Five Exercises for Developing Professional Skills

There are five basic exercises that develop the muscle and neuronal controls needed to hit a professional stroke. All of these movements are "unnatural" in that they are usually discovered by chance. However, we have found that a very small percentage of the population has a predisposition to one or more of these movements. Once in while, one of these individuals will pick up tennis at an early age and will be called "talented." We have also discovered that almost anyone can develop and use these movements to hit a tennis ball in about six weeks. So if you are among the majority of people who did not start out with a tendency to use any of these five actions (neither Becky nor I discovered them until we were adults), it is still possible for you to develop professional-level skills by just doing the exercises illustrated in the Shockwave videos below. Each exercise can be done in your home. We suggest starting out doing them about 5 minutes each, three days a week. Similar exercises apply to the backhand and volley.

The straight-line motion and wrist position are to assure a clean strike. The upper arm rotation is needed for the acceleration stage in the Agassi Forehand.

Introduce these movements into your rallies in the short court as soon as you are ready. It is best to introduce one movement at a time and give it a chance to take hold before introducing the next movement. The order presented here is a reasonable sequence of introduction, but following your own natural tendencies is always best.

The elbow placement is needed for stability and maneuverability. The shoulder control is necessary for stability throughout the stroke.

The theory behind this approach is to follow the brain's natural learning process, whereby we first develop the components of an activity, such as learning the elements needed to walk, and then we integrate the individual components into a purposeful action. This is the most rapid form of learning at any age.

A remarkably large part of the problem in learning tennis is that most people do not have any of these five essential movements in their skill set, and so they are highly restricted in what they can do. Because the importance of these movements is not widely known, a student could go for years without developing them.

The racquet path must be controlled to prevent shanking the ball.

As noted above, allow about six weeks for these movements to develop. In some cases, it might take longer; in others, it might be shorter.