If you’ve been following tennis in the USA you already know that we do not have any high-level players knocking on the door of the world arena. Our best men’s and women’s players appear to be over the hill as they cannot successfully compete against the world’s best on a regular basis.
For example, in the French Open, the American players were out of the competition fairly soon. We were treated to headlines such as, “Women’s final will be an all-Russian affair”. Why are we no longer producing high-level players capable of competing with the world’s best on a consistent basis?
The answer appears to be in the training, especially the development of high-level skill execution. Coupled with this is the lack of development of specialized – dynamic correspondence – exercises. This means specialized strength and explosive exercises that duplicate the skill execution.
Instead of precise, specialized training, we see multiple general conditioning programs to get the player “fit”. But fitness should only be a base upon which specialized or dynamic correspondence exercises are executed. It should be a prerequisite to the type of training needed to play on the world level.
The hottest trend today in tennis is fitness training. It seems to permeate most programs and the players who become fit seem to think that they have now achieved the highest level possible. They do not realize that it is but a beginning or base that is needed in order to excel on the higher levels of competition.
In addition, the idea that you should play and compete more and more in order to become a high-level player is still very strong in tennis — and many other sports. But as I have brought out many times previously, more playing does not make you a better player in relation to skill execution. You mainly improve your strategy.
Tennis, as other major sports in the US, is falling behind the rest of the world because it is not keeping up with the latest advances in the world of sports science, especially as it relates to high-level players. The main trend toward fitness without the following specialized training indicates that we are still in the dark ages when it comes to the whole concept of specialized sports specific training.
Rather than taking time to improve many different physical qualities such as coordination, speed, quickness and agility and playing more from the very earliest years, we never give the youngsters a chance to develop their full array of physical abilities. As a result they are limited in their playing abilities. As long as this continues we will only occasionally (laws of chance) have a great player on the world level.
For more information on how you can become a better player and improve your skills in the groundstrokes, see Explosive Tennis: The Forehand and Explosive Tennis: The Backhand.