Tennis Drills for Beginners

The four basic skills in tennis are the groundstrokes (forehand and backhand), the serve, the return, and the volley, with footwork running underneath all of them as the skill that gets you to the ball in time. Learn those in order and you have the whole foundation of the game. A beginner who can rally a forehand and backhand, get a serve in, block a return, and punch a volley can already play a real point.

Here is the order this page follows, and why it works for someone brand new:

• Racquet and ball control. Before any stroke, you need to feel the ball on the strings and meet it out in front. This comes first for everyone.
• Forehand. The stroke you will hit most, and the easiest to groove because you swing across your stronger side.
• Backhand. The side beginners avoid, which is exactly why it gets practiced early here, before the habit of running around it sets.
• Serve and return. The two shots that start every point. The serve is the only shot you fully control, so a repeatable one is worth a lot.
• Volley. The shot at the net. It is the quickest stroke for a beginner to feel good at, because there is no big swing to time.
• Footwork. The split step and the recovery to the middle, the two habits that get you to the next ball on time and balanced.

You do not have to be perfect at one before touching the next. Spend most of your time where you feel least steady, and let the readiness marker on each drill tell you when a stroke holds up. For the deeper, all-levels version of every skill below, including the spin and tactics a beginner skips, the complete tennis drