Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to episode number 412 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about 3 core critical things that high level tennis players all do and beginners to intermediate level tennis players just don't. And listen, if you just want to have fun playing the game and want to take it too seriously,
then you can totally skip all of these things. And that's perfectly fine. If you just enjoy hitting the ball back and forth and it doesn't, especially matter to you if you continue to improve or develop and it doesn't especially matter to you if you're doing it right or just kind of making up your own way of doing it, but that's probably not you. If that
was you, you probably wouldn't download a tennis podcast about improvement. So I'm just going to go ahead and assume that it does matter to you whether or not you do it the most efficient way or not. And we'll be getting into things pretty nitty gritty here with that in mind. I'm just going to go ahead and take the assumption that since you downloaded this show and you're listening, then you want the nitty gritty and that's exactly what we're
going to talk about today. So I'll go ahead and give you a roadmap here. Number 1, number 2, number 3, not necessarily any. Well, the kind of are in order, honestly. Number 1 is anticipate. Great tennis players anticipate instead of react. I'll give you the roadmap. Now, number 2 is great tennis players use the kinetic chain on all shots. In other words, they move their body in the right order at the right time to produce really smooth, effective,
power and energy with very little efforts. That's number 2. We'll talk about how to do that. Number 3 is swing confidently instead of taking their foot off the gas. Great tennis players never hit tentatively. Well, okay, never say never, right? Occasionally, they might hit tentatively, but it is never a core part of their tactics or strategy. It's not part of their DNA. They don't go through long pockets of taking their foot way off the gas and just tapping
the ball and play, whereas beginners at intermediate level players do that all the time. Sometimes as a core strategy, and again, if you're perfectly happy at that level and you're perfectly happy with that style, then by all means, go ahead and continue. But if development is the name of the game for you and improvement year after year is the name of the game for you, then confidence is critical. And when I say confidence, I mean how the racket is swung.
Not necessarily like your mentality, although they go hand in hand. So we'll talk about that. Third, all right, let's go ahead and jump in. So first, the best tennis players are never waiting for the ball to do something. They're not waiting for the ball to get hit before they put their body in motion. They're not waiting for the tennis ball to be hit to move to a better place on the courts. They're doing things proactively and ahead of time before the next ball gets hit. And on paper,
I know that sounds great. I know that sounds obvious. And if you've been playing tennis for a long time, then you probably kind of assume that you're doing that just based on experience alone, alone, and just based on repetition and like number of matches that you played alone. And I'm sorry to tell you that it's just not true for maybe one or two or three percent of you listening.
Maybe it's true that you've just kind of intuitively naturally picked it up based on great habits from maybe other sports that possibly you played at a very, very high level previously. Otherwise, it's probably like true anticipation is probably not happening. And I make that statement just based on my 20 years of working with everyday tennis players. And this journey for me started with just kind of a little bit of an obsession and a little bit, frankly, a little bit of annoyance
at the lack of split stepping. I want to be really clear that what I'm talking about anticipation is very, very different from just the physical move of doing a split step. So I remember everybody knows that they're supposed to split step. And I think what happens here with a lot of tennis players is they hear it explained, you know, a handful of times, they see it demonstrated by a coach and they're like, okay, now you try. And then they physically, you know, do the move of the split step.
