How Playing Slow Tennis Improves Your Game

To understand better why playing slow is a good approach to improving many facets of your tennis, we need to really understand what the main problem is – and that is hitting the ball late.

When we hit the ball late, we lose both power and control; in some cases, we get huge power but complete loss of control.

The latter happens because the player is rushing his stroke as he realizes that he is late and therefore moves the racket very fast at contact with the ball.

Why are players hitting the ball late so often?

One reason is that the timing and ball judgment are difficult in tennis, as there is very little time available to position and correctly execute the stroke.

The second and more common reason is that players play competitive tennis way too much before they have stabilized their technique and timing. As a result, they are receiving fast incoming balls as they play.

The main objective of your opponent in matches is to put you under pressure so that it’s harder for you to control your shots. One way of doing that is to hit the ball fast at you.

Because you’re playing a lot of matches, you hit lots of balls late and that starts to ingrain in your mind.

Now you’ve built a bad habit that can keep causing you problems on your strokes in terms of power and ball control.

To better understand why hitting the ball late is so detrimental to your tennis, let’s dig deeper into the problems this causes.

How Stroke Technique Breaks Down When You Hit Late

We’ll focus on the forehand today since most players struggle with hitting the forehand late.

Here are just some of the key forehand technique elements that break down when you hit the ball late:

1. Incorrect wrist lag

An incorrect wrist position is one of the more obvious breakdowns of forehand technique when hitting late because it has to adjust in such way that the player still hits the ball over the net.

If the player hits the ball well in front in the right contact point, then the wrist would be fully laid back and in a very stable position at contact. The racket face would also point straight forward where the player wants to hit the ball.

But if the player hits a forehand late, then having the wrist in a fully laid back position would send the ball far to the right (for right-handers) since the racket angle would point there.

Because our brain is very smart, it realizes the error and will “instruct” the wrist to move out of a fully laid back position in order to angle the racket face forward where the player wants to hit.

While that works out sometimes, the wrist is now unstable. Therefore, the player stiffens the wrist to make it stable, which kills the effortlessness of the stroke and also the ability to manipulate the ball’s spin or direction well.

2. Poor hip and shoulder rotation

When we hit the forehand (or two-handed backhand) late, then the body has not yet rotated well into the ball.

Because the shoulders and hips are only partially rotated from the initial start of the forward rotation, they are just barely starting to contribute to power through their rotation.

When the player hits the ball well in front, then the shoulders and hips would have rotated much further and would have built up much more energy/speed along the way.

In turn, they would have contributed much more of that power into the contact with the ball.

3. Lack of swing

When the player realizes that they will hit the forehand late, they need to rush the stroke so that they at least have some chance of directing the ball where they want.

Because they are rushing the stroke, they can’t allow the arm and the racket to swing downwards to build up more power through gravity acceleration, so they need to take a shortcut.

That means the forehand stroke will have no swing, and it will lose on another source of effortless power.

These are the most common and obvious technical breakdowns of the forehand stroke, and they significantly impact how effortlessly the player hits the ball and how well they control it.

Play Slow To Receive Slow Balls

While we can try to correct the above technical problems through video analysis and specific drills for each of the problems, we need to know what their original cause.

And that’s receiving a ball that’s too fast for the player’s current timing skills.

That’s why we can apply one simple approach to help improve all of the above problems at once, and that’s receiving a slow enough ball that the player can time it well.

But here’s the catch – if you want to receive a slow ball, you need to hit a slow ball.

The only time that’s not the case is when you rally with a highly skilled tennis player or a tennis pro who has mastered the ability to slow down and control any type of ball that they receive.

Beginners and intermediate tennis players lack this skill (it’s a difficult one!), and they tend to hit the ball fast if they receive a fast ball.

So, as soon as you rally with someone of your level and you hit the ball fast, you’re very likely going to receive a very fast ball back, hit it late and lose control of it. In the process, you’ll ingrain one more repetition of incorrect timing and incorrect stroke technique.

Therefore, you need to play slow to receive a slow enough ball so that you can repeatedly hit it well in front and ingrain lots of repetitions of good timing and correct technique in that tennis session.

The Speed Of Rallying In A Free Hitting Session

To better illustrate how slow you should be playing and how to incorporate it into your practice, I’ve recorded a video of me and my buddy Urban in a free hitting session one Sunday morning.

This was our typical hitting session where we don’t play points but just enjoy hitting a tennis ball and having a good workout.

Start Of The Session

After playing a few minutes of mini tennis, we move to the baseline and start rallying at a slow pace.

How slow? I don’t have a radar, but with the timer tool in my video analysis app, we can measure the time from me hitting the ball until I hit it the next time.

As you saw in the video, the average time between hits was around 3.4 seconds.

So, on average, the ball flight time from me to Urban was 1.7 seconds.

We would play at this pace for 5–10 minutes before gradually hitting a bit faster.

