Tennis Video Tips

Tennis: Serve Repair - Hitting Long

Assume a right-handed player.
Problem: Often hitting hard serves long.
Repairs:

1. For players of average height, hard, flat serves have to just barely clear the net, or they will go long. Only very tall players can get hard, flat serves in consistently enough to make them even begin to pay off, and advanced players rarely hit truly flat serves. Adding some topspin will increase your margin of clearance over the net to several times larger. The most preferred power serve among advanced players has a mix of topspin and slice.
2. Meeting the ball too low is like making yourself shorter, thus reducing the vertical angle from your racquet over the net to your target area. A low contact point also disrupts the upward whipping action you create at full extension. You should meet power serves at full upward extension.
3. You might be meeting the ball too far back. Generally speaking, meeting the ball more in front of you will make you hit lower. Either you're tossing too far back, or you're leaning too far forward before you've swung, thus getting ahead of the ball.

Crossfit good or bad for Tennis?

This is a question that I get asked a lot. Whether it’s good to do crossfit to get in shape for tennis or better off just to do cardio?
Lifting weights in my opinion does help give you more power and more strength for your tennis game. However, it has to be done right. We are in the gym not to become huge and super muscular; we are there to build muscles that help us for example serve better; move better in a lateral movement, hit a more powerful backhand through generating more power from the hips and core.
The key is to mix a lot of reps with heavy weight every once in a while to gain both endurance to the muscle and build more mass. This way you will get more in shape and become lean and mean. Remember you shouldn’t lift heavy all the time; it might give you a nice bod however for tennis you need to be light and quick. So the lean and mean process is the best approach.
Some of the useful exercises for legs are leg press, leg curls, barbel squats and hack squats.
Let me know if you have any questions.

How much money should a bettor use for betting?

There is no exact amount of money for how much a person can or should use for betting other than the minimum/maximum betting limits at a bookmaker. But, once you determine the right betting strategy and a system you’ll be using, it’s necessary to determine a few more things regarding your staking on bets. Generally, you can choose between the fixed percentage of your original betting bankroll, the fixed percentage of your current bankroll or the famous x/10 unit-betting system, where the 10/10 bet equals the highest amount of money you are willing to spend per bet.


1) Original bankroll fixed percentage – there isn’t much to discuss here, you choose a certain percentage of the funds you set aside for betting and hold onto it until the end of the season. The advantage of that is the simplicity for determining your stakes, while a disadvantage is the inability of adjusting the stakes to the current (new) bankroll. That can be resolved by correcting your percentage once you bankroll changes significantly, for example if your starting bankroll was $1,000 and you bet 2% of it and your bankroll reaches $3,000, then you can just simply start using 3% of your new bankroll. This is usually done on a monthly, quarterly or annually.


2) Current bankroll fixed percentage – here, things get a bit more complicated since you have to recalculate the stakes necessary after every bet you place but on the other hand, this staking method is taking into account the facts whether you’re currently in a profitable period (the total stakes increase) or you’re on a negative streak (total amount of stakes decreases). One big disadvantage about this method is that if you get into a bad streak right at the beginning, your bankroll will decrease and thus will be harder for you to grow it later on when you start winning more.


3) Unit-staking – the simplest method of all. Let the 10/10 be the highest amount of money you’re ready to invest, and let’s say it is some 5% of your total original bankroll. Then, depending on the odds and your confidence about that bet, you determine whether the stakes should be low (1-3), medium (4-7) or high (8-10), and those three categories can also be defined more delicately if needed.


The conclusion: optimal way of determining your stakes, taking into account expected/potential profit/loss of a part or your whole bankroll, would be to invest percentages of the current bankroll somewhere from 1% to 5% (3% being the best) on each bet. If you’ve decided to use the fixed profit betting strategy, then, depending on the average odds you expect to be betting on during the betting season, you should set your average stakes during the season to be about 3% (can be 5%, but definitely not above that).