7 ‘Off-Season’ Drills: Liam Broady’s Quest For ATP Top 50 #tennis

Hey, so I'm super excited to share this video with you as this week I got to get on court with Liam Brodie and David Sammel. Now, you probably know Liam Brodie. He's a British tennis player that's recently reached the top 100 players in the world and his coach, David, is one of the most reputable tennis coaches in the world. So it was a real privilege for me to get on court with them. And of course I filmed their session to share with you guys. So stay tuned as you'll hear David's perspective of the session, my perspective of the session, and you'll see Liam doing his off-season strength and conditioning followed by seven key drills that he's doing to help him to reach the top 50 in the world next year. Let's go. My name's David Sammel and I coach Liam Brodie and we've just been doing off-season training all this week and this will carry on for another three weeks. Off-season is a lot of fun but it's a very tough time for the players. They get very fatigued because a lot of the stuff that you're doing is based around physical. So even the on-court work, which you will see is around a lot of physical but still keeping a feel for the ball and actually still helping the tennis. And then of course they're gonna be doing a hell of a lot of stuff in the gym around it and strength work and core work and stabilizing work. And you basically create a foundation to grow through the year. And during the year you're basically maintaining but the gains are made in training blocks. And it's so important to have these training blocks to get real gains that you can then try sustaining throughout the year because it's very difficult to make massive gains when you're playing tournaments. So tournaments is really more about maintenance. The steps forward happen in training blocks. So as you heard David say, this time of the year is pretty intense for professional tennis players. What you're watching on the screen now is Liam's strength and conditioning session. This week he's had a session each day, most of them being in the gym. This one is more tennis specific, which is why we're on court. Liam's working through a few footwork patterns in particular, working on his lateral stability when pushed out into the corners. They were focusing on accelerating, decelerating and then loading that outside leg to produce explosive power before recovering. Although it was mainly a physical session, there was also quite a bit of technical work as well. And just like David said, this is a vital time of year to put that work in as it's much tougher to do during tournaments. As you saw Liam's S&C coach gradually progressed the exercises to become more and more realistic to what Liam would be doing on the match court. The first drill was Liam simply loading his outside leg. He then introduced a medicine ball to get Liam driving from the outside leg through the court and then finally added in the recovery. This session was just 30 minutes long as Liam was just about to have a pretty intense basket session with David. So what you will see in the video is that we did seven drills and basically the way it works is you do seven drills seven times over and each drill is done 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. So you do all seven and then in between you get a 90 second rest. Today we just did it five times because it's the end of the week and Liam was pretty fatigued but the rest of the week every day we'd done it seven times and then obviously still doing the off court training as well. So it's a pretty tough week. I suggest anybody who's doing this start with three times, two or three times and build up because it's very, very tough on the legs and also the coach feeding the ball can change the tempo and make it more or less difficult and you will have seen some varied feeds from me to give him different balls at different speeds and different heights. As you can see from these clips all of these exercises are pretty basic and you can do them yourselves whether you have a hitting partner feed to you or using a ball machine. But the key in this session in the off season is volume. David wants Liam to hit as many balls as possible and for Liam to build up his endurance so that he can maintain a high quality when he's in a fifth set battle. You can see how this session was built like a high intensity interval training workout very specific to a tennis match. 30 seconds work followed by 30 seconds rest is pretty much playing a point and then having a break before the next point. And that 90 second break after each set is like the changeover. I hope you're enjoying the video so far. If you are, hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this. Each exercise that was picked was picked by David and Liam tailored around his game and what he wants to get out of the session. You can pick any exercises to do if you wanted to have a go at this session but try to pick a combination of things that you want to get better at, i.e. your weaknesses but more importantly, throw in some exercises that are focused around your strengths as after all, these are the shots that are gonna win you tennis matches. After the physical work in the last five, 10 minutes Liam was keen to hit a few serves and then the coach for the next booking arrived so Liam passed for a hit. Let me know in the comments below if you can figure out which player was playing after Liam. A big thanks to David and Liam for inviting me onto court to watch their session. As a coach, it's always incredible to see what the best in the world are training like. David and I have some very exciting news in the pipeline which we'll share with you at a later date but in the meantime, head over and give him and Liam a follow over on Instagram to support their journey in 2024. Thanks as always for watching this video. I look forward to seeing you in the next one. Take care. Hey guys, I'm Liam Brodie. This is the Locker Room Power Book. It's something I've carried with me over the years and read many times through. There's some fantastic nuggets in there and I think it would be a fantastic Christmas present for any young up-and-coming players or older club players that are looking to improve their game.