4 – Change-of-Direction Training
Tennis players and their coaches love to do various agility drills. You know the ones – throw a ball in the air and track it down. Use a ‘reactive ball’ and it becomes more unpredictable.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these drills, I think they miss out on a key feature of movement in tennis – instantaneous, high-force, ‘change-of-direction’ (COD) moments.
There are 3 phases to a COD movement – braking (i.e. decelerating – which we alluded to above), propulsion (re-acceleration after a COD) and the transition phase (the time between braking and propelling).
When performing agility drills, there’s a high perceptual demand compared. Again, this isn’t bad BUT, the physical part of a COD is diminished considerably. Consider this, could you achieve more intensity in a movement if you ONLY had to think about going from point A to point B (and then back to point A)? Or if you also had to think about where the ball was heading, how you’d catch it, with which hand etc.?
The latter scenario actually sounds a lot like what you’re going to be doing on a tennis court anyway – track a ball down, make a decision, organize your body to hit a quality shot, strike the ball, and then get back into position.
Players do this millions of times per week during practices and matches. They’re already getting so much ‘agility’ in their day-to-day training – must we beat it to death?
If I put my physical preparation coach hat on, I want to make sure that A) a player is able to change direction more efficiently, with more speed, quality etc and B) that when they step on the court, these changes of direction aren’t more demanding than they need to be (because we’ve done the hard COD training off the court).
Do more pre-planned, intensive, COD training… you’ll thank me later for it (see video examples below).