Stepping Out of your Comfort Zone

Jay Margolies
TennisOne Managing Editor

After watching the French Open final between Stan Wawrinka and Novak Djokovic one can't help but marvel at the movement, court coverage, and raw power of these incredible athletes. Regardless of where or how hard the ball was struck, these players almost always seem to get themselves into position and on balance to make the return shot.

At TennisOne we’ve produced scores of articles and videos about the importance of footwork in producing a clean contact with the ball. After all, tennis is a game of movement. On this site we’ve talked about the split-step, the number of steps taken between strokes (spoiler alert: the lower the level player, the less steps taken), and the tiny adjustment steps often needed to square up to the ball. We’ve shown you the intricate footwork patterns the pros use to do that efficiently. And we’ve talked about the degree of fitness necessary (and how to achieve it) to keep up this movement throughout three grueling sets on a hot summer day.

Yet all too often, when I’m at a local club, I see players mis-hit balls and instinctively take a couple of shadow swings, as if the repeatable, reliable swing pattern they’ve spent years working on (and handed over countless dollars to their teaching pros to perfect) was somehow responsible for the missed shot.

Make no mistake; local teaching pros are a great asset to our sport. Begin your journey with a competent pro and he or she will guide you passed some of the nastier pitfalls you might otherwise succomb to. Bad habits, once internalized (think forehand grip on the serve), become extremely difficult to overcome. And they could set your development back years, if not permanently. We all know players who have stagnated at the 3.0 or 3.5 levels for years and have very little chance of ever moving up.

But teaching pros are only human — they want you to succeed, so much so that sometimes they fall into the trap of continuously feeding balls into your optimal strike zone. In this way you become more and more comfortable. The more skilled the pro, the better he is at feeding balls. The result is we often return from our lesson with the feeling that we’ve have never hit the ball better. And that is probably true.

The Un-Comfort Zone

The problem is we rarely can repeat that experience in the real world — a world where our opponent is trying to do just the opposite of our teaching pro, and that is to make us more uncomfortable. So, after months spent grooving your strokes, at some point your teaching pro needs to reverse course and make you uncomfortable on the court, and that is where the movement becomes real.

In baseball, the batter is stationary and the pitcher has to deliver the ball into the strike zone (or at least fool the batter into thinking the ball might be in the zone). The batter than has to adjust to the ball with his hands and his bat in order to make contact. In addition, the batter has the luxury of not swinging at a ball if it’s out of his comfort zone. Unfortunately, in tennis we have to swing at every ball regardless of where it lands on the court. And that is what separates the better players from the rest of the pack.

Watch any of your favorite pros on TV, or attend a tournamnet like the Bank of the West here in Palo Alto, CA, or better yet, check out the ProStrokes collection on TennisOne shot in high-speed video. While you are watching, forget about the number of steps taken between shots or the tiny adjustment steps, but instead, focus in on the position and balance with which these pros approach each and every ball.

The swing patterns of the pros seem effortless, and in a sense they are because they almost always get to the ball in time to load up and then release their stored energy smoothly and efficiently just like they have practiced for so many years. And so can you!

A few years ago I had the privilege of attending a training session with former ATP pro Paul Goldstein and his trainer, Donald Chu, some of which is documented in the article, “Climbing the Rankings with Paul Goldstein”  found here in the TennisOne Lesson Library.

Most of us will never go through the rigorous strength and conditioning sessions that top athletes like Goldstein did; however, we can all learn something from what he told me that day. “I know how to hit a tennis ball; no one is going to teach me that at this stage…. Over the last year and a half my ranking shot from 200 to a high of 58 in the world and the strength and conditioning program that we’ve been on has been the direct cause of the ranking increase."

Stories of players reaching new heights after improving their physical conditioning abound on the pro circuit. Martina Navratilova, Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish all played their best tennis after committing to a more rigorous training program. And they did this despite making very few changes to their techniques. Let me say this one more time, without making any changes to your technique, physical conditioning alone could take you to the next level.

Okay, most of us will never hit the ball like Paul Goldstein or Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, or any of the other great players; however, once we have internalized a repeatable, reliable swing pattern, the road to improvement may have less to do with your strokes and much more to do with your conditioning and movement to the ball. It’s really quite simple, move to the ball and load up in time and on balance then release that swing you’ve paid so much money to learn and you’ll give yourself the best chance to make clean, solid contact.

Remember, the longer a match goes on, even in good playing conditions, the more likely your footwork and movement will breakdown. So, think about it, perhaps your next trip to the club should begin in the gym.