in this book for readers with the mental fortitude and perseverance to fight through the challenges.
In many ways, the reading experience felt like grinding it out in a long and grueling tennis match — challenging, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding if you stick with it until the end. Like any tough opponent, Improve Your Tennis IQ demands focus, patience, and a willingness to persevere. That is always a good lesson to learn in tennis.
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