10 Tennis Tips for Beginners Looking to Advance

This one’s for all you self-learners out there. The ones that pour over YouTube shorts, realizing that their feed has become consumed by slow-mos of Federer’s serves. The ones that started playing once per week for fun but now find themselves practicing their hand toss around the house. You’ve officially been hooked, but you find yourself a little stuck. “The passion is there, but why am I stuck in the beginner phase?” Well, this one’s for you.

These 10 tennis tips summarize some of the most common areas beginners struggle with or push to the back burner. Put more practice time and effort into these, and watch your confidence and level of the game improve!

Image of Tennis Player Footwork

1. Learn how to move on the court

Footwork is something many beginners don’t know about or neglect. How you move around the court will allow you to rally longer. It’s also essential to playing an offensive game. Watch as many footwork drill videos as possible, then take them to the court. If you don’t want to dedicate a whole session to footwork, try starting with 10-15 minutes of drills before you work on your forehand or rallying. Then, throughout the rest of your session, incorporate the type of footwork you learned that day, slowly building upon each new footwork skill.

Extra Tip: Remaining on the balls of your feet will allow you to move faster and more efficiently. After 10 minutes of playing like this, your legs will likely be talking to you.

Extra Tip: Remaining on the balls of your feet will allow you to move faster and more efficiently. Stay on the balls of your feet longer each session until you can play an entire match like this.

Prepare early in tennis before each shot

2. Prepare early

Even as a beginner, you’ll quickly realize you can predict the general direction the ball will end up on your side of the court (this skill will progress the more you play with a buddy). This heads-up should cue you on the direction to move in but also give you a chance to prepare your shot.

Since contact should happen in front of the body, start your unit turn and prepare before the ball bounces on the court. This allows you to hit the ball not only in front of your body but also ensures that you can use the entire weight and force of your body to follow through on a powerful shot.

3. Learn to recover quick

Once you hit your shot, it’s tempting to “sit back” and see where it ends. This is a recipe for unpreparedness. Once your opponent answers, you’ll be late with your next shot or miss entirely if you don’t recover in time.

Recovering quickly means hitting your shot and immediately preparing for the next one. Determine the direction your opponent is aiming for and move there fast. With footwork drills, this recovery time will decrease more and more.

Enable Images to see a Tennis Player Following Through

4. Follow through on every shot

Push through the ball and allow your racquet to follow through completely. This will ensure the most power in your shots and prevent unnatural movements of your upper body that happen when you stop your racquet abruptly after making contact with the ball.

Practice your tennis service without the ball

5. Learn to toss before you learn to serve

The infamous tennis serve. There are many steps and checkpoints to hit while adding style and grace. Many beginners will watch their favorite pros and attempt to replicate what they see in their videos. This often leads to more frustration than success. You’ll find the most results by breaking down your serve into each individual checkpoint. This starts with the toss. How high, how far in front of you, and how far to the left or right you throw the ball can make or break your serve.

Master each of these elements of the toss before working on your serve. You can practice this basically anywhere. Once the ball goes up and comes straight down, landing directly in the hand that tossed it without movement of the tossing arm and without spinning, you’re ready to bring it to the court.

Extra Tip: Practice your serve without the ball first. Simply focus on each step of the process and try to make it as fluid as possible.

6. Watch as much content as you can… but the right content

With countless coaches and trainers on YouTube these days, learning how to play tennis hasn’t been more accessible. Techniques, drills, and even mindsets are all out there for us to soak up and use for free. That being said, it’s essential to find the right instructors. Watch coaches with plenty of experience, possibly even coaches of the greatest players of all time.

Even better, there are subscriptions like TopCourt that bring content from only the best coaches, trainers, and players in the world. This can be a godsend when you’ve heard 3 different ways to do basically every tennis skill out there. You know you’re getting the best information that will allow you to progress the fastest.

7. Drills, drills, drills

It can be tempting to jump right in and rally when you get to the court. But this won’t necessarily make your game any better, especially if you haven’t mastered the correct techniques and skills. It is ridiculously more challenging to unlearn a bad habit in tennis than putting in the time to learn the correct one from the start. So, dedicate time each session to putting in the hard work. The results will blow you away.

8. Record yourself

Seeing what you’re doing on the court is super important without a trainer or coach. Oftentimes, when we’re playing, we think we hit the ball one way, but after watching ourselves, we realize we hit it a completely different way. Recording allows you to hone in on what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. The more you learn how each of these feels, the faster you start incorporating the correct techniques and avoiding the incorrect ones.

Extra Tip: Watch the videos of yourself throughout your practice sessions so that you can quickly correct any mistakes on the spot before they become bad habits.

9. Get on the court more

Consistency will be your best friend if you’re serious about improving your game. Good tennis comes from getting out on the court as much as possible. Those techniques and skills become muscle memory every time you get out there. This allows you to dedicate your time to strategy and playing tennis with intent.

Enable Images to see how you should treat yourself while learning tennis

10. Go easy on yourself

Remember, you are your greatest cheerleader. Celebrate your progress, no matter how small, and use it as fuel to keep pushing forward. With dedication and the right mindset, you can turn your passion for tennis into a rewarding journey of skill improvement and personal growth.

Even the best in the world lose their cool and smash a few racquets (some more than others :)). As a beginner, frustration is bound to hit you at some point on the court. Beating yourself up can be incredibly detrimental to your game. Instead of spiraling in a practice session, take a break, rewatch the videos of yourself, and take even smaller baby steps.

When tennis remains fun, you’ll want to play it more, and the more you play, the better you get. So, go easy on yourself and remember to have a blast, because that’s why you started playing the sport after all.

Read it. Sip it. All the way to the bottom.

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