The Quest For More Power In Tennis And Why It’s Not The Answer

Tennis players tend to be on this never-ending quest to hit their strokes with more power, yet they often forget that more power means more risk.

So what speed allows you to play tennis well and consistently?

While power or speed is very tricky to measure if we don’t have radar guns, we can measure the time the ball travels from one player to another quite easily.

Most smartphones now have a good enough video camera to record a few ball exchanges, and various apps like Coach’s Eye allow you to put a timer on the analysis and measure the ball flight time.

In this video article, I’ll show you how fast I play when just rallying, how fast I play during a match and how fast the pros play.

The Average Flight Time In A Free Hitting Session

When I analyzed a forehand from one of my members, I realized that he was hitting the ball really fast. He said that his forehand was not consistent, but when I looked at his technique, I did not see any major technical flaws.

The most likely reason was that he was attempting to play too fast and therefore too risky.

The faster the ball flies, the smaller the window above the net through which we need to hit it.

It simply becomes more and more difficult, and the shape of your backswing, your grip and where you finish the stroke have very little to do with this.

A simple analogy would be that the farther you are away from the hoop in basketball the harder it is to score. That applies to everyone, even to the best basketball player with perfect shooting technique.

As I measured the player’s ball flight, it turned out that it took the ball less than a second to reach the other side after he hit it. That’s a really powerful forehand.

That raises the question: how fast should a good recreational tennis player play?

When I measured my own hitting speed, the average ball flight time was around 1.5 seconds.

Another way to look at it is that the average rally length when hitting with my buddy Urban was around 3 seconds.

Does that speed change if I play a match?

The Average Flight Time In A Recreational Tennis Match

I have footage where I play some practice points with another friend, and I recorded the ball flight times of a few strokes in 3 different points, each of which lasted 4 strokes.

The average ball flight time of the first point was 1.49 seconds, of the second point 1.54 seconds, and of the third point 1.39 seconds.

In the last point, I was attacking more with the forehand with no neutral rallies, and that caused the average time to go down.

As you can see, even when I play points, my ball flight time is still around 1.5 seconds. In some cases, I hit with more power to around 1.4 seconds, which is only 7% faster.

I do put more topspin into strokes but also more height in order to be more consistent, and that’s why the ball flight times are basically the same as when I rally and hit flatter and lower above the net.

So there are 2 mistakes you could be doing:

1. You could be the player who hits very fast in practice and doesn’t care much about mistakes, but when you play a match, you play significantly slower because of the fear of missing. If so, you’ll be mostly on defense as you cannot dictate the rallies playing very slow.

2. Or you could be the player who plays very slow in practice without putting much effort in moving and adjusting to each ball.

When the match comes, you feel you need to hit with a lot power in order to dictate the rallies, but that results in making tons of unforced errors because you’re not used to that speed of hitting.

In both cases, you play worse in matches than you play in practice.

Therefore you need to discipline yourself to practice and play matches with roughly the same speed of hitting.

Finally, if you’re not at the skill level of tennis that Urban and I are, your ball flight time should be more than 1.5 seconds.

While you may be capable of hitting the ball as fast as a pro in a baseline rally, you will not be very consistent. The smallest error in a racket angle at contact, a mishit, loss of balance or a slight mistiming of the stroke will result in a missed shot.

So the key takeaway is to find your optimal rally speed at which you are very consistent and stick to it as if it’s a speed limit that you respect when driving a car.

You can try over a long period of time to raise your own speed limit, but the process must be very gradual, adding only a few percent of extra speed to your shots and seeing if you can still control the ball well.

The Average Flight Time In A Professional Tennis Match

So how fast do the pros play?

I analyzed a practice match between David Ferrer and Andy Murray and measured the times of the ball flights in baseline rallies (excluding returns).

The ball flight times varied from 1.06 to 1.5 seconds with an average time of 1.3 seconds.

While that’s approximately only 15% faster than my playing speed, I could never get to those speeds in my lifetime and play consistently.

It is of course possible to hit the ball at such speed if you have good technique and timing, but playing points is a different story.

Hitting a nice ball coming from the ball machine all the time with the same speed, height and spin is very different from playing a tennis match.

There is a lot of movement in a match, and you’re receiving very different balls that require many different adjustments of the fundamental technique.

Combined with additional decision-making processes, these variables make hitting the ball consistently much more difficult.

Therefore we have to play at lower speeds in order to have a bigger window above the net to hit into.

So the ball machine can deceive you into believing that you can play faster than it’s actually possible in a real match.

I would like to thank professor of mathematics Igor Getman for sharing with me some calculations about the ball speeds and times. These are of course approximate calculations but they give you a good idea of actual speed of hitting and how much speed the ball loses by the time it reaches the opponent.

A ball flight time of around 1.5 seconds at a distance of 26 meters (both players at 1 meter behind the baseline) means that the ball left the racket at 81 km/h (50 mph) and it arrived at opponent’s racket at around 49 km/h (30 mph).

Summary

Tennis is a very complex game, and there are many reasons why you may not be able to rally consistently from the baseline.

Players tend to become too focused on stroke technique and look for explanations of inconsistent play in technical flaws of the stroke.

They forget that one of the main reasons for missing strokes is playing too fast. (for their current skill level)

Just as speeding is one of the most common reasons for car accidents (where drivers lose control of the car) so is “speeding” one of the most common reasons for missing a shot in tennis (where players lose control of the racket and the ball).

You can now compare your skill level with mine and realize that, if I play well and consistently at ball flight times of 1.5 seconds, then you should be playing slower if you’re not at my level yet.

By the way, I am a tennis coach and have been playing tennis for more than 35 years. 

The ball is in your court now: try to record your rally speeds in a match or even when just hitting with a friend and let us know what the average ball flight time is.

Update!

This is the latest video related to playing speeds and it explains one key reason why you are hitting the ball too hard.