Month: April 2021

Unless you are fortunate enough to have your very own tennis court then there will no doubt be times when you can’t practice or train with the use of a court.

However, there are plenty of ways that you can train to get better at tennis without having access to a court. Here are some exercises, drills and diet tips to help you improve.

Start With Your Goals

Like anything, if you don’t have a clearly defined goal with your tennis game it will be very hard to produce the changes that you’d like to see in terms of results.

A good start to getting better at tennis is to write down three big goals you’d like to achieve with your game. Post your goals on your bathroom mirror or somewhere else you’ll see every day and this will motivate you to work hard to become the player you want to be.

Improving Strength & Fitness

Cardiovascular Fitness

Any amount of extra fitness activity will make your tennis game better. Tennis by itself is not enough to get you into the kind of incredible physical shape you need to be in to be great at the sport, it burns a relatively small amount of calories compared to more intensive sports and workouts and will not efficiently build the muscles you need to inject pure strength into your game. Lifting weights and push ups are two great options to build muscle and make you stronger.

The other reason why you should focus on getting into shape is to improve your stamina and fitness levels. The last thing you want is to be exhausted and too fatigued to continue playing, which is why your physical condition is so important when playing tennis. Going for runs and cycling are great ways to do some cardio to increase your fitness levels.

To start with, you can work on your cardiovascular fitness through running or cycling, which will improve your fitness in tennis games.

The fitter that you are, the better your game will become so this is one easy way to get better at tennis even without a tennis court. Your speed and endurance for running around the court is one of the biggest areas of your game.

Sprints

Short sprints are also good to practice; you can set up some markers that will incorporate sprints the width and depth of the court and different directions too, completing them in a circular routine.

Strength

Another big element of tennis is having good strength, to enable you to deliver fast serves and to return balls to the back of the court with pace.

You can work on your arm strength through weight training at the gym, or buy your own set of weights to work with at home.

Squatting

You should be eating healthy and exercising even if you’re not a tennis player. But if optimal performance is your goal, then squats are by the far the best bodyweight exercise to strengthen your legs and core muscles.

A great thing about squats is that they can be performed in the privacy of your own home, and without the need to use extra equipment.

Practicing Tennis Without a Court

Of course, you also need to be able to improve your racquet ability and (as well as investing in the best racquets) you can do this by improvising with your training environment, for example:

Serving

A large flat area of concrete or grass is perfect for practicing your serving.

You will need to measure out the relevant areas and if you have something to mark out the court like tape then you can practice your serves.

Ideally, you will want to be serving into an area that has a wall or something behind it so that you can easily collect your balls in and go again.

Returning Against a Wall

If you have access to use a large wall, you can use it to hit the ball against to improve your racquet skills.

You can move closer to the wall to improve your short game and further back to practice your back of court shots.

Swingball

You might remember swingball as a fun garden activity as a child but it is also a great way to practice your forehand and backhand shots in a small area.

If you are not familiar with the setup, it is basically a ball attached to a post that allows you to hit the ball to make it spin around the post. You can practice hitting it from one side to the other but you will want a high-quality one to get more out of it.

Master the Art of Split-Stepping

Just like the serve, the split-step is a vital part of your game that you should be constantly working on. You can do this in the comfort of your own home, preferably with your racquet for the added immersion and realism.

There are also ways of improving your game that doesn’t involve exercise in any way such as:

Reduce Foot and Heel Tightness by Rolling your Foot Over a Tennis Ball While Standing

This may come as surprising news, but using a tennis ball for a foot massage feels fantastic, relieves tension and is easy to use. You should start with one foot at a time, ensuring that you are rolling the ball all around the foot where you experience stiffness and pain.

If tennis balls aren’t your thing, then a foam roller works equally as well for the hard to reach places of your feet.

Online Courses

As with anything in life taking advice from people with experience and implementing that advice into your game can be a very powerful combination. There are many courses online that can help to make you a better tennis player just do a quick search.

One I can recommend personally is the PLB Tennis Academy: Turn Your Forehand Into a Weapon.

Watch Video Tutorials

Sometimes your game can see huge improvements by small tweaks to your techniques. From understanding the most effective grip for each shot, to how to get topspin on the ball, video tutorials will help you to develop your overall game.

There are many free videos on YouTube that will help you to improve your skills, including ones with former ATP pros and coaches.

Pick a skill that you want to improve and then search YouTube for one of the most-watched videos on that specific skill to get a high-quality tennis lesson without leaving your house!

Here are some good basic tips to improve your strokes:

Improve Your Diet

Like most sports, your diet has a large influence on your performance.

If you are carrying too much weight, for example, you will find it harder to get around the court or your stamina may be affected.

You need to have a healthy, balanced diet that provides a body shape that equips you best for playing tennis.

If you look at the pros, you will see a lot of muscle, particularly around the shoulders, arms and thighs. At the same time, you don’t want to have so much muscle that it slows you down.

Your diet can also be adapted to give you more stamina when you are playing in a match.

Some games can go on for hours, which is difficult to maintain energy levels without the right diet. You will often see tennis players eating bananas in the breaks between games for a quick energy boost.

