I touched on technique in last week’s post. Here, I want to address straight line sprinting and leg muscle qualities.
While these qualities influence one another (and this is only a model), I will outline them each individually – this should provide a clearer understanding of how movement as a whole is improved by different forms of training.
Linear Speed
Among respected coaches, there’s an argument out there that tennis players are getting a lot of agility + COD training from tennis. So much so that they probably don’t need to train it off the court.
I once thought this to be true but I’ve since changed my opinion. Today, I believe we need a holistic approach – using COD training with and without a tennis ball is ideal in order to develop this quality.
There’s another group of coaches that argue the following; tennis players move in a confined space and only need agility + COD training. In other words, other forms of running and sprinting aren’t necessary.
I’m very much against this opinion. Linear sprinting is not only extremely important for tennis players, it’s not trained nearly enough. Here are a couple reasons why you should train it for better on-court movement:
1 – Acceleration
Every single COD movement requires a player to accelerate. Whether that’s a ‘re-acceleration’ – after hitting a wide ball – or a first-step action after a split-step – for example. Given that these movements occur over and over, it’s safe to say that tennis players accelerate often.
So if you’re training linear sprint speed, you’re actually also training acceleration. Every single sprint requires an acceleration to top speed.
And if I’m being frank, most of the sprinting that tennis players should be doing, shouldn’t be very long anyway. I’m talking about 10-30m range for most of your sprint work (and possibly extending out to 40-50m sometimes).
The reason you won’t be accelerating more than this is simple – you don’t need to. The greatest distance you’ll cover on the court is maybe 15-20m (if you’re chasing down a drop shot from the back of the court). And while I still think speed work in the 30-50m range is – at times – useful for other reasons, players need to work up to those distances over weeks and months of training.
In any case, improving acceleration speed will directly transfer to your change-of-direction speed because in both cases, getting off to a fast start (first step ability) is crucial.