Practice 2.022: Eight steps to bring routines into the modern era

Tennis players of a certain age might remember hearing tall tales about the practice habits of legendary grinders like Bjorn Borg and Mary Joe Fernandez. “I heard Borg spends one week hitting crosscourt, and the next week hitting down the line,” or “Mary Joe has to make a thousand shots in a row before she can go home.” The message was: To practice like a pro, you need to hit a ton of balls; to become a pro, you can’t miss any.

Forty years later, that message hasn’t evolved much. When it comes to practice, the focus is still on repetition. And that makes sense for players who are developing their strokes—there’s no substitute for muscle memory. But the game has changed since the days of Borg and Fernandez, and our knowledge of how to win matches has deepened. It’s time our practice habits caught up.

Big-time tennis today is about the “serve-plus-one,” about the first strike, about dictating play with the forehand, about forcing your opponent into errors. We know 70 percent of rallies are over in four shots or less, so why are we practicing as if we need to win a 100-ball marathon on every point? We know the serve and return are the most important shots, so why aren’t we working on them more? We know the pros are using analytics and sports psychologists to get an edge—can we follow their lead?

With those questions in mind, we’ve consulted with two coaches who are at the leading edge of tennis training. Craig O’Shannessy has been an analytics-based adviser for dozens of pros, including Novak Djokovic. Jeff Greenwald is a sports-psychology consultant and author of The Best Tennis of Your Life: 50 Mental Strategies for Fearless Performance.

Together, at the Brain Game Tennis website, they’ve put together a course that helps players use analytics and sports psychology during matches. Here, they walk us through a step-by-step plan that will integrate those disciplines into our training regimens—and bring our practice routines into the modern era.

1) Use Video

The first step to practicing more effectively is knowing—specifically—what you need to practice.

“Traditionally, players have gone out and just hit balls and tried to improve their strokes,” O’Shannessy says. “You’ll make better use of your time if you focus on simulating real match situations.”

Start by finding out how and when you’re losing points. Are you missing returns? Are you hitting your weaker stroke too often? Are you shanking a certain shot from a certain part of the court? The easiest way to find out is to tape yourself, or have someone tape you, in competition. (If you can swing it, O’Shannessy recommends the new Cinematic option on the iPhone 13.)

From there, you can identify the shots and scenarios where you’re struggling, and work on them during practice. You might be surprised by how quickly you notice your shortcomings, and how clear the solution to them is.

2) Add Pressure to Your Practice

For Greenwald, videos and stats allow us to get more granular in practice, and to inject a psychological element into our training.

“It’s called ‘deliberate practice,’” he says. “Instead of working on a list of things, players deepen their focus on a specific goal.”

Rather than hitting forehands and backhands, spend your practice polishing your serve-plus-one (the serve plus the next shot), or your putaway forehand, or a baseline pattern you struggle with. By bringing match situations to the practice court, you’ll also bring some of the pressure that comes with them.

“The biggest complaint I get from players is that they don’t play as well in matches as they do in practice,” Greenwald says. “If you add some stress in practice, you can condition yourself to the anxiety of a match, so you feel more comfortable playing freely when it counts.”

3) Put Something on the Line

“It’s amazing what can happen when you bet a smoothie on a game, isn’t it?” Greenwald says with a laugh. “People suddenly get very serious.”

The difference between practice sessions and matches is the difference between stakes and no stakes. As every tennis player knows, that’s all the difference in the world. According to Greenwald, though, too many of us want to keep the two realms separate.

“When you get to 10-all in a baseline game, no one wants to do sudden death,” he says. “It’s usually ‘win by two.’ Why not do sudden death and put some pressure on yourself?”

Try putting something small on the line when you compete, so you play with a little more purpose. If you play regular practice matches with a certain opponent, up the ante by wagering a dinner on them. The first to win 10 matches gets to dine at the restaurant of his or her choice—and the loser pays.