Further Reading

https://racketsportsworld.com/practice-tennis-indoors/

A key element of sports performance is the athlete’s diet, for professionals and amateurs alike. For children playing sports like tennis, having a good diet plan from an early age will help embed a healthy and balanced diet throughout life. A good diet plan will not only help with fitness levels, it can also be important to help build high levels of stamina for matches. Professional athletes employ nutritionists to advise them on their diet because they know how big an impact it has on their results.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to pay a diet specialist but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still create a really good diet plan yourself. One of the biggest issues with diet plans for kids is that they are often a bit fussier about what they will eat. So half of the challenge is developing a diet plan that not only works but is also appealing to them. Getting vegetables into kids’ diets is a difficult task that many parents struggle with but there are ways of getting around this with a bit of creativity in the kitchen.

A good tennis diet plan will vary depending on the age and build of the young player and also the amount of activity that they are involved in. If they are training five times per week for three hours and playing a match each week, this will be very different to someone who trains for a few hours each week. So first of all, work out how many hours of tennis will be completed each week and factor in any other activities that they will be doing at school or elsewhere.

A Balanced Diet

A good source of energy is foods that are rich in carbohydrates such as whole grain pasta, bread, rice and starchy vegetables. The amount should be calculated based on the calories consumed, so children with high levels of activity throughout the week will need more carbohydrates to keep them well fuelled for tennis matches and training.

A healthy meal should include a large proportion of veg (30-40%), around a quarter of the meal should be made up with whole grains and another quarter should be healthy proteins such as lean meat/fish. The rest of the meal should include fruits and some healthy oils. In terms of liquids, avoid sugar-filled drinks and limit milk and juice. Water is the best option but isn’t always the drink favored by children so adding natural flavorings are the healthy way to make water a bit more interesting. You can add berries, for example, to give it some extra flavor but without the additives and sugars in many other drinks.

Tailored to Activities

Another factor to consider in regards to children’s diets is that pre-match meals should vary from everyday meals. If there is a tennis match that could go on for three hours as an example, they will need more fuel than they would for a one-hour training session. Experts suggest that you eat a high protein meal the night before a match and eat a light, high carbohydrate meal a few hours before the match.

Diet Diary

You should create a diet diary to keep track of what is being consumed and to monitor the effects of diet variances. For example, if the player feels low on energy in a particular match, you can check for any dietary problems that they need to avoid for the following match. Keeping a diary can sound boring for many kids but with fun apps that provide incentives for recording diet data, it can be more appealing to the technology savvy youth!

Some of the apps even tell you the proportions of food that you have had and you can set a personal diet plan. Instead of needing to laboriously enter data, you can simply scan a barcode and it brings up all of the nutritional information, so recording diet data doesn’t have to take up much time.

Match Foods

A lot of children take what are labeled as energy drinks and energy chocolate bars to give them an energy boost in games but whilst they give a quick boost, they do not provide as much benefit as bananas. There is a reason all of the pros use their breaks to eat a banana – because it works!

When you do not have a training partner but still need to put in the work to keep in shape or develop your tennis skills, you have to get a little bit creative with your drills.

The fitness elements are more straightforward to complete as an individual but the on-court drills are more difficult to do alone.

If you have the luxury of a court and all the equipment you could need then solo drills are easy but not many people do have all the expensive gear.

However, there are plenty of drills that you can incorporate into individual training that will help you to progress with your tennis training, such as:

Practicing volleys off a wall

Whilst returning volleys from a wall will not replicate the exact ball direction that you might receive from an opponent, it is still a great way of sharpening up your reflexes and speeding up your reaction time.

So hit a ball against the wall and repeatedly return it. You can practice doing it whilst allowing the ball to bounce or practice a direct volley from the wall.

As well as helping with your racquet work, this is also really good for improving your footwork/foot speed.

Serving on a court or marked area

If you have a free court to practice on but just no tennis partner then you can still spend time perfecting your serve. You can either bring a large volume of balls with you, or you can incorporate ball retrieval into your fitness training.

So for example, after hitting 10 serves run round to the other side to collect them all, making sure you are doing sprints to each ball in the way that you would move around the court during a game.

Then serve them to the other side and so on.

If you do not have a court, you can still mark out an area on grass or concrete to fire your serves at. Ideally you would set your area up somewhere near a wall or fence to keep the balls nearby.

Line-to-line shuttles

No racquet required for this drill, as you are working on your speed and endurance. If you are able to use a tennis court then you have your line markings ready to go.

You run from the sideline to the intersection line, touch the line and turn and run back to the sideline.

The next run is to the other sideline and back, then you repeat these shuttle runs.

It is a similar drill to the bleep test and you can keep doing this for as long as possible, trying to improve the number of shuttles each time you do this one.

Ladders

A good way of improving your footwork is to use ladders.

In the old days people actually used wooden ladders that they lay on the floor for people to do this drill but now you can buy ladders made from lightweight materials.

So you lay the ladder along the floor and step into the first square with one foot and then the other.

You do the same for each square of the ladder until you get to the other side. For tennis, it is helpful to try doing this forwards, backwards and sideways.

You can run back round the edge of the ladder and do it again, or incorporate it into a circuit drill with a number of other drills.

Jumping

Depending on your fitness and jumping ability, you can possibly use the net to perform sideways jumps from one side of the net to the other.

If you are not quite at that jumping level then you can practice using a smaller item but being able to jump is important in tennis and this drill can give you a good workout for developing your leg muscles.

You can also do it using a small wall or other surfaces to jump up onto the top off and then back down and repeat.

To make it replicate a match situation more closely, try and jump high on the spot hitting an imaginary ball rather than using anything to jump over or onto. This will help you to reach those high balls in match situations.