Playing ISN'T Practice

If you want your game to get better it’s important to isolate the parts of your game that improving will give the greatest results.  It isn’t likely that improving your forehand from the baseline will make a huge improvement in your doubles game.  Learning to get to the net or improving your return may.

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If you think that playing a few sets will help your return or your ability to approach the net you are probably wrong.  Why?  Let’s say in a play situation you decide to practice moving in behind your first serve so that you will be able to use it in a match.  So in 1-½ hours you may play 2 sets.  On average these sets will be 10 games each or 20 games total.  Of the 20 games you will serve 5 of them.  These games may average 6 points each or a total of 30 points.  If you serve 60% first serves you will practice coming in behind your serve 18 times over a 90 minute session.  

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What if you and your partner(s) decided to spend 1 hour practicing your serve, approach and returns?  In 30 minutes you would be able to hit 90-100 serves and your partner would practice returns, then you would switch.  Match this against 18 practice points in 1-½ hours and you can see that it might take forever to get better, longer if you don’t really practice it consistently. 

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What about your backhand volley?  Is it going to get better by magic?  What are you doing to improve it?  Oh yes, you’re playing.  You probably get 10 chances to practice your backhand volley during play and your focus is only on the point not making your volley more reliable.

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Isolate what you need to work on in practice and get as much repetition as possible.  And PLEASE make sure that you are practicing with a good technique.  Practicing an inferior technique leads to a dead end as it can never go beyond a certain point.

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