Middle Of The Session

We would gradually increase the speed of our hitting for about 10 minutes until we’re about 20 minutes into the session.

At that point, we would reach our maximum speed of rallying at which we are still very consistent while having a really good challenge of playing as this is testing our skill levels.

Keep in mind that the fastest improvement at any sport or other activity happens right on the edge of your comfort zone.

You need to push yourself slightly over the comfort zone but not too far because you will make tons of mistakes, break down your technique and lose confidence in yourself.

The key is to hit around 70%–80% of the time in your comfort zone and around 20%–30% of the time just pushing yourself on the edge.

Applying this to tennis means I will hit most often at speeds that I know I am consistent and spend just a bit of time hitting slightly faster than my comfort level.

If you apply this principle over a long period of time, it works wonders in terms of rate of improvement and the level you will eventually reach.

So, at what speed are we rallying in the middle of our session?

The average time between my hits was now down to 2.8 seconds, which means the average ball flight time from me to Urban was 1.4 seconds.

That’s approximately 20% faster than at the beginning.

It’s important that you interpret this correctly.

Most of you are NOT playing slowly at all, so this doesn’t mean that you should play 20% faster in the middle of your session.

Instead, it means you should play 20% SLOWER at the beginning of your session compared to your usual speed of hitting.

While Urban and I are very consistent at our maximum speed in the session, you are likely playing too fast to be consistent at your usual speed of hitting.

As a result, you first need to lower your current speed of hitting to levels where you are consistent but challenged (that’s likely 10% to 30% slower already) and further reduce the speed by an additional 20% for the start and the end of your hitting sessions. 

Let that process a bit in your mind as we move to the end of the session speeds.

End Of The Session

At the end of the session, Urban and I decrease the speed of hitting back to the starting speeds.

The ball flight time between my hits was around 3.3–3.4 seconds, which was basically the same as at the beginning.

We would start playing at these reduced speeds again in the last 5 minutes of the session.

Now why do we want to end the session playing slowly again?

First, we may have gotten a bit tight during really fast ball exchanges.

Playing on clay courts also causes many bad bounces to which we need to react with quick movements, and that’s when we need to improvise our strokes in order to save the ball.

In those instances, we had to abandon our ingrained technique.

It also feels natural to wind down from that high tempo and maximum focus on the ball to a bit slower tempo before ending the session.

It does not feel natural to move really fast and watch the ball with maximum focus and then suddenly stop the session and sit down at the club for a drink.

We want to gradually decrease the high level of hitting and concentration back to “normal levels” of regular life outside the tennis court – and we do it through slowing down our tempo.

In conclusion, this is what Urban and I – and many other experienced tennis players – have been doing all our tennis lives, and it has helped us tremendously in advancing in our skill levels.

We started to play like that originally in our teenage years, but the reasons were different then. We were not so skilled, so if I hit the ball too fast to Urban, he wasn’t very likely to give me back a nice ball off which I could hit well again.

We simply missed too quickly if we started hitting too fast too early. So, we kept rallying at lower speeds where both of us were able to control the ball well and extend the rallies so we could hit more balls and spend less time picking them up.

Over the years, our skill levels improved, and we were eventually able to rally and control the ball at much higher speeds, but we still follow the same process as we did over 30 years ago for the reasons I explained in this video.

I highly recommend you follow this process, as it is applied in every sport and other disciplines like dancing or mastering a musical instrument

Summary

One of the biggest problems in tennis is hitting the ball late.

When we hit the ball late, our stroke technique has to break down in order to adjust to the intention we currently have of where to hit the ball.

Our brain and body are quite good at improvising and finding solutions to hitting the ball late. Unfortunately, those solutions are not consistent in the long term, and they can lead to injuries.

Hitting late also robs you of effortless power, which robs you of the enjoyment of just hitting a stroke and prevents you from dictating the rallies more in competitive situations.

The main reason for hitting late is that you are receiving a ball that’s too fast for your current skill level of timing and ball judgment.

Therefore, you need to receive slower balls that you’ll be able to time, read well and hit more often at the ideal contact point.

As you hit them at the ideal contact point, you’ll feel effortless power coming into the ball and you’ll be ingraining correct technique.

The catch is that if you want to receive a slow ball, you need to hit a slow ball.

By looking to hit the ball slow, you will stop tensing up so much (tension / tightness is your greatest enemy in tennis).

Your swing and wrist lag will gradually start to improve, which will lead to even better sensations of effortlessness.

Start and finish free hitting sessions by playing slow in order to keep refreshing your memory of where the ideal contact point is and what the correct technique feels like so that it’s less likely that technique and timing will break down in faster ball exchanges.

Experienced tennis players with many years of tennis under their belt have realized that this is the right way to keep reinforcing the correct technique and ability to hit the ball effortlessly.

They keep doing it long after they have mastered the skill of playing tennis.

I invite you to follow their lead and come back to this article in a few months to report on how this approach worked for you.