We are going to have a major shortage of tennis courts in Batumi this summer due to all the outdoor courts at BNZ being closed and a lot of tourists pouring in soon, so let's try to come up with a plan to ease the situation. A tennis footwork instruction program for anyone interested, optimized for off-court practices on a partly sandy beach just a minute's walk from the tennis courts in the summer of 2025 seems like an excellent idea, so this is what we would like to sell to you in the following...
There are a number of ways in which we can improve our tennis skills off court, i.e. with the racket and the ball but without the net. In terms of workout and the corresponding power gained to improve our performance on court, some of these drills are in fact genuinely more suitable for off-court than on-court practices. With our focus on keeping the bulk of our footwork instruction program suitable for off-court practices, let's see which modern tid="recoil" style="scroll-margin-top:59px" ennis footwork drills can actually be done on tennis courts only as the rare opportunities for on-court practices arise this summer, and which ones are better suited for surfaces more challenging to our footwork as long as the workout for more power is our main concern, to come up with a first draft of our footwork instruction program.
In general, taking a physically demanding stroll at a decent pace on a sandy beach would actually serve as a better basis of building footwork muscles for our game on tennis courts than a nice and easy one on court. Jogging barefoot in deep sand at a technique-sensitively high pace for a species like us born to run would be even better, teaching our bodies how to move in the, say, physioculturally most efficient and reasonable way optimized for endurance – and as a by-product, for our average speed – with all the benefits that come with it, not just on tennis courts.
A historic reminder of the importance of endurance in tennis was the Australian Open final of 2002, clearly dominated by an extremely talented but physically very weak unknown Swedish veteran player against the previous World #1 Marat Safin. At the end of his professional tennis career, Thomas Johansson who had never advanced past the quarterfinals in any of the 24 previous Grand Slam tournaments he had participated in during his career, took a few months off specifically for endurance drills, and right after returning to the pro tour from the physio break won his first and only Grand Slam title.
Regarding a variety of more tennis-specific footwork drills than just plain running challenges, deep sand is exceptionally good at teaching us how to find our best footwork for these drills, too.
The so-called Romanian volley drill is suitable for pretty much any surface, with or without the net. Furthermore, it can be used to practice some of the steps introduced in the footwork drills video above, such as the cross step or the karaoke step:
In many ways, sand or grass would actually be a more useful surface for this drill than the hard courts – not just better for the knees but equally importantly an excellent challenge for all the muscles driving our footwork. As a useful complement to the Romanian volley drill, we'd also do some tennis timing drills off court for moving at the right moment as a variation of the general cat and mouse drill.
As another example of improving our tennis footwork off court, getting enough out of our back foot to load our biomechanics (the so-called "whip") properly and make the ball fly at a much higher speed than it would without such a preparation is how our serve can be greatly improved:
Moving the hips forward to block the recoil can be puzzling, so let's zoom in additionally on how to do it properly:
If you have a flexible and well-balanced body then a relatively wide stance is not too much of a problem and without having to shuffle your back foot you can block the recoil while getting enough out of your back foot anyway:
Deep sand would be the best surface for this drill, obviously, to find our back foot push-up optimum. Try serving some small stones behind the buoys on an empty beach like this to make your serve fly properly, for example. The alternative on court would be serving some balls over the fence to get proper weight behind the ball while serving. And when you are done with this, try serving some balls at the baseline before serving them normally into the service boxes, exactly like one of the well-known second serve specialists introduced below used to improve his serving skills at an early age to later dominate world tennis as a result for a whole decade.
Speaking of tennis or not, such a result is just one example in a long series demonstrating that genuine long-term success relies on sound underlying philosophies rather than what meets the eye.
Unlike the volleys and the power generation aspects of the serve, practicing the footwork of other tennis strokes by and large assumes the bouncing of the ball on a tennis court or similar. As the footwork techniques of the groundstrokes were covered in the introductory video already, and we'd skip the corresponding footwork drills as covered in regular practices on court anyway, let's focus now on the overhead smash footwork challenges that require instruction to be taken successfully in the concluding section of the overview of our tennis footwork instruction program for all the basic tennis strokes except the groundies.
There are two types of forehand overhead smash in tennis: the so-called Sampras leaping (aka bouncing) overhead smash and the more conventional ones ranging from traditional flat smashes to snap/flat combos with varying ratios. The general instructions for the corresponding footwork and most of the armwork are the same for both of them:
Similarly to the backhand volley, a stroke exists known as the backhand overhead smash, but unlike the backhand volley it is almost never used in tennis, so we'll leave it to experiment with on your own:
Regarding the forehand overhead smash alternatives known as just "smash" or "overhead", here is an example of a relatively traditional one which is apparently optimized for max horizontal velocity:
This is where the Sampras smash gets different – here we use a forearm roll called "snap" rather than a relatively straight arm follow-through to make our smash a winner or similar along the vertical dimension of space:
A live example of the corresponding non-tennis stroke by the author, optimized for a bounce into the stands apparently:
In our footwork instruction program we'd be covering the forehand overhead smash using both pronation with a relatively straight arm follow-through (the relatively traditional smash) and the Sampras version of pronation with a bent elbow follow-through (the Sampras smash, given restricted attention due to the reasons introduced below) with an emphasis on the footwork involved, including both the similarities and the differences in the footwork of these two variations of the forehand overhead smash.
Words of warning... For the longevity of your tennis career, be always well warmed up before practicing the Sampras smash as it is a badminton stroke. Hitting a much heavier tennis ball with a lot heavier tennis racket before warming up properly can result in the so-called tennis elbow over time, which means no more tennis in many cases. If you feel that your hitting arm is not fully relaxed to hit a Sampras smash effortlessly then always hit a regular smash instead, alright.