Mondays are Workdays, Nose to the Grindstone – Shubert Blog

Written by: Staff on 8th November 2011

Mondays are Workdays, Nose to the Grindstone - Shubert Blog

A close-up of the tennis shoes of Spanish player Rafael Nadal during his individual match, of the Davis Cup semifinal Spain vs. France, against French Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at Los Califas bullring in Cordoba, southern Spain, 18 September 2011. Nadal won the match 6-0,6-2 and 6-4. EPA/JULIO MUNOZ |

I had a chance to train for a few hours today in Santa Barbara with my training buddies and coach Ben. I have to admit, I started the day sluggish, sleepy, not engaged, and I wasn’t happy about it. I think there’s been a lack of focus on my part about tennis lately and too much focus on women/food/money (I wonder how the top 100 guys handle this area). Started out practice slow, couldn’t get warmed up, joints hurting for no reason, and I think the only thing going for me today was the Sun poking out through the clouds, at least I got a tan. I sort of feel like a new inmate, unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the court area. I can’t wait to start feeling like a hardened criminal on the court again, I have the mental attitude down but right now the body and the muscle memory is lacking.

Mondays can set the tone for your work week, I have to continue on playing Top Gun later this week Friday so it’s really important for me to start the next 4 days of training off right. So, relying on years of discipline I stayed solid and tried to cut down on errors. Ended up playing too defensive and wasn’t hitting over my backhand, too many days on the road and not enough time drilling and training the muscle memory to just hit the blasted ball. I chipped and sliced my way through an entire set… I played a set against junior Brandon McClain, recent 18s finalist down in Palm Desert at the USTA Regional and Solinco teammate of mine. Luckily we were both off our games because I didn’t feel I was even competing for the first hour of practice/set play. It was the one area of today’s practice that I was upset at, moreso than any unforced errors I made. I can’t remember hitting a winner the entire set either. The back and forth affair went on for an hour and a half and at the end I stood at 6-5, at which point Brandon started feeling some pain in his elbow and tanked the last game. I have to admit I was a little pissed because here I was busting my ass for an hour and a half trying to pick up my level and try my best to put myself in situations that mirror the professional pressures and strains and my training partner across the net starts dropshot/lobbing me and dinking serves in. It’s like, all the work we just put in the past hour and a half, culminates to a waste of time because the most critical moment of the set was avoided. We didn’t have the chance to put ourselves in the most pressurized situation and thus make ourselves better because of the tanking. Sigh, tomorrow is a new day.

For the most part, I got a good physical workout. After the set, we set up a rope above the net to work on height and depth. We put one guy in the ad corner and move his partner around side to side, working on little position steps while the dude who’s running gets a solid workout chasing down every ball and working on high/heavy over the rope. I didn’t keep track of how many balls I chased in a row, but Ben said it was something like 60 in a row, but after that I felt a lot better about my game because I didn’t slice a single backhand and was able to chase down everything while staying on balance. Shoulder is a bit sore from serving, but some rolling out, some ibuprofen, and a good night sleep will definitely get me back to banging ball solidly tomorrow.

Trying to train hard and get back to beast mode,

Shubert

Topics: Brandon McClain, Thomas Shubert

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