4) Give the Serve Its Due

The most common rally length is one shot—a serve and a missed return. That tells us we should work on our serves. Granted, it’s more fun to rally, but improving your serve, even if only incrementally, will have an outsized effect on your results. Instead of grinding early in your training sessions and then hitting buckets of serves later, flip the priority list and start your practices by working on your serve and return when you’re fresh.

O’Shannessy’s research shows that making six of 10 first serves is ideal: if you make more, you’re probably not hitting it hard enough, and not getting enough free points; if you make fewer, you’re giving your opponents too many looks at second serves.

To find the balance between power and accuracy, he recommends this drill (alternate between deuce and ad courts after each made serve): Step One—Make two first serves in a row, six times. Step Two—Make three first serves a row, five times. Step Three—Make four first serves in a row, four times.

“Only hit first serves, but first serves that you can actually make in the court,” O’Shannessy says. “Blasting first serves that spray all over the place doesn’t help you at all.”

5) Give the Return Its Due, Too

If there’s a “least-practiced shot,” it’s probably the return. But as with the serve, a little improvement in your return will go a long way.

“If you’re winning more than 30 percent of your opponents’ first-serve points over a season, you’re a rock star,” O’Shannessy says. “Think of it like this—getting a quality first serve back in play gets you admission into the point.”

Be sure to carve out time in your practices to work on your first- and second-serve returns. Have your partner or coach move up to the service line and hit different types of serves at random, to both corners and into your body, to replicate match conditions. On big first serves, concentrate on getting the point back to neutral; floating the ball deep and down the middle, so your opponent has no pace or angles to work with, is a perfectly fine play. On second serves, look to shift the point in your favor right away; pick a corner and drive the ball in that direction.

6) Give Yourself Permission to Miss

How do you practice overcoming the yips? You can hit dozens of aces in practice and still struggle just to get through your service motion when the pressure is on. For Greenwald, it’s about recognizing when and why you get tight, and making adjustments.

“I try to increase my players’ awareness of their thought process,” he says, “so they can make new choices when they feel nervous.”

When his players become frustrated, Greenwald will ask them questions so they can pause, regulate their emotions, and understand that they have control over themselves. Sometimes he’ll give a player “permission to miss”—for two minutes, they can blast away without worrying about where the ball goes. Usually, they come back feeling looser and playing better.

“You want players to understand that they can adjust their mental state during a match, they can go from awful to ripping the ball again quickly,” he says.

7) Go Inside Out

The world’s top players can finish points from the baseline with their forehands, and many of them like to do it inside-out. But no matter your level of play, the best pattern is when you’re hitting forehands, and your opponent is hitting backhands.

“In men’s tennis, a high percentage of forehands are hit from the backhand court [ad court for righties, deuce court for lefties],” O’Shannessy says. “That means players are running around their backhands and hitting forehands whenever they can.”

With that in mind, set up four targets across the opposite baseline—one near each corner of the court, and one on either side of the center hash. A partner or coach should feed balls to your backhand side, and you should run around and hit forehands to each of those targets.

Traditionally, players are taught to recover to the middle of the court, but if you hit a penetrating inside-out forehand, you’re better off not moving all the way back to the center. The ball will likely come back crosscourt, and you’ll be better prepared to hit the shot you want: another forehand from the backhand side of the court.

8) Add a Plus One to Your Party

“There are many different labels we have for game styles—counterpuncher, serve-and-volleyer, all-court player, grinder,” O’Shannessy says. “But those styles are all secondary game styles. The primary game style for everyone is first strike, because most rallies end in the 0–4 shot range.”

As Roger Federer showed us for two decades, the best way to strike first is to use your serve to set up your forehand (or your backhand, if that’s your strongest offensive shot). Honing that serve-plus-one to perfection should be a major objective of your training time.

Start by working on serves that will give you the best chance of hitting a forehand on the next shot—for righties, that’s out wide in the deuce court, and down the T in the ad court. Then work on making the most of that first ball and using it to put your opponent on the defensive right away.

“It’s the serve, return, serve-plus-one, and return-plus-one, those are the strokes that dominate the most,” O’Shannessy says. “And that’s what you need to mirror on the practice court.”