Hello and welcome, my name is Philipp Halfmann and I am the Director of Exercise & Sports science at the IAAPH, and I am also author of "Advanced Concepts of Strength & Conditioning for Tennis". We have received a lot of inquiries from you guys in the past, asking us to show a training session with a professional athlete. So in today's episode you will be able to take a look inside a professional training session with Swiss national junior champion, Alexander Ritschard.


The training session will consist of: 1. Dynamic stretching 2. On-court integrated tennis drills with a speed ladder 3. Serve & volley So, you are welcome to join in; I hope you will like it. Every training session starts with a dynamic warm up for the upper- and lower body. You can see Alexander performing a lunge with trunk rotation followed by a lunge with ceiling reach before we get to the court starting with on-court training. At the beginning of today's training session we want to focus on lateral footwork and groundstrokes. One great way to accomplish both in one exercise is by using an integrated speed ladder drill. Before you can do this drill with your athletes make sure they are familiar with the "Lateral Fast Feet" speed ladder drill. So, set up the speed ladder behind the baseline and have the athlete move through the speed.

ladder before hitting ground strokes. The focus is on perfect movement mechanics and stroke production. In the next drill we want to focus on improving the footwork for the inside out forehand. This can be accomplished by combining 2 speed ladder drills: Lateral fast feet & the posterior cross-over before hitting the shot.

Next we hit some basic volleys with good rhythm and in good form before finishing the training session with some serves. Well, that's it again for today's episode. As usual, opinions can differ. What's your point of view? Let us know below in the comment section. A brand new episode will be available next Sunday. So make sure you don't miss it and subscribe!

In the meantime I recommend you watch some of the previous episodes -- you should really watch them all! If you like what you saw tell your friends -- I'm sure they will appreciate it. I'm Philipp Halfmann, Thank you for watching and Auf Wiedersehen! Tennis Conditioning TV episode are licensed under creative commons. You are welcome to embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.