But then when it comes time to actually do it in real life, it feels clunky. It feels like a waste of energy. It feels like, man, I'm just working way harder now. I go, what's the point of
this? And there isn't really, there really isn't a payoff out of the gate. And so I think most tennis players who have been taught about the split step never really had the dots connected well enough and didn't stick with it long enough for it to become at least a little bit familiar and a little bit second nature to where there can really start to become real true benefits and breakthroughs
because of the split step. And so I think it's a shame. I think it's a shame that so many tennis players have tried it and abandoned it or tried it and assumed that because they tried it and they're like, oh, this is cool, that they just continue to do it and continue to develop the skill and continue
to refine it. And that's a bad assumption to make just because something makes sense doesn't mean and even just because something maybe works the first time we try it, which by the way is very unusual and when we do something different than our normal habit, it's a small minority of the time
that we're actually going to see immediate progress. Anytime we do something different than we're used to, there's almost always going to be some kind of regression or clonkiness or unnaturalness, you know, feeling like, oh, this is weird and this feels wrong and I'm not comfortable with this, that's normal. That's that's what should happen. That's what should happen when you try something
different than what you're used to. And so the split step is one of those things that I think it's tried and then thrown to the side very quickly because there isn't an immediate improvement, there isn't immediate benefit. Like they don't immediately feel faster, they don't immediately feel more smooth, but that's what happens when you do stick with it and you do it at the right time. So a split step when done well, well, let me say it this way, a split step when done perfectly
is not a hop and then a landing on the feet into a ready position. That's not what happens when an elite player uses a split step. It is not just a wide like ready position hop and then coming back down on the ball's rear feet and then like being ready for the next shot. That is not at all
what a great split step is and I'll be you know, totally transparent here. Early on, that was my understanding when I was teaching even when I was playing, I was fortunate enough to start early enough and have good enough coaching that I developed a better way of doing it than that, but I didn't understand the dots that I had connected kind of subconsciously until years and years in years of coaching and studying world class players and seeing that there's doing something much more nuanced
and much more special than just hopping up and down and being like, okay, I'm ready. What's really happening in real life is elite players are lifting before the ball gets hit. So we're activating ahead ahead of time. Then the ball gets hit before they touch down, recognition happens just before
touching down and then elite level players are hitting the ground running literally. They're coming down from their split step having already recognized that the ball is moving to the right or to the left and then dynamically pivoting their right foot or their left foot if the ball goes to the right, they're pivoting their right foot to the right and if the ball goes to the left, they're pivoting their left foot to the left. Before coming down so that when they do come down, they can plant
their other foot. So let's just track along with me here, liking your mindset. If the ball is going to the left, then on the way down seamlessly, they're pointing their left foot to the left, then planting the inside edge of their right foot down on the court to push off of their right foot and dynamically shift their energy and their momentum to the left onto that left pointed foot
and flows seamlessly to the left. So their elite level players are unwading their whole body, then coming down in seamlessly transitioning that energy and that momentum in the direction that
the ball was going. So rather than stand there, which is what the vast majority of tennis players do, the vast majority, and I'm telling you, even the majority of the listeners of this show are standing there waiting for the ball to get hit and then their body is activating after the ball gets hit and after they recognize the direction of the ball, then they're starting their energy, then they're lifting their feet and getting out of the gates out of the starting blocks.
If you split step and you just go straight up, straight down and then just wait for the ball to get hit, well, at least we're not just standing there, but we also kind of end up getting rooted in a little bit static. When we don't time it perfectly, at least the body is getting activated and physically and mentally we're a little bit more engaged. If you're going to do just
straight up and down split step and just hop in place, that's fine. But what elite players are doing is they're timing that hop absolutely perfectly so that none of the energy that they used to levitate, none of the energy that they used to leave planet earth and hover over the court for a split second, none of that energy gets wasted. This is critical. When you do it just right,
you're not just hopping up and down in place and then running after the ball. You're activating your energy and then timing it so that you can seamlessly harness that energy and slingshot it in the direction of the ball and then instead of having to activate after you recognize that the ball has been hit, you're already activated and you can just flow in the direction of the ball
right or left. This is anticipation just by definition because we're doing something ahead of time before the ball gets hit to activate our body's momentum and to activate our muscles to activate our brain and our whole neurological connections are all getting prefired precisely at the right time to be able to flow in the right direction seamlessly. None of that energy is wasted when it's done correctly. But if you've ever tried to split stuff and you're like, oh, this is dumb. This is just
like a waste of energy. I feel so much more tired. You weren't timing it precisely and that takes time and you I'll just tell you like it's this is not as simple. This is hard. Okay. I'll just go ahead and say it. You know, this is really hard to time it exactly the way I'm describing. In fact, when you study professional players in slow motion, you'll see that they time it perfectly,
not all the time. There are some times that they lift up and they come down and they didn't quite nail the timing and so they don't quite know where the ball is going yet and they aren't able to do this flow transition the way that I'm describing it. So just don't feel bad. All right. If you go out and try it and it feels clunky and you're not harnessing the energy momentum, don't feel bad. This takes a lot of practice to do it well and actually flow gracefully and smoothly. There's a
reason why not many players look graceful and smooth when they move around a tennis court. Even if they understand what I just talked about, which most so that's like hurdle number one. Like most don't even know what I just said in terms of like the actual nuance of what world class players are doing. But even if you do understand it, learning it and executing it precisely enough to actually get the benefit. That's hard. It takes time. It takes repetition and practice.
