This week’s Tuesday Training post focuses on the calendar. For most recreational players, this time of year is the closest tennis comes to an off-season. Between colder weather, shorter days, travel, holidays, and family obligations, many players naturally curtail their court time. While there might be a few stray fall season playoff matches and local Tri-Level league play, for most recreational competitors, December is our downtime.
I have noticed that many players do not resume serious tennis training until after the new year. One reason for that is that the annual tradition of New Year’s Resolutions makes January feel like the perfect starting line, and in many ways it is. There is nothing wrong with syncing renewed focus to the turn of the calendar. However, the spring tennis season arrives very quickly. There isn’t a lot of time to work on your game with league schedules, tournaments, and competitive commitments bearing down on you.
That is why I think it is a best practice to treat December as the pre-season of goal setting. Now is the ideal time to experiment, test ideas, and evaluate what will ultimately shape your official tennis objectives for 2026. Players can use this period to try new strength routines, explore mobility drills, hire a coach for an assessment lesson, change racquets, or run on-court experiments such as altering serve targets or working on new point patterns. Others might commit to cardio work, revisit injury-prevention routines, or finally review unwatched personal match video footage from 2025 and clear off that camera roll. The key is to start January with momentum rather than from a dead stop.
This idea extends far beyond tennis. In personal development, an otherwise wasted month can create a performance edge. While many people drift through the holidays with the idea that serious improvement efforts will start with fresh goals and resolutions in the New Year, there is an opportunity to launch into January rather than limp into it. December offers space, perspective, and room to prepare before the turn of the year when serious goal commitments are made.
I want to acknowledge that rest and recovery also have an essential place in every player’s tennis calendar. Breaks are limited and necessary, but even rest benefits from intention. Doom scrolling social media will not improve on-court performance. Purposeful recovery might. Yoga, meditation, gentle mobility work, or simply unplugging can help the mind and body reset in ways that can support better tennis in the new year.
The people who perform at the highest level, both in tennis and in life, make smart use of the time others overlook. December is the largest block of unstructured time you will have all year, and it carries enormous untapped potential. Approach the coming month as your tennis pre-season. Invest in it with purpose. Use it to clarify goals, test ideas, and build momentum so that you enter 2026 prepared, confident, and with a little progress already behind you.
