Tennis - How To Practice Tennis By Yourself

How To Practice Tennis By Yourself - 5 Different Ways

When you have no one to practise with, what can you do to improve your tennis? Now you will have no excuses for not training alone!

The 5 different ways are:

Using a ball machine

The advantage of using a ball machine is that you can hit the same type of ball (low backhands for instance) over and over again and fully master that one shot. Some of the new ball machines on the market are also capable of feeding the ball in different zones on the court so you can change the ball length and width and replicate pointplay against the machine.

Using a practice wall

This method is great for any level player, indeed pro players use the wall often. For beginners you might choose to practice with 2 bounces so you have time to set up and execute a proper shot. There are so many drills you can do against the wall and the truly great thing is - the wall never misses! It is a great way to work on your strokes.

Hitting serves alone

The serve is the most important shot in tennis so it would make sense that players spend the most amount of their alone time hitting serves, however not many players actually do this at club level but the further you go up in levels, the more time players will spend hitting serves as they truly understand the importance of the serve in tennis. You don’t need anyone to practice serves.

Training your footwork and movement

Fitness on court is important. Footwork is one of the most overlooked elements of tennis the world over. Ask the majority of club players what they struggle with and you’ll rarely get the response “my footwork”. However ask 100 pro players why they didn’t play well and many will tell you “I didn’t move very well today, my footwork was slow and heavy”.

The fact is, if you can’t get into the right position to hit the stroke, you won’t be able to execute properly. Just look at Federer dancing around the court and you’ll soon realize just how important footwork is for tennis players.

There are so many footwork drills that you can do that you probably never will have time to do all of them even in the same month if you train every single day.

Self feeding balls to yourself

This is another great way to train alone, it’s something that anyone of any level can do and you’d be surprised that even Pros use this when they have nobody to hit with and their coach is not on hand to feed them balls.

What you can do is, start with a few balls in your pockets and start working on one stroke.

If you are working on your forehand, work on the spot. You can also mix up the height of the feed. Some balls are higher and some balls are lower.

With all of these strokes, you can work in two ways.

You can work from the starting position, drop feed and then prepare with the whole swing. Or you can start from the power position, drop feed and then swing forward.

This applies for both forehand and backhand positions. It will help generate more power on a ball that has no pace on it.

Another variation: you can mix and match all of the strokes. forehand, single hand backhand, double hand backhand, forehand slice, backhand slice, etc.

Another step further, put targets on the other side of the court and try to hit the ball towards them. This will help you gain precision in your shots.