How to actually get better at tennis

When Carlos Alcaraz loses, which is still rare enough to feel notable, his instinct is not to dwell on the result for long, but to go looking for specifics. Patterns that didn’t quite hold up, decisions that shifted momentum, small moments that, in hindsight, carried more weight than they seemed to at the time.

The language is rarely dramatic. It is, instead, precise and almost forensic.

It’s a reminder that, at the highest level, improvement is not driven by how much tennis you play, but by how clearly you understand what just happened.

Spend enough time around amateur tennis — club matches, coaching sessions, the familiar churn of weekly hits — and a slightly uncomfortable pattern begins to emerge.

There are players who seem to live on court. They play three, four times a week, enter local leagues, book extra practice sessions when they can, and yet, if you happen to watch them six months later, or even a year on, something is broadly the same. The strokes are recognisable, the patterns familiar, the outcomes not dramatically different. They are not worse, certainly. But they are not, in any meaningful sense, better.

It raises a question that sits quietly beneath the surface of the sport, rarely addressed directly because it feels almost counterintuitive to say it out loud: what if playing more tennis is not, on its own, the thing that makes you improve?

At professional level, of course, volume is unavoidable. Players train for hours each day, building the physical and technical foundations required to compete at the highest level. But to assume that volume is the driver of their improvement is to misunderstand what is actually taking place on those practice courts.

Watch closely, and what stands out is not the quantity of hitting, but the interruption of it. Rallies are stopped early. Patterns are repeated in short, deliberate bursts. Conversations happen constantly between player and coach, between intention and outcome. A slight adjustment is made, tested, and either kept or quietly discarded. What looks, from a distance, like repetition is in fact something more precise: a series of feedback loops, each one closing the gap between what the player intends to do and what is actually happening.

For most amateur players, that loop barely exists.

The issue is not effort. If anything, effort is abundant. The issue is clarity.

Tennis is a sport that lends itself to a kind of functional illusion. A forehand can feel solid until it is asked to do something slightly more demanding such as to accelerate under pressure, to change direction, to hold up late in a match. A backhand can survive comfortably in neutral rallies while offering very little when the point requires it to become assertive. A serve can “go in”, reliably enough, and yet yield no real advantage. From the inside, everything feels broadly in working order. From the outside, the limitations are often easier to spot.

As Brad Gilbert once wrote, in the understated way that has made Winning Ugly quietly influential for decades, “If you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, you can’t correct it.” It is a simple line, but it captures something fundamental: improvement depends not just on repetition, but on awareness.

Without that awareness, repetition has a tendency to harden into habit.

Which is why playing more tennis, in isolation, can lead to a strange kind of stagnation. You do not stay the same so much as you become a slightly more efficient version of your current level. The same patterns are reinforced, the same decisions made under pressure, the same tendencies resurfacing at the same moments. Matches begin to take on a familiar shape in their long exchanges, limited variation, outcomes that feel, if not predetermined, then at least unsurprising.

It is not a lack of intent. It is the absence of intervention.

At the top of the game, that intervention is constant. Novak Djokovic has spoken often about analysing his matches, about the need to review what has happened in order to understand what needs to change. “I always try to analyse my matches and see what I could have done better,” he said, a line that feels almost too obvious until you consider how rarely that process is applied with any real structure at amateur level.

Coaches, too, have long leaned on tools that make this process more tangible. Darren Cahill, in his work both on the tour and in broadcast, has frequently pointed to the role of video in helping players confront the difference between what they feel they are doing and what is actually happening. It is not always a comfortable exercise. But it is often a necessary one.

The temptation, once this gap becomes apparent, is to try to fix everything at once. Grip, swing path, footwork, positioning, tactics or a wholesale reset. In practice, improvement tends to be far more selective than that. It is usually one or two constraints, quietly exerting more influence than everything else, that define a player’s ceiling. A return position that concedes too much court. A forehand pattern that never quite applies pressure. A second serve that invites attack.

At the highest level, as Andy Murray has often noted, the margins are small. But small does not mean insignificant. More often, it means decisive.

The difficulty, particularly for players without consistent coaching input, is identifying which margin matters. And this is where the structure of improvement begins to diverge.

For many players, the cycle remains loosely defined: play, reflect briefly, play again. For others, and almost invariably at higher levels, it becomes something more deliberate. They play, observe, correct, test, repeat. The difference between the two is not dramatic in any single session. Over time, however, it compounds.

Rafael Nadal has built an entire career on that idea of constant refinement, speaking repeatedly about the need to keep looking for ways to improve. It is less a phase than a mindset, one that assumes there is always something to adjust, something to understand more clearly.

Perhaps what is changing now, albeit gradually, is access to the mechanisms that make that mindset actionable. The tools that once sat almost exclusively within the professional game such as video analysis, detailed feedback from experts, structured review, are becoming more widely available. Not perfectly, and not universally, but enough to begin shifting the landscape.

Which means the dividing line in amateur tennis may no longer sit purely between levels of ability, but between approaches to improvement. Between those who are simply playing more, and those who are, in a more deliberate sense, getting better. It is not always obvious at first. But given enough time, it tends to show.

Perhaps the more interesting shift, then, is not in how much tennis people are playing, but in how they are starting to understand it.

For a long time, the kind of feedback loop that defines the professional game — video, analysis, expert input — sat at a distance from most amateur players, available in theory but rarely in practice. Improvement was something you felt your way through, rather than something you could examine with any real clarity.

That gap is beginning to close.

It is now possible, in a much more direct way, to look at your own game as the best players do. To allow you to step outside it, to see patterns rather than just experience them, and, crucially, to have those patterns interpreted by people who have spent years operating at a higher level of the sport.

Not every session needs it. Not every player will seek it out.

But for those who do, the process starts to look a little different.