double galzing header part 7

Active Away Tennis Holidays Blog: Guide to Improving Your Doubles Part 7

If you have been away with us before, you are almost certainly going to have heard us talk about this.

Steve’s family used to run a very successful double glazing factory in his home county of Staffordshire. We developed this technique to help improve your volleys while Steve was attempting to upsell some double glazing on one of the holidays – just kidding 😉

In part six we talked about improving your lateral movement to help to move better as a team, if you haven’t read part 6 or would like a recap you can read it by clicking here. Today we are going to give you some tips on how to improve your volleys. To do this you have to use a little visualisation.

Volleys are technically the most simple shot to learn but one of the hardest shots to master.

We often find that one of the main issues people have with their volleys is that they try and do to much with them. They try to swing to much and generate to much pace, this has a couple of consequences.

  1. Because you have a lot less time when you are at the net if you try to swing you wont have enough time to get ready for the nest shot – you end up looking like you are manically swatting flies.
  2. The volley is about control, you are generally deflecting pace rather than add pace. Volleying is all about feel; there are 4 main feelings you should have on your volleys, a block (deflecting pace), a push (adding pace in a controlled manner), a catch (taking pace off) and a punch (adding pace) we will be delving in to this more at a later stage.
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The basic principle of our double glazing theory is to imagine that you have a pane of glass running through the middle of your body running from shoulder to shoulder all the way to the floor, you then visualise another pane of glass about 1ft in front of you with a pocket of air in between. Got it?

The two panes of glass move where ever you go. The idea is that you will always (well 90%) of the time keep the racket between the two panes of the glass when you are volleying. i.e if you take the racket back past your shoulder line you have broken the back pane of glass if you follow through then you have smashed the front pane of glass.

To volley successfully try to always keep the racket in between the glass. The exception to this maybe on a high volley with no pace when you need to inject a little pace in to the shot.

Tennis Holidays are a great way to make real progressions in your game, it is an intense week of learning new skills in the morning and putting them in to practise in the afternoons. Being able to play for 20 hours in one week means that you can really make changes in your game fast! Our Tennis Holidays our suitable for all levels whether you are a complete beginner through to county level players – everyone is welcome!