There's a YouTube video. If you want to see this in action, I'm actually bringing it up right now. I want to make sure I get the title correct. If you want to see this in action by professional players and see how I train everyday players to be able to do this, there's a video called. Well, there's a video called the best tennis players do these three things. The same title is this podcast. You can go check that out. There's also another one called how to flow like
Federer, tennis footwork lesson. That goes into a little bit more detail. So check them both out. Okay. The second part of anticipation, it's not just activating yourself in the split step, although that's a huge part of it. But there's also preemptively moving to the right place based on where the ball is on the court. This goes for singles and for doubles. The only time that you should be standing in the middle of the court as a singles player is if the ball is in the middle
of the court on the other side of the court. If your opponent is hitting a ball from exactly in the center of the baseline, you should be standing in exactly the center of the baseline. Same thing if you're at the net. The only time you should be in the middle at the net is if the ball is being hit from the literal middle on the other side of the court. And so every time the ball travels somewhere else to the right, to the left, forwards, backwards, deeper, shorter, you should be
preemptively moving somewhere else before the ball gets hit. Next, that's the definition of anticipation doing something ahead of time because you're preparing yourself for whatever the next likely pattern is. And if you're not constantly keeping tabs on what the ball is doing and adjusting your physical location on the court, you will get behind in the rally. And the same thing goes for doubles. And there's a lot of nuance to this. And finding the exact place takes a lot of again,
it takes a lot of time and experience and trial and error. But when you get it right, you shrink the court for your opponents dramatically and especially in doubles. Everybody knows and doubles that you're supposed to cover the middle, but doubles clinic after doubles clinic after doubles clinic, after doubles clinic, tennis doubles players leave the middle exposed over and over and over and over and over again. And it's because they're stuck being a spectator and just watching the ball
because it's interesting and it's entertaining to watch our opponents run around. It's interesting and entertaining to watch our partner run around. And we kind of want to know like what how's this going to end up? Oh wow, this is such an exciting point. And we get frozen becoming literally a spectator watching how the point is unfolding. Meanwhile, as the ball is traveling back and forth, there's always somewhere else that we should be moving. But if even for one second, you get stuck
watching the ball, you're not moving to where you should be next. And that leaves the center exposed so so so so often. I mean, millions of times a day, even relatively good doubles players are just standing and watching. And so just an illustration of this. And listen, I like if you're a student of the game, you're probably on paper. You know what I'm about to say. But the vast majority of you listening do not do what I'm about to describe. If your partner has to run 10 feet to the right,
you should also run 10 feet to the right. And if you don't, there is actively a widening gap between the two of you. And that is leaving the middle exposed. It's critical to understand that the middle is not always the center line, especially in doubles. But in singles two, the middle shifts the geometric middle of the court. There's a literal middle, which there's that hash mark in the middle of the baseline. That's the literal middle. And then there's the center service line. That's
the literal middle of the court. But that's only the geometric middle of the court when the ball is in the very center of the court. Anytime the ball travels even a little right or left away from the literal center of the court, you should be moving someplace else in singles and in doubles. And if you want to see real practical tangible examples of this in action and not in action, then again, check out the YouTube video by the same title. The best tennis players do these
three things. And you'll see real life examples of that. Okay, so you should always be moving somewhere. And ideally, you should always be proactively activating your body. And as often as possible, seamlessly flowing your momentum in the direction of the ball coming down from your split step. If you're not doing any of those things, you're just playing so far behind in exchanges. You're so far behind the action. And you're really just watching and then hoping that you can
catch up to the ball. And in such a dramatic pivot, such a dramatic difference between truly doing what you're supposed to do ahead of time and being reactionary is a gigantic difference between potential and quality of play and level of play. All right, so that's number one. The best players anticipates. All right, number two, the best tennis players use the kinetic chain.
And that means that they move their body in the right order. Ideally, we should be gathering energy momentum first by pushing against the ground and starting to build energy with our legs and moving that energy up into our torso, our hips, our core, then into our chest and shoulders. And then finally, that energy should move smoothly and efficiently and fluidly out through our arm
into the racket and then eventually into the ball. That order, that sequence or chain that I just described is the best and most powerful, most efficient order that the human body works together to transfer energy from the human body into another object. So when you study baseball players, throwing a baseball, they move their body in that same sequence using that same chain.
When you study baseball players hitting a baseball, they move their body in that same order using that same chain from the ground up into the torso, out through the arm into the bat and then eventually connecting with the ball. Hockey players hitting a hockey puck. Mixed martial artists throwing a punch or boxers throwing a punch. It's from the ground into the torso through the arm and then into the object that we're trying to deliver energy. That's the order
that the human body moves best in. Unfortunately, most tennis players reverse it. Instead of the body, the big parts of the body being the engine and the arm just being the delivery mechanism and kind of the conduit through which that energy travels smoothly and efficiently, most tennis players to one degree or another are inactive with the big parts of their body and they are overactive with the small parts of their body. This is how injuries happen.
This is at its core, this is the foundation of tennis elbow, of golfer's elbow, of torn rotator cuffs, of carpal tunnel, of wrist injuries, elbow injuries, shoulder, like all this is why tennis players and golfer's, by the way, same kinetic chain for golf. This is why athletes, like every day adult competitors and all kinds of sports have issues and tendinitis and inflammation of small
parts of the body. It's because those small parts of the body are being called upon to accelerate dramatically, aggressively, intensely over short periods of time, over and over and over and over and over again to provide energy and power and force into whatever the object is that they're trying to deliver power and force into. And that is not how the body is meant to work. And it's why people get weaker results, less reliable results, less efficient results than they want, less powerful
results, less spin, less everything. It's because the body is being used in the wrong order. Unfortunately, it's very easy to just flip the racket around with small parts of the body. And a great deal of effort and engineering has gone into investment, has gone into engineering and developing rackets that are incredibly easy to maneuver and move around. And that helps exacerbate the problem. So when you give somebody with bad habits a super light easy to maneuver
racket, it's super easy for them to use those bad habits. Now, you could argue that on one hand, well, it's a big benefit to that player because their mechanics are bad. So we need to help support that player to enjoy the game as much as they can and get the best results with their crappy habits. And so from that perspective, like if you're not the type of person who's very interested in investing time and effort and energy and changing bad habits, then a super light,
super powerful racket is a godsend. It's like, wow, thank God, I've got this super maneuverable, easy to swing high power generating racket because my body isn't generating the power that I need. So thank goodness I have this racket. But guess what? It is a band-aid at the end of the day. And if somebody's happy with that level of play, then that's fantastic. They're getting the results that they want. They're achieving the goals that they want. That's fantastic.
