Mike Agassi wanted Andre to hit 1000000 tennis balls annually to train a future world #1. Andre Agassi spent 101 weeks ranked #1. Being able to control the ball and put it where your opponent does not want it has always been a good strategy for success in tennis.
Today’s elite tennis training rightly focuses a lot of time on footwork, speed, agility, aerobic recovery, flexibility, strength, and balance. A player with aspirations for playing Division 1 college tennis or higher had better be a supremely conditioned excellent athlete as well as a great ball striker.
Pros, elite junior players, and high-level college players are all doing a lot more than just hitting a bunch of tennis balls to train
Just hitting a lot of tennis shots is not enough for tremendous players. What about the rest of us?
Even with newer insights, hitting a lot of tennis balls and making the ball behave will help a person win a lot of matches. The older notion of hit, hit, hit, is not going to hurt lower-level players who are unlikely to hit so many tennis shots as to produce a lot of over-use injuries. Recreational players, league players, and high school players can all benefit from developing reliable and varied strokes. Doing so requires putting in the time to actually hit tennis balls.
25% of Mike Agassi’s Formula
If you are not aiming for #1, a person might think hitting 250,000 balls per year is a good path.
- Hitting 10000000 balls per year would mean hitting 2739.72 balls per day.
- We can round that to 2740 balls per day because who hits 72% of a ball?
- Multiple 2740 by .25 to get 685 balls per day
- With some rounding a player who cannot hit every day could aim to hit 5000 balls per week (685*7=4795 tennis balls per week if someone needs a lot of precision)
One could use a hopper, a ball machine, or a grocery cart with a set number of balls to make practicing toward this goal easy.
A player who plays in both a singles and doubles league during the week might easily play her two matches and then have two practice sessions hitting 2000 balls each and assume that 1000+ balls were hit during the warm-ups and match play during the week so that 5000 tennis strokes were executed during the week. This player will likely see results improve.
No wall, no ball machine, no partner? Do something like this with Patrick Mouratoglou’s adjustments/advice
If this is too much, why not 10% of Mike Agassi’s Plan?
Maybe a player is pretty casual and only plays tennis once per week in varying singles or doubles competitions. He could aim to hit 274 balls per day for the year and assume that the one day of match play gets at least 274 tennis strokes executed between the warm-up and match. He could aim for practicing one to two times per week to hit the remaining (275*6 I like multiples of 5) 1650 shots for the week.
Hitting a lot of tennis shots in practice will also improve the conditioning and strength of a lot of lower-level players so match improvement can come from more than just cleaner striking
A Weekly Practice Could Look Like
- 50 1st serves with a variety of placements
- 50 2nd serves with a variety of placements
- 100 Forehand Volleys
- 25 Drop Volleys
- 25 Cut Volleys
- 25 Cross Court Volleys
- 25 Down the Line Volleys
- 100 Backhand Volleys (see above for variety)
- 50 Half Volleys & Overheads
- 100 Underspin Approach Shots
- 50 Slice Backhand Approach Shots
- 50 Chip Forehand Approach Shots
- 100 Offensive Lobs
- 100 Defensive Lobs
- 500 Forehands
- 150 Heavy Cross Court Rallying Forehands
- 100 Offensive Forehands (Everyone wants to hit winners, but practicing rallying shots and scrambling shots is likely more beneficial)
- 200 Defensive High Net Clearance Forehands
- 50 Direction Change Forehands
- 500 Backhands (See above for similar but not identical differentiation)
I don’t love the above list. Using a wall or backboard, a ball machine, a human practice partner, or a human instructor will all lead to different-looking lists. Still, if a player wants to jump one or two levels in results, it is not a bad idea to think about a realistic number of additional balls to hit each week and find a way to do it. If someone simply adds 1000 tennis shots per week, a weakness is likely to become more neutral in match play and a strength may become an intimidating factor on the other side of the net. The moral of the story:
The More You Hit the Better You Get
Tennis Abides: Dan Martin on Tennis and Life 