New Hall School’s Tennis Academy is pioneering the use of superspeed tennis training to aid its strength and conditioning programme for high-performance tennis players and is the first tennis training base to use this method in Europe.
Superspeed tennis training involves ‘overspeed training’ where the students play strokes without hitting a ball with specially-weighted rackets following carefully designed progressive protocols.
Students are already seeing significant increase in racket head speed and this is translating into more power on the court. Pupils have been able to generate an extra fifteen miles per hour to their swing speed after just two sessions with the training aids.
“I really noticed the difference in racket head speed after just a few sessions with the weighted rackets,” commented Mark Simpson-Crick, head of tennis at New Hall School. “All of our pupils have really enjoyed incorporating this into their training programme as it is a really fun way of generating more power on your shots. Our players are now accelerating their rackets faster into shots and hitting more powerful and heavier groundstrokes.”
Ellie Blackford, a tennis Scholar at New Hall School, has been using the specially-weighted rackets as part of her training programme . She said: “It increased how hard I can hit the ball and it helped me to generate racket head speed.”
Charles Longden, tennis strength and conditioning coach at New Hall School, uses the equipment and added: “Overspeed training is becoming increasingly popular in rotational sports having achieved notable success in golf. By regularly employing specifically-designed progressive training protocols, racket head speed will definitely increase by a significant margin and we are already seeing these sustained gains with students after only a few sessions.”