So for those types of people that don't want to continue to develop as a player, those lighter, easier to swing rackets are fantastic. For somebody who does have a growth mindset and does want to continue to develop level after level after level, that kind of equipment is going to hold them back because it helps enable bad habits. A super light, super powerful racket enables the use of small parts of the body and almost kind of rewards it. Now, can somebody with great mechanics
use a super light, super heavy racket effectively? Yeah, absolutely. But it doesn't make a whole out of sense when the body is being used in a very athletic, well-coordinated, super powerful and efficient manner. It doesn't make a whole out of sense to pour gas on that fire and give them the world's most powerful. Because it's just not necessary. It's much better to use the body super efficiently and effectively and then use a racket that's heavier that gets the most out of
that smooth effortless flowing power. Now, a racket with more mass not only does it provide more control, but also can give a player with big solid circular flowing smooth swings. Huge, huge results off the racket face because all that mass plowing through the ball really helps provide a lot of power and spin, but without losing control of what's happening. So, reversing the order of operations is necessary for a large percentage of tennis players out there. And that's
on, I'm talking about all tennis shots. Certainly, big swings like a forehand ground stroke or a serve or a backhand ground stroke, but even on relatively small motions and movements like a forehand
volley or a backhand volley or a half volley or something like that. If you reverse things and the hand and the arm are the primary movers of the racket, even on relatively delicate, you know, short motions like those, you're not going to get as good of results as somebody who moves from the body first and uses the correct order of operations, the correct chain with the movement of
different body parts. That person will always have better results. All those other things being equal compared to somebody who moves the wrong parts of the body more and the wrong parts of the body less. So, for real life examples of kinetic chain, positive examples and negative examples and progressions and all that sort of thing, go to YouTube and check out the video that has this title. The best tennis players do these three things. You'll see a bunch of examples on how you
can improve your kinetic chain. All right, number three, swing confidently. So, you can have great anticipation. You can have great footwork and movement. You can even have correct use of the kinetic chain and move your body smoothly and efficiently. But if you don't use all those tools with the appropriate level of confidence and what's the word I'm looking for? Not assurance, but man, what's the synonym for confidence? It'll probably come to me in like two minutes.
If you take your foot off the gas consistently when push comes to shove and like when the rubber meets the road, if you're constantly playing it safe and decelerating the racket assertively, that's the word I was looking for. Assertiveness and confidence. If you're not assertive with your acceleration and instead you are careful and tentative and you're playing it safe consistently, then you're going to cap out at a certain point. Now, yes, you can win a lot of matches as a purely
defensive player, especially at beginner and intermediate levels of play. But as you play better and better opponents, you will need more and more ways to make them feel pressure. And if as you put pressure on them, you don't have a way to maintain that pressure and keep them on the defensive and kind of do your best bow of constrictor impersonation and just squeeze a little bit, more a little bit more until you finally take control of the points and or the game or the set
or the match. If you don't have the ability to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and keep the pressure on, then a good opponent will get their foot in the door and turn the tables on you if you continue to keep your foot off the gas pedal. So there's a couple critical elements here that are necessary to make this work. Number one, this is going to sound all these things like at first glance, are going to sound incredibly obvious. And that's why there's such big opportunities because yes,
it's obvious on paper. But these are the things that are getting in the way of the results of everyday tennis players. The first most important thing here is there needs to be awareness of level of intensity of which you're swinging in the racket. And I like to use a zero to 10 scale, 10 out of 10 being how hard, how physically fast you can possibly swing the racket, how hard you can physically hit the ball is a 10 out of 10. And most tennis players just don't even know what
that is. Most tennis players hang out around like a four or a five and they hit good shots. And then occasionally they'll kind of dip their toe into the deep end of the water and they'll kind of ramp up a little bit to like a six or a seven out of 10. And that's like a, you know, more attacking or more offensive shot. But hardly any tennis player knows what it feels like to just let loose, stop worrying about whether or not the ball goes in the courts and just wail on the ball and see
how hard could you actually physically hit the ball if you hit it as hard as possible. Here's why that's important. You could, you can't possibly know what a five out of 10 is or a six out of 10 is. If you don't know what a 10 out of 10 is and if you don't know what a five or a six out of 10 is, then it's impossible to catch yourself when you go down to like a three or a four when push comes to shove and it's a high pressure situation. It's impossible to catch yourself decelerating
down to a three out of 10. If you don't really know what a five out of 10 is and you can't know what a five out of 10 is. If you don't really, really know what a 10 out of 10 is. Are you tracking with me? Hopefully you see where I'm going here just at least on paper, you know, logically. So a drill that I love bringing players through who have a hard time maintaining their confidence and maintaining their level of acceleration is I have them start with a 10 out of 10. Just have a ball machine
