When I had a tennis lesson last weekend, I learned something really cool and important. My coach made me do a drill in which I had to stay low to the ground with my knees bent and stay like that while I hit many balls. It turned out that this helped more balls to stay in because it was easier to rotate and hit the ball when already in a low position. By staying low for the entire drill, I felt the burn in my legs, but it also helped to shorten my recovery time, and then shorten the time it took to get to the next ball. I figured out that staying low, but still in a somewhat comfortable position, makes it faster for you to move to the next ball because you are already in a position in which you can push off from the ground right away to go to the next ball. If you were standing upright, you would have to bend your legs to push off really quickly to be able to get to the next ball in a short amount of time. If you don’t push off fast enough, which is often the case, it takes longer to build up the momentum and your acceleration to get to the ball, therefore, it would take longer to get to the ball. In tennis, it’s important that you get to the ball as fast as you can and recover as fast as you can because it’s all about timing the ball and getting into position quickly so that you can hit an aggressive shot.
