How Iga Swiatek Practiced To Win The French Open #tennis

hey everyone so I had the opportunity of watching world number one and queen of clay oson in her first practice session on her way to winning the French Open title this year and in this video I'm really excited to share the whole session with you along with some of my thoughts and some tips that you can take away for your own tennis let's get into it so today was day one of the French Open and I had tickets to Philip chatre ronal garr's Center Court but as play wasn't due to start until midday I spent most of the morning roaming around the practice courts which if you've seen my videos before you'll know is my favorite place to be at Pro tournaments you get up close to the players and for me as a coach I absolutely love seeing the drills that they use and the way that the players and coaches interact some coaches get really involved in the sessions whilst others sit back and save their words for important moments this year I had the pleasure of watching quite a few players train such as the two smoothest Italian players fognini and Muti Paula Bosa mato analdi riina and briefly Carlos alcaras but the one I really wanted to see was eager as she had been dominating on clay for the last few years and I was really intrigued to see her practice as she's a player that I haven't seen much of live the great thing about the French Open is that you can see the players's practice schedule on the app so I headed over early to get a spot when she stepped onto Court you could visibly see that she was soaked in sweat she'd clearly just had a decent warmup in the gym in preparation for this session on the court with her was her coach Thomas wiktorowski former coach of Radwanska and the Polish Fed Cup team along with her sparring partner and later on in the session psychologist Daria abox eaga started the session hitting with her sparring partner in the service boxes before moving to playing left-handed forehand this was a nice way to create focus and develop the connection between brain body and ball and is especially good for double-handed backhand players like eager she did this for about 30 seconds before moving moving on to the classic bow TI drill where one player hits crosscourt whilst the other hits straight but she did this with an open racket face using the Continental grip after going straight for 30 seconds she changed to go crosscourt these exercises all seem to be a part of a well oiled routine spending just 30 seconds on each one next up Thomas jumped in with a variation of the drill where eager was to change Direction with a slice when the time was right open racket face work is great for developing touch and feel but it was interesting to see eager using it in this [Music] way next up was a minute or so of volley to groundstroke before heading back to the Baseline to groove her groundstrokes up and down the the [Music] middle she did this for about 5 minutes so far you'll notice that there's nothing out of the ordinary with the drills that she's doing with her coach but pay attention to her footwork the only time she's still is when she strikes the ball otherwise she's always bouncing on her toes this is something that's striking when you watch eagle play as her footwork is phenomenal especially on the CL because of the touch exercises at the start she already has a good feel for the ball and because of her physical warm up in the gym she's already ripping it just 8 to 10 minutes into her session at this point she changed ends with her sparring partner players tend to change ends during practice just like they would in a match so that they can adapt to the wind and the light conditions you can see here at the change of ends is the perfect opportunity for Thomas her coach to give us some tips Without Really hearing him or speaking polish I wouldn't like to make assumption about what he's saying but you can clearly see him here talking about the flight of eager's forehand naturally on Clay having more shape to your shop more Arc can be really beneficial as it kicks out much higher on this surface one thing that I found interesting but makes a lot of sense is that eager went back onto court and practiced crosscourt backand now the reason I found this interesting is pretty much every single player and Coach that I watch in practice goes into Crosscut Four Hands first but it actually makes a lot more sense to start with Crosscut CAU back hands as you'll notice that players when they go up and down the middle tend to pretty much hit only four hands even eager so prioritizing the backhand next is very important she's also going to find herself in that crosscourt backhand battle a lot in her next few matches and so after this drill still practicing crosscourt she was then running around and hitting Inside Out For Hands which logically is what eager's trying to find in those crosscourt battles she was clearly practicing all of the shots that she's planning on using to win the tournament [Music] next up Crosscut Four Hands followed by more volleys but this time 30 seconds of them were done with one arm behind the back this is another good way to develop a better brain body and ball connection and afterwards you really appreciate your off hand when you bring it back into action [Music] [Applause] a few overheads were next and then they played a few points starting with a loopy feed and a drive volley this is another shot that's going to come in useful on the clay as players tend to hit that ball with much more height over the net eager's going to have more opportunities to step in and take the ball out of the air [Music] [Music] Thomas then jumped in again for some Drive volley feeds and then a drill working on eager's up and back movement he started with hand feeds then moved onto racket [Music] feeds it's a really important movement pattern for the clay as your opponent has more opportunity to push you back with those High bounces but for me as a coach it was really interesting to see that eager's coach wasn't necess necessarily feeding the ball in the most realistic way he was simply feeding from around the service line with no Top Spin but I guess here the key was just to give eager a few repetitions to feel comfortable and in her groove before match day [Music] tomorrow eager then played some more live Bard drill focusing on targeting her opponent's backand before hitting some serves to wrap up the session I would imagine that ego would have had another practice session later on that day focus more around Point play as she wasn't due to play her first round until the next day [Music] [Music] after the practice I headed to my seats on Philip chatrier to watch the end of Naomi Osaka's win against kolene Garcia and then Carlos alcaras make light work of JJ wolf as you can imagine I found watching eager's practice session super fascinating and I hope that you found it as interesting and valuable as I did if so let me know which other players you'd like to see and I look forward to seeing you in my next video take care