Basic tennis foundational skills include hand, foot, eye coordination and agility. You need to incorporate non-racquet drills to help develop these foundational skills along with the ball sending and receiving skills required for tennis.
Dynamic Warm up -Jog – Shuffle – Jog, High Knees, Butt Kicks, High skips, Frankenstein walks
Ladder Ball Drills
Foundational Footwork -we will learn the ready position, activated feet, split step, walking steps and shuffle recovery. These new skills will be the foundation of your tennis development and it must come natural and intuitively. Everything that we do forward will build on these foundational skills. Module 1 will include hitting, but the main skill of footwork is the focus.
Click on the video below for a demo of Module 1.
Ready position and Activated feet
We want all players to get in the habit of having “happy feet” or activated feet. Activated feet puts the body in motion and prepares the body for ground reaction force, which is very important in tennis.
Split step
The split step is to help a player gather balance and be able to change directions or move to a ball on balance and efficient. The split step is a small hop where both feet leave the ground and land, ready for reaction. The timing of the split step, is initiated at the strike of the opponents ball. There are two variations, the normal split step and the flow split step. The flow split step lands on the opposite foot of the direction that you want to move to. In other words out of the hop, if you want to move to the right, you land left-right, if you want to move to the left, you land right-left.
Pre-load position and Walking Steps
Recovery Steps
There are two recovery steps and in this module we will only focus on the shuffle steps. The main goal of the shuffle step is to stay face forward to the net, while shuffling back to the middle of the court. The key is to stay on the balls of your feet and use calf flexion to glide back to the middle.
Additional drills
Ups and Downs(10 mins)
Kick and catch drill (10 mins)
Ladder Footwork Drill
3 sets of 30 seconds with 30 seconds rest
Figure 8 Drill
3 sets of 30 seconds with 30 seconds of rest in between each set
Shadow Stroke Drill
4 sets of 30 seconds each with 10 seconds of rest in between sets
Lateral Stepping Footwork
3 sets of 30 seconds with 30 seconds of rest in between each set
Ready. Set. Play.
Ready position
Racquet in front head above handle with activated feet.
Pivot
Turn and pivot in the pre-load position
Recovery
Load and push off outside foot, shuffle steps back to the middle
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