Recovery between points is a skill nobody coaches

Roughly seventy per cent of a tennis match is not play, and almost no training addresses what happens in that time.

Add up the actual ball in play time across a three set match and you get a startlingly small number, usually well under a third of the elapsed clock. The rest is walking, towelling, bouncing a ball, standing at the back fence with your back to the court. That interval is where a player either recovers or does not, and it is trained about as seriously as the coin toss.

Physiologically the window is the whole ball game. Tennis is a repeated sprint sport, and performance in repeated sprints depends far more on how fast you clear the previous effort than on your ceiling in any single one. A player with modest peak fitness who returns to a low heart rate in twenty seconds will outlast a fitter player who does not, and the second player will be told they need more running.

What actually shifts it is unglamorous. Breathing through the nose rather than gasping. Keeping the trunk upright rather than folding over the racket, which feels natural and is close to the worst thing you can do for getting air in. A fixed routine so that the interval is the same length every time and the body learns when the next effort is coming. None of that requires equipment and all of it requires somebody to decide it is worth attention.

The mental half is tangled with the physical half in a way I find hard to separate. A player replaying the previous point is also a player breathing shallowly and moving fast, so the physiological and psychological recoveries fail together. The remedy is the same either way, which is a ritual that occupies the mind with something procedural.

I have watched a lot of junior training and I have almost never seen a coach intervene in the twenty seconds after a point. They coach the shot, then wait for the next shot, and the most trainable part of the match goes by unremarked.

Somebody should film a match with the camera on the towel rather than the ball.

You would learn more.