Being A Success At Tennis Is All About Knowing Yourself

This is just a follow on to the previous post HERE

You probably need to read it for some background.

Anyway, following on from the last post, here is some more stuff behind it.

You have got to realise that variety and accuracy are the most important weapons you can develop – even more than pace.

Look at this years Mens final at Wimbledon.

As brilliant as Roddick was (and he was) we all know that he has the fastest recorded serve in the World – yet Federer out aced him by serving 51 aces in the match.

We all know about the pace of Roddicks tennis serve but believe me Federer has the “best” serve purely down to the ability to hit the “spots” again & again when needed.

So pick out a shot in your game that you can exibit a lot of variety and accuracy and work on it.

Try this drill.

Play tennis points with a partner and you are not allowed to hit the same variation of that shot twice in a row.

That doesn’t just mean spin, but can also be length, speed, height, direction.

I include the serve in this – you cannot serve the same serve twice in a row.

I am going to go more into this in an upcoming series – “The Match Winning Variation Quotient”

Use it and tell me what you think.

Be The Tennis Player You Are Before You Try To Be The Tennis Player You Are Not

The tennis player is I’m afraid not on a level playing field!

We are not all created equal with similar amounts of tennis skills and even if we are someone else is physically more gifted.

Even if you can overcome that, you find someone else has better tennis mental strength………….and so the list goes on!

But, wait a minute.

Even before you start worrying about how you measure up against others, there are plenty of other things to worry about.

For example, do you make the most of your own game?

Do you know your strengths and weaknesses?

Do you understand them well enough so that you are able to make your strengths as strong as they could be?

Can you see that maximizing your tennis strength or tennis strengths (if you are lucky enough!!) could actually rank pretty high, if not at the top when it comes to things that you might need to do to move your tennis game on?

If not, then think about it for a minute.

If you do then carry on.

I was working with a player recently.  I watched her play some singles and asked her about the tennis match I just watched.

She then proceeded to explain the match in terms of what her opponent did and didn’t do.

When I asked her about what she was able to do during the game I came up against a baffled silence.

I then asked her about what she thought her strengths were and whether she was able to implement them in the game and again I got some puzzled looks.

“I don’t really know” she said, “I never really think about things that way!!”

So Bang!

Out goes the No1 Principle from my “Beat All The Tennis Players You Want” Matchplay System, which talks about trying to impose your tennis strength onto your opponent.

If you don’t know what it is, how can you impose it?

Anyway, I thought she played the volley and played around the net prety well and wondered why she didn’t do it more.

She said, she thought she had a good volley but felt a bit strange because all the other ladies tend to play from the back of the tennis court.  She also felt like she was put off when she was passed or missed a volley.

I agreed with her but told her she didn’t set the points up well enough and that was the real reason why her net play was a bit “sketchy”.

This is what we did (and you can do the same if your net play could/should be your A game).

You serve and play out the point – BUT!!

You have to get to the net by your 3rd shot or you lose the point.

This will force you to serve well enough to get to the net straight away or get your opponent out of court to allow you to hit a telling approach to get “in” on one the following balls.

Of course she messed up early on, but pretty soon she began to think about what it took to get to the net on “her terms” from the beginning of the point and sure enough things were soon falling into place.

So pick something in your game that you know is a strength and work out how you can work things so that you can get yourself  in “that” situation more often in matches.

Remember that Beat All The Tennis Players You Want 1st Principle of Tennis Warfare – Deploy your weapons & work out how to diffuse your opponents weapons!!

It can only be a good thing.