just feed just the same kind of medium speed over and over again. And I'll tell my student for the next two minutes, I don't care if you miss every single ball. I really, I don't care. If all of these go in the net or all of these go into the back hurting or over the fence or whatever it doesn't matter, just show me how hard can you physically hit the ball at a 10 out of 10, even world class athletes are going to miss a big chunk of those shots. And you are too. You'll probably miss
most of them. That's not the point. Just find the point here is calibration. The point here is find your most intense effort. And then now we have a baseline that we can work off of. And I like to next have my students work through the whole scale or spectrum. So first, let's set our peak most intense, most fast acceleration possible 10 out of 10. Then I like to have players start a ladder at four out of 10. So okay, so now we know what peak intensity is. Now let's go a little
bit below half speed. Okay, let's hit a bunch at four out of 10. It should be really easy to just make a whole bunch of shots in a row at four out of 10. All right. Now let's increase intensity by 20%. So that's half, right? If we started at four out of 10 and we add two, that's actually relative to where we started. That's a 50% increase on the total scale. It's a 20% increase to two out of
those 10 is 20%. But if we start at four and we go up to six, that should be a big jump. But you're only going to know, you're only going to know that you're only going to experience that if you know where 10 out of 10 is first. Does that make sense? So start at four, little below half speed. Then jump up to six. Six out of 10 should be round about. You're just neutral, rally ball, just kind of standard
exchange speed back and forth. Then after you hit a bunch at six out of 10, jump up by 20% again and hit a bunch at eight out of 10. Eight out of 10 should be your offensive attack tempo. And should like for most intense and purposes be kind of your peak except like there's not going to be a lot of times that a nine or a 10 out of 10 is a good idea because we start to lose control of our bodies and our mechanics and our form. Once we get up above about an eight out of
10. So just just for context, we're not actually going to use a nine or a 10 hardly ever. But let's experience an eight out of 10. That's the tempo you should use. When you're in total control at the point, you have a weak easy shot. Your opponent's kind of on the ropes. And we should have that gear available to us when we have the opportunity. So experience going from a four to a six to an eight and then do that ramp multiple times. And when you swing at an eight, it should be
close to your max speed. And you might miss a bunch of those and that's fine. But just learn where you are on the spectrum. And the four, that tempo you should rarely use really just for defense when you're in a lot of trouble. And you just want to make sure to make our make your opponent hit just one more ball. That's what a four out of 10 is for. And it's six out of 10 is when
you're halfway in between. It's a neutral exchange. Nobody really has the upper hand. And you're just kind of feeling out the point and trying to get a little bit of an advantage so you can ramp things up a little bit and get the opportunity to attack. So it's only after you can accurately feel where on the spectrum you are that you can be start to become disciplined about not taking your foot off the gas. The reality is most tennis players as pressure builds their intensity and
their swing speed drops for safety. And that dropping for safety is exactly what lets good tennis players take over the match. Get their foot in the door. Take control of the points and beat you even though you might have had the upper hand up until that point in the match. The second you take your foot off the gas in terms of your intensity. You open the door for your opponent
to rebound and take over the points and take over the match. And in my experience, the biggest reason why tennis players do that is they just don't even know what their intensity level is in the first place. So the only way to learn how to swing confidently is to gain that awareness, gain that self awareness of how fast your body and your racket is actually moving. And then you can start to monitor yourself in real life and be like, oh man, I've gone from like
a six out of 10 to a four out of 10 over the last 10, 15 minutes. And then you can reengage at the right intensity level and maintain that confidence. If you want to see an example of this, go to YouTube and I did a pretty in depth lesson on this called why you miss on hard swings and how to fix it. Why you miss on hard swings. And I go through a case study with a student where I move her through this training exercise and a bunch of other drills as well. And it's a really awesome improvement
in her confidence and her swing speed as we make her way through that training. So check that out. All right, hope this episode has been super helpful. If you'd like additional help on your game, make sure to go to tennissecret.com. That's tennissecret.com. And I'll show you how to make half the errors and run half as much in your very next match by picking smart targets and smart positions. You can gain a huge advantage in your points. And I'll show you how to do that in your very next
match at tennissecret.com. Thanks for listening today. Hope this episode has been super helpful. Really appreciate having you as a listener. I'll talk to you next time. For more free game improving instruction, be sure to check out essentialtennis.com where you'll find hundreds of video, audio and written lessons. Also, be sure to subscribe to essential tennis on iTunes and YouTube, where we are the number one resource in the world, providing passionate
instruction for passionate tennis players. Thank you so much for listening today. Take care. And good luck with your tennis.