(Inspired by the podcast episode #3: “Tour Coach” w. Cameron Moore on The Adam Blicher Show — Dissecting High Performance in Tennis)
Q: “What do you consider the biggest waste of time of biggest myth within tennis?”
Hitting more balls equates getting better. People will say “Oh you’ve got to go out and hit ten thousand balls and you’ll be an expert”. There’re plenty of people who have hit ten thousand balls and are nowhere near expert level. They hit ten thousand and they might be worse for hitting that ten thousand.
I was watching the press conference after Paes and Hingis won the U.S. Open (red. 2015) and it was one of the most exceptional interviews that I’ve seen. Paes was talking about how people think that he doesn’t like to practice and he said that’s simply not true. He goes “What I get out of one hour is like the equivalent of four to five training blocks of what someone else gets”. He goes:
“It’s not about the quantity of the training, it’s about the quality of that quantity”
And I think that’s where people make the mistake saying “I’ve just got to spend more hours on court”. Well you can spend more hours on court, it’s not necessarily going to equate to you getting better. I’ve seen so many kids work exceptionally hard over the years. They work hard and they’re focused and they don’t get any better because they’re doing the same three or four drills they’ve been doing since they were eight years old, those drills have no relevance to them getting any better; they’re really good at those drills but the quality of their over all practice isn’t great. They’re beyond the needs of those drills but they keep doing them over and over again and it doesn’t help, no improvement is coming.
So it’s not about how many balls you hit, it’s not about how many hours a week you spend on court, it’s about the quality of the time that you spend on court.
It’s not because I demonize hard work and I acknowledge that a lot of hard work and quality hours needs to be put in even to simply have a shot a being any good, but if a kid focus for the period of time they are on the practice court, it’s irrelevant.
I had one guy on tour practicing 4–5 hours a day on court, focus the entire time, practice sessions was great; and he needed that. I had another guy where 2,5–3 hours was the max of what we were going to spend a day on court. Anything over that was just a complete waste of time so there wasn’t a need to spend any more time on court than that. So we knew that we had to max out what we could in the 2,5–3 hours a day and move on to something else and that’s all he needed as a player.
You need to figure out with the individuals, what’s their threshold? How long can they train for in a day? What’s the point of where quality starts to depreciate. Is it worth it to go past the time or should you move on to something else or at that point should you begin your off court work and head to the gym?
Q: So it basically comes down to each individual?
Yes, each individual and knowing the player. To me, I don’t care how many hours a week the kids are on court. I want to know what’s the quality of the hours? If the quality is good, you could have one kid who trains 10 hours a week as opposed to a kid who trains 20 hours a week and a kid training 10 hours a week is getting more out of it than the kid training 20. The kid training 20 is wasting 10 maybe 15 hours a week because it’s not focused, they’re not really working on anything; they’re just hitting balls.