Practice or Play

Do you want to improve your tennis game overall?  Do you think you can improve by playing more often?  The only way to improve your game overall is to improve your strokes by adding practice sessions into your schedule.  If you get out twice a week, make one of them a practice day and you can take your game to the next level.

If you only play, then the strokes you have can become more consistent, but they won’t lift you up the ladder and raise your tennis rating.  Match play forces you to concentrate too much on the outcome of the point and not the new elements of a stroke.

Having a practice day allows you to focus on one stroke at a time and implement the changes you desire.  In order to improve a stroke you need several elements:

• You must know the new form you want to perform.
• You need to hit enough balls repetitively to integrate the new form into your stroke. This can be done with a ball machine or a hitting partner.
• You need to practice drills that put the new form into a point situation.

Number 2 and 3 cannot be done while playing a match.