 Hey guys and welcome back to another classroom tennis lesson. In this video I'm going to talk you through three of my favorite drills that can help you to develop a better quality rally ball. Now when we talk about a rally ball we're talking about the shots that you hit when both players are at the baseline in a neutral situation. Neither player has the opportunity to attack and neither player will be defending. Both of you are trading the ball back and if you have a good quality rally ball it's going to help you to set yourself up to be able to be in more of an attacking position and to prevent you from having to defend in the point. These three exercises will help you to develop that shot in both receiving a quality rally ball and being able to send a quality rally ball back. Although these three exercises aren't directly aimed towards improving your attacking skills and your defending skills, your ability to change direction and your ability to hit the ball harder, indirectly these staple exercises that are going to improve your rally quality will actually help all of those things as well. The drills are all suitable for all levels of player from beginner all the way through to professional tennis players and two of the exercises will give you the opportunity to benchmark your scores so that you can see how you're progressing over time. So enough of that chat let's get into the first exercise of my top three. In drill number one we are going to be looking at rally tempo. So this drill is very very simple you need two players this can be done on a full singles court or you can use half of a court if you don't have the space. The aim of the game is for you to work cooperatively with your partner to hit a 20 shot rally. Now you're going to hit that 20 shot rally as quickly as you can, make sure you set a stopwatch, start the stopwatch as soon as the first ball is fed and as soon as ball 20 lands in the court stop the stopwatch you have your time. If you make a mistake at any point whether the ball goes into the net or if it goes long you mustn't count that shot but you can start the rally from the score you left off from. It's a very simple exercise and what you'll find is over time to improve your score you'll have to hit the ball harder, you'll have to hit the ball lower, you'll have to take the ball earlier and you'll have to move your feet quicker. So just by putting this scoring system in place it forces you to play better tennis each time you step on court. Now when benchmarking this exercise it's good to understand that in a professional tennis match on average players take around 30 seconds to hit 20 shots in a rally. Now with that being said when playing a point at professional level the players will be moving from side to side forwards and backwards covering a lot of distance in between each shot. The shots will be traveling at different heights, different depths and different spins however in this exercise your job is to stay up and down the middle to make that rally as quick as possible. So if you can get anywhere near to 30 seconds to hit your 20 shots then that's a very very good score. The next drill is called the two minute challenge. Now in this exercise again you have two players and this can be done on the full singles court or on the half the court as well and the aim of this exercise is to become consistent and to hit with good length to your shots. So the way the drill works is we have a line drawn halfway between the service line and the baseline at one end. The person at this end will call them player A, they're the player who's going to be tested or the player that's going to be scored in this drill. Player B at this end their role is to keep the ball in play and to count the score that player A gets. Now when counting the score player B is looking for all of the shots that land somewhere in this zone here we'll call this zone one and this zone here which we'll call zone two. Anything that lands in zone one is one point, anything that lands in zone two is worth two points. If a ball lands short in the service boxes or if it lands deep outside of the court then you get zero points. After two minutes we're going to see how many shots or how many points player A scored. So for example if this was a rally we'd start the stopwatch, if the first shot lands here zero, two, three, three, five, five, six, eight etc. Now you'll notice if a ball gets missed, if it goes out of play or if it goes short you don't have to start your score again, you continue your score and accumulate points through the two minutes. To benchmark your scores it's good to understand that a very good score if you are a top county or national player you should get in the region of 60 points. Now when I do this exercise with my men's and ladies teams at club level they tend to get between 45 and 50 points across two minutes. If you're somebody newer to tennis and you're just trying to improve your consistency then a score of 30 would be a pretty good start. It's important to bear in mind that when you do this exercise it all depends on who you're playing with so quite often if you're playing with somebody who's a similar level to you that's a good way for you to benchmark your scores but try to record your scores with whoever you play with so that next time you do the exercise with them you can see if you've progressed or not. The thing I love about this exercise is there is endless possibilities to improve. If you score 40 points in your first attempt the next time you do the challenge there's a few ways that you can improve your score you could simply aim to not make any mistakes if you can get all of your shots in play you're likely to get a fairly decent score however if you're doing that at a slow pace and you're looping the ball in very slowly actually you're not going to get as many shots within two minutes as you would if you were hitting the ball harder or taking the ball earlier or maybe hitting it lower as well so there are lots of factors that come into play when trying to improve your score so try to consider which is going to be best for you. The third exercise in my top three is very simple it's half court points. Now the reason I like playing half court points it focuses you on your consistency and the quality of your ball striking. Now there aren't as many tactics that you can put into play when you're playing on half a court purely because you have less space there's not as much room for you to hit winners there's not as much room to pull your opponent out of position so you're going to have to win by hitting good quality shots time and time again. Now you can do this in a number of ways you can play this exercise in a straight line up and down one half here and you can split the court into so if I put a line here and here you can see that these two players will play on this half now depending on level and what you want to work on you can add the tram lines or take them away completely up to you but the aim is to try to beat your opponent just by trading back and forth being patient and hitting good quality ground strokes. If you do hit a weaker short ball that lands somewhere here then actually your opponent's going to have an opportunity to step in and attack and give you a little bit less time so it really focuses you on keeping that ball to a good length at a good pace with a good amount of top spin as well. Another way you can do this exercise is on the cross court so exactly the same format but you'll be playing on the diagonal instead. This brings in some other tactics you can start to work on creating space by hitting shorter and wider angles making use of the tram lines if you decide to use them as well but it's really good doing this on a cross court because generally when you play singles and doubles this is going to be your safest shot to play. When playing cross court you have a slightly bigger distance from corner to corner compared to when you're hitting in a straight line you're hitting over a slightly lower point in the net and generally when you play in singles and in doubles you can make your opponent move further because you're actually getting them to move out of the court as opposed to hitting the ball straight back into the court in a straight line. When doing these half court drills it's really good to keep score of your match so I tend to do these in tiebreak format where you play first to 10 points. You can start with a serve if you're going cross court or you can start with a basic feed if you're purely focusing on ground stroke consistency and rally quality. This drill can obviously be done on the opposite diagonal too so you can play on this side with two players on the left hand side of the court. You can practice specific shots you could set the challenge where if you're playing on this side and you're right-handed that you're only allowed to hit forehand to practice your inside out shots you could set the rule that you can only slice when it comes to your backhand there are endless ways that you can progress or regress this drill to set it at the right challenge level and to work on what you want to get from it. So there you go they are my three favorite drills there are plenty more that you can have a go at. My advice when you go into these exercises is do record your scores when you do these exercises with different players your scores may vary so it's useful to make a note of who you did the exercise with when you did it and what your score was so that over time you can compare your scores to see if you've improved and to see how much you've improved by. You can also set yourself goals to hit in the future this is the best way to improve your game and to become accountable for your progression. Anyway I hope you liked the video let me know how you get on and I hope to see you soon in my next video take care