Do you focus during Mini Tennis?

1. Raise the body temperature and prepare you to play. Your body will be exposed to much more demanding situations in a tennis match compared to your normal state when sitting or walking. If your muscles are not warmed up, they are not very flexible. Your body needs to be able to move faster and further than in daily life, and you need to be able to “wake” your body up in order to perform at higher levels of difficulty than usual.
2. You are able to get the feel for hitting the ball with the whole body and mimic motions and movements that will happen during a match. If you warm-up on mini court with just your arm and are lazy with your footwork and lower body, then this feeling can transfer back to the baseline and you’ll have troubles finding the rhythm and finding the feel of hitting the ball with your body and leg drive. That’s why its critical that you immediately start to engage your full body. Starting from quick and swift footwork for getting to the ball and then pushing from the ground and into body rotation and the strokes. Everything is done in a controlled manner while the whole body moves in coordination.
3. Raise the focus and alertness of the brain - improving hand-eye coordination. Your brain does not have to coordinate the whole body in demanding situations for most of your day. It needs to get warmed up for tennis just like the rest of your body. If it doesn’t warm-up well, it will make errors in calculating ball trajectory and moving the body into the correct position and you’ll make mistakes.
4. Establish good timing and contact point. This takes us right back to the brain! Your brain didn’t need to time your movements with small moving objects coming towards you at high speeds before you stepped on the tennis court. Your eyes also didn’t need to track very accurately small moving objects. Now they both have to do just that! Mini tennis is the perfect warm-up to help this happen before you go back to the baseline and into real situations. Warm-up your tracking system and work your way into finding ideal contact points by being aware of how close to the sweet spot you hit the ball.
5. Get the feel for the ball, strings and the court. Even if you play every day, you know that you might start your tennis lesson or a match with old or new balls and with old or new strings. Even these small changes can give you a different feel and you have to adjust to those conditions very quickly. Again, mini tennis warm-up helps you do just that!

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