The Most Efficient Way To Improve Your Tennis
What’s the best advice you can give me on how to improve my game most efficiently?
I’m an educator in passion and mathematician by training, so I’m always interested in the most efficient method.
Feenix Y. Pan, Ph.D.
Learning Consultant in Mathematics
www.door2math.com
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Hmm, tough question. 
Let’s look at your question from this perspective: you need to play a lot in con-competitive situations and complement that with competitive play.
Fast improvement in technique and coordination and feel comes from NOT playing for points.
There should be no pressure – just joy of hitting and focus on feel and comfort. If you’re not comfortable hitting and feel tension somewhere, your technique is not correct – or you hit the ball too late or too close or too far.
The technique can improve by itself if you don’t force it too much and just focus on your comfort and hitting the ball cleanly and consistently. You need many hours on court without playing for points and without pressure. Your body WILL adapt and find the most comfortable technique.
You also need to play for points so that you learn how to play tennis for points – there are lots of tactical and mental lessons to be learned. Your strokes must also become more efficient in the match and you’ll also be forced to adapt them more.
The problem with playing for points mostly is that you constantly play under pressure, in time deficit and off balance and that creates havoc with your technique and fluidity of the strokes. Your movement is not fluid, it’s not well coordinated and takes a lot of effort out of you.
The key is to find a balance between playing for points and just hitting.
If you’re in your first years of learning tennis, I would suggest at least 80% of the time just hitting without any pressure and any competitive situation – and around 20% of the time playing for points.
Note: When I say just hitting it doesn’t mean that you just hit down the middle of the court for 2 hours. It means that you have a purpose with every shot and you work on something. You may work on consistency and really hit down the middle for 20 minutes.
You can then hit short and long cross court shots. You can volley back to your opponent and hit an occasional volley away. All this is done in a “practice mode” where there are not points and you just focus on clean, comfortable and consistent EXECUTION of the shot.
Even later I would still suggest at least 60% of your tennis practice and play to be playing in non-competitive situations and drills.
When I was a student and had lots of time to play tennis in the summer, I used to just hit with my friends 3 to 5 hours per day during the week and then I would play a tournament during a weekend.
My ratio of non-competitive to competitive play was probably around 9 to 1.
This allowed me to develop all the strokes really well since I could focus on my feel, comfort and technique and was not pressureed or rushed. The tournament play taught me how to play for points without damaging my technique.
And even if some of my shots broke down slightly during matches, I could “find” and “repair” them again with many hours of free hitting in the following days.
If you play for points too much, you don’t get a chance to “repair” your technique. It gets uglier and less effective – since you hit with lots of tension in your body and with a mind that’s not calm.
A calm mind produces calm and steady strokes while a hurried mind produces hurried strokes.
Another plus when just hitting is that you can extend the rallies and work on your stamina or ask your friend to move you around so that you can practice hitting on the move and so on. You can work on the specific part of your physical game which you are lacking.
So the most effective way to develop your game in all areas (technique, physical game, strategy and the mental game) is to find the right balance between playing in non-competitive situations and playing for points.
Have a very high percentage of playing in non-competitive situations in your first years of tennis and gradually focus more on playing for points.
But always keep a high ratio of playing without pressure where you can work on your shots and tactics which will help you develop effortless and fluid technique and movement.
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March 4th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
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March 6th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Tomaz advise is on the money as usual and it relates so much to how I developed better strokes over the years. One thing that occurred to me that I could add -especially since the question comes from a mathematician- is that eventually it becomes clear to you (the player) that behind every good stroke there are (to a large degree) a number of “laws” at play, that if violated, will inevitably result in the decrease of the quality of the shot.
A good example of the many questions we could ask ourselves in order to understand how these “laws” work and “assist” our strokes would be: Why are my shots consistently better when I manage to keep my center of gravity low and when I’m balanced and/or centered? The point being that if it didn’t matter at some “physics” level then getting to the shot within balance and bending your knees wouldn’t make any difference at all…
We’re dealing with an incoming ball at different heights, speeds, spins and a myriad of other characteristics that in theory could be returned perfectly well each and every time -IF- the perfect set of “conditions” could be applied to our returning shot. If we could see the whole process in slow motion we could adjust all the parameters: 1. Get to the optimum set up/position (distance from ball, etc) behind the shot. 2. Hips and torso turn (racket back) 3. Correct grip for perfect racket head openness/closeness. and 4 and 5 and 6… et al…
But of course, getting all the conditions “just right” is impossible to do. The fact is that we only have a fraction of a second to make all these judgments and decisions on how to proceed. But on the other hand if we get familiar with what set of “laws” assist us best in hitting a great tennis stroke we can ALWAYS apply them behind each and every shot knowing that at least within a pretty good degree of approximation (margin of error) we’re doing the “right” thing.
In my experience (which to a large extent has just been on a trial and error basis) this has proven to be effective. This has obviously been a process over time, but I still today (in a much lesser degree) make a conscious effort to watch carefully those things that cause undesirable results. And guess what… they are always the same ones… So what has happened as a result is that things got much more simplified (easier in the sense that no “guessing” is involved). I do so much LESS today than what I used to years ago because I strive to do that which (for the most part) works, while staying away from that which consistently showed me that did not.
Does this mean I achieved some kind of perfection? No!!
I’m still no way near the player I’d like to be, but I thought sharing this would address what without a doubt has made -over time- my game more consistent and efficient. One of the good things about it too is, that since it “shrunk” my form to that which is more closely in tune with the “laws…”, my focus (since my mind is done figuring out/discarding/selecting) has gotten better too. In fact, this is not to be confused with something overly heady or analytical, or playing by numbers… It’s really not, it’s more a matter of training your body senses (through trial and error) to what it would be like achieving the “right feeling” for every shot. Once it feels right, it would most likely prove that the body mechanics are in place too. I hope that helps!
March 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 pm
The best way to improve tennis is in my opinion is to play points with control with more and more rallies rather than to finish point in one or two strokes. Long rallies give lot of confidence and will improve stamina also.