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TennisOne Lessons 
After Age 50, Emphasize Placement and Control Kathy and Ron Woods Some of the most significant changes in your body as you age are typically the loss of muscular strength, endurance, and flexibility. These three factors demand that you change your game as you age. The good news is that you can adjust your play and continue to enjoy tennis for several more decades.
Let’s look at a few salient facts. First, your muscular strength decreases approximately 30 percent between the ages of 50 and 70, with even more dramatic losses from then on. The greatest loss of muscular strength is in the lower extremities: in the muscles of the back, buttocks, thighs, and calves. We have two types of muscle fibers, usually referred to as slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers. Slow-twitch fibers are slow to contract, slow to fatigue and provide us with muscular endurance. In contrast, fast-twitch fibers contract quickly and help us accelerate movements that generate speed and power, but they also tire quickly. As you age, you’ll experience a 25-50 percent reduction in the number and size of fast-twitch fibers, especially in the areas of the body noted above. The resulting loss of explosiveness in your muscles clearly hinders your ability to move fast, hit with power, and generate pace on the ball. Your flexibility will also decline with age due to the fact that the connective tissue around your joints becomes less resilient. In fact, over the years the connective tissue is likely to crack and fray due to the natural aging process.
Our remedy to combat the alarming facts presented above is to modify the way you play tennis and seriously work on off-court fitness training to stave off and postpone the decline of your muscular fitness and flexibility. At this point you are probably wondering just how to modify your tennis game. Let’s look at some of the easiest changes to make. First, schedule sessions periodically with a certified teaching professional to improve your tennis technique and make it more sound mechanically, more efficient and less stressful to your body. You should ask your coach to help you smooth out your strokes allowing them to flow easily. Learn to relax while striking the ball, maintain strong dynamic balance and improve your anticipation of opponent’s possible shots. Improve your stroke technique by simplifying the movement and eliminating unnecessary quirks and flourishes. One typical mistake in stroking technique that we see is players who accelerate their racquet during the backswing on serves or ground strokes and then slow the racquet speed during the forward swing. This is a needless waste of energy and efficiency and does not produce more power. In fact, what you’d rather do is relax your preparation and then gradually build up the speed of the racquet head as you begin the forward swing.
Our second tip is to rely more on placement than power. Your objective during a point should be to maneuver your opponents into poor court position to allow you to win the point with just enough speed and power to get the job done without wasted effort. For example, a clean winning shot up the middle in doubles comes from placement rather than raw power. Save your powerful shots for when they are the only alternative to win the point. A third recommended adjustment focuses on overhead motions for the serve and the smash. In both cases, your declining ability to generate force with your lower body robs you of some power and the risk of shoulder, rotator cuff and elbow injuries increases with age and repetitive abuse over the years. On the overhead smash, because you can’t jump like the old days, you are better off playing a step or two further back from the net which allows you to position yourself better to defend against the lob. We also would advise you that learning to angle overheads to the open court will become your best strategy rather than trying to bounce the ball over the back fence. Practice angling overheads to both sides of the court but don’t forget that down the middle is also a great strategy especially in doubles. Our general recommendation is to hit the overhead at about ¾ speed with excellent placement.
In serving, we can promise you that you’ll hit fewer aces as you age. Just as a baseball pitcher has to learn to rely on placement, changing speeds and disguise to prolong his career, you can follow the same formula. If your serve becomes predictable, your opponents will figure out a tactic to abuse your serve and put you on the defense to begin the point…not an enviable position. Add to your repertoire of serves by learning to vary the speed and spin. You can hit a serve flat with little spin, slice it with sidespin or hit up on it for topspin. Ideally, you’d like to own all three serves and be able to vary the speed on each one while disguising your intent. For placement, divide the service box into thirds lengthwise and practice placing your serve wide to either side and down the middle at your opponent’s body. Don’t neglect depth by focusing too much on side-to-side placement because good depth on a serve (one that lands within a foot of the service line) will usually produce a weak return. You can experiment with each of these serving recommendations but to speed up your skill acquisition, we’d suggest you ask for help from a coach so that you don’t end up practicing the wrong technique or tactic. For example, many players change their ball toss to vary their serves with the result that opponents can easily anticipate which serve is coming.
Another typical ploy is for servers to change their serving position at the baseline by moving closer to the alley to hit a wide serve to the outside of the service box or moving toward the center of the court to aim for the inside third of the box. Although this tactic may produce results, you are giving your opponent a heads-up to defend the obvious serve. During a point, you can improve your placement by learning to vary the height, direction and spins of your strokes. Keep in mind that the height and side-to-side direction of your shots depends on the angle of your racquet face at contact while spins are a function of the path of your forward swing. The amount of spin you apply to a ball can be varied by speeding up your swing and increasing the angle of the upward or downward swing for more spin or flattening out your strokes for less spin. Test your opponents to see if they prefer shots that bounce high or low, short or deep, backhand or forehand. Once you’ve determined their preferences, give them a steady diet of their least favorite such as high bouncing balls to their backhand or short low balls to the forehand. Each shot you hit should be planned to elicit an error or at least a weak reply. Of course if you can also put your opponents in a poor court position, that is a bonus. For example, a well disguised lob that allows you and your partner to take the net position away from your opponents may not win the point outright, but it sure improves your chances of winning the point on the next shot.
When volleying, because you are closer to the net, take advantage of the possible angles available, rather than trying to hit volleys through an opposing doubles team. Even if the angled volley is not a winner, once you have your opponents moved to one side of the court, the opposite side is opened up for a winning shot. Varying the depth of your volleys is an equally effective tactic. A well-placed deep volley that lands near the baseline will force your opponent to hit a defensive shot, even if that volley was hit at a moderate pace. You also might enjoy learning the drop volley, one that lands softly just over the net. Soften your hands like a baseball player catching a hard hit ball and let the ball deflect off your racquet. A final point on the tactics of placement of shots is to rarely risk more than one line at a time. For example, if you receive a short ball and plan to approach the net, aim your shot either deep or wide but not both. Your decision of which line to risk will depend on the position of your opponent and her mobility. We don’t mean to imply here that you should ever aim for lines but would advise you instead to allow a good margin for error of 3 or 4 feet for your actual aim points. All of these strategies will give you an opportunity to actually improve your play as you add on the inevitable years. That is one of the key reasons tennis is so much fun at any age. You can keep adding shots, improving placement, change tactics and outsmart those young folks. If you want to prolong your tennis life, we’d also advise you to begin now with an off court fitness program of strength and flexibility. While you will never completely escape the clutches of the aging process, there is ample evidence that you can slow it down and avoid threatening injuries by improving your fitness. Your comments are welcome. Let us know what you think about Kathy and Ron Woods's article by emailing us here at TennisOne.
Kathy and Ron Woods have been a successful mixed doubles team for 30 years. Both were individually awarded the prestigious Tennis Education Merit Award by the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Kathy Woods, a former president of the United States Professional Tennis Association, is manager and director of tennis at the Racquet Club of St. Petersburg, Florida. Ron Woods, PhD, a college coach and professor of sport science, was a senior staff member of the United States Tennis Association for 20 years. Kathy and Ron recently co-authored the book, Playing Tennis After 50, published by Human Kinetics. It is available from the publisher at Humankinetics.com, Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. |
