Category: Training

The direct answer: the off-season fitness base is built with simple, consistent work — not heroic workouts. Today we’re launching a free tool that turns that principle into a daily plan: the 30-Day Fitness Calendar. It starts with a baseline assessment of six simple fitness tests, places your player on one of five levels, and…

The direct answer: a good hitting partner might be the highest-value investment in your junior’s development — more valuable than another private lesson per week. Lessons build technique; hitting partners build tennis. Matches are won on rhythm, repetition, and the ability to problem-solve against a live opponent, and none of that comes from a basket…

The direct answer: the November–January off-season is the most valuable training window in junior tennis, because it’s the only time of year when there’s nothing to win. No rankings pressure, no tournaments every weekend — just weeks of uninterrupted time to get fitter, fix technique, and rest. The juniors who make the biggest jumps year…

The direct answer: yes, juniors can strength train safely — but what “strength training” means changes completely by age. For young kids it means climbing, jumping, and playing. For pre-teens it means bodyweight exercises with perfect form. For older teens it can mean supervised resistance work. The through-line at every age: bodyweight first, form before…

The direct answer: footwork is the most underrated junior skill because nearly every missed shot in junior tennis is, at root, a movement failure. Kids don’t miss because their forehand technique is broken — they miss because they arrived late, off balance, or too close to the ball, and no stroke technique survives bad positioning.…

Here’s the direct answer: the serve develops last because it’s the most physically and technically demanding shot in tennis. It requires shoulder and core strength most kids don’t have yet, plus the coordination to toss a ball and hit it at full extension with a complex motion — the only shot in tennis where the…

If you’re new to junior tennis, the colored balls can look like a marketing gimmick. They’re not. Red, orange, green, and yellow are stages of a ball progression system designed so kids learn real tennis technique on courts and with balls scaled to their size and strength. Your child moves through the colors roughly in…

The direct answer, up front: most junior players train far more than they need to and rest far less than they should. A 10-year-old does not need 15 hours a week. A 16-year-old chasing high-level competition probably needs 12–18. And at every age, the right number is the one your specific kid can sustain with…

The short version: after a hard tournament weekend, your kid needs 48 hours before anything resembling real training. Not 48 hours of “taking it easy” while hitting full practice the next morning — 48 hours of genuine recovery. Sleep, food, light movement, and nothing that looks like competition. Junior tennis has a chronic overtraining problem,…

The short version: cold doesn’t just make tennis uncomfortable — it changes the equipment, the body, and the math of every rally. Balls get livelier and harsher off the strings, muscles tighten and tear more easily, and the warm-up your kid skips in July becomes non-negotiable in November. Here’s how to play through fall and…