For those that are unfamiliar with the term COD, it stands for change-of-direction.
In the tennis world, things can get confusing as players and coaches often use the term ‘change direction’ when referring to hitting drills or on-court tactics. In other words, changing the direction of the ball (from a crosscourt exchange to a down-the-line switch, for instance). But that’s NOT what we’re talking about here.
I’ve spoken about COD in the past (you can check out THIS article for an extensive review). But in layman terms, it’s basically the instant when you move / orient your body from one direction, to another.
More specifically, it includes various moments of acceleration and deceleration (along with the transition phase between the two). It can also include changing modes of travel – like going from a sprint to a side shuffle or a backpedal, for example.
You might be thinking – “isn’t that called ‘agility’”? Well, not really. And this is perhaps the biggest distinguishing feature between agility and COD movements – the perceptual side of the equation.
Changing direction is typically defined as being a ‘preplanned’ movement, whereas agility, which includes a change-of-direction action – is ‘unplanned’ and involves reacting to some sort of stimulus.
For example, reacting + moving to return your opponent’s serve would be an agility action as a whole – i.e. you perform a split-step, decide which way you’ll move (while you’re in the air), and then move in that direction as you attempt to return the ball.
On the flip side, the recovery movement after you’ve hit your shot, would be considered a COD task only – in other words, you’ve made the conscious decision to get back into a better position to retrieve the next shot, with (hopefully) some speed in the process!
Grey zones do exist here – but it’s not the point of this article to dive deeper into those nuanced situations. This was simply a quick review of the topic.
The main discussion point of this article is the following – how do we integrate COD training if we’re new to this form of training? More precisely, in part 1 we’ll tackle specific COD drilling, while in part 2, we’ll dive into some of the contributing qualities that will improve this quality.
COD Training for the Novice
One thing I want to stress here is that COD abilities are influenced by several factors:
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Technique – this could include your body lean / posture, foot placement (including pressure) and how you’re adjusting your strides as you enter + exit the COD.
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Straight sprinting speed – every movement in tennis has unique differences; some include distances that are longer (think about running down a drop shot, for example), while others are shorter (i.e. moving a step or 2 to hit a groundstroke); while the latter is more prevalent in tennis, being ‘fast’ in terms of running in a straight line (as I’ve argued previously), is a quality that’s increasingly more important.
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Strength, power and reactiveness – these are ‘underlying’ qualities that are actually very important (and highly correlated) with high level COD abilities; this is where your plyometric and weight training will heavily influence COD ability.
Then there are actual COD drills. Typically, drills that are specific to each sport will transfer best (to some degree). We don’t want ‘full-out’ mimicry because we might as well just play the sport itself. But looking at distances, angles, muscle actions that are ‘specific’, will likely lead to a positive transfer to movements players perform on the tennis court.
One small caveat, there are many coaches who sit on one end of the spectrum, versus the other. You’ll have a group who ONLY trains the underlying qualities – speed, strength power – and don’t tackle any of the COD-specific drills. While the opposite group will ONLY tackle the drills and forego the underlying qualities.
From my perspective, you need both. The underlying qualities will have a large influence on outputs – how much force we can put into the ground to both decelerate AND propel us back into position. Or the speed at which we enter a COD moment.
But specific COD movement drills can allow us to ‘ease into’ this form of training, be more precise with our foot placements, develop better awareness of how we should push off during the transition phase of a COD and so on.
Here are a couple examples of lower level COD tasks that can be worked in during very early stages: