Here are 5 goals you can work on while you warm-up:
1. Raise the body temperature and general activation of the body.
Your body will be exposed to much more demanding situations in a tennis
game compared to your normal state when sitting or walking.
And if the muscles are not warmed up, they are not very flexible. You
can quickly strain a tendon with a quick movement that happens when you
sprint for the ball or suddenly have to stop.
Your body (parts) also needs to move faster and you're actually “waking”
your body in order to perform at higher levels of difficulty than
usual.
2. You're getting the feel for hitting the ball with the whole kinetic chain.
If you warm up on mini court and basically not move and just hit the ball with the arm, 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 it's 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 controlled manner while the whole body moves in coordination.
3. Raising the focus and alert level of the brain.
Your brain did not have to coordinate the whole body in demanding situations for the most part of your day.
It needs to get warmed up for tennis. Your brain also did not perform
extremely challenging calculations of the trajectory of the ball in very
short time frames and it needs to warm up for that too.
If it doesn't warm up well, it will make errors in calculations and you'll make mistakes.
4. Establishing good timing and contact point.
Your brain didn't need to time your movements with small moving objects
coming towards you with high speed before you stepped on the tennis
court. Now it has to do that.
And mini tennis is the perfect middle step to perform before you go back
to the baseline and into real situations. Your eyes also didn't need to
track very accurately small moving objects and once you rally from the
baseline, they'll have to.
So it's important to really see the ball well, warm up the tracking of
the ball and finding ideal contact point by being aware how close to the
sweet spot you hit the ball.
5. Getting 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.
This gives you different feel and you have to adjust to those conditions
very quickly. Again the mini tennis warm up helps you do that.
In summary, if you warm up properly on mini court, you'll warm up all
the “systems” needed for the real game and you'll make a much smoother
transition from not so demanding situations before you stepped on the
court to much more demanding situations that happen in the real game of
tennis.
A good warm up lowers the chances of hurting yourself, enables you to
immediately start hitting the ball well from the baseline and therefore
increases your satisfaction and enjoyment of the game and allows you to
get a quick head start in a match because your opponent most likely did
not warm up well.
It's now up to you to decide on which side of the equation you want to be...
Warm-up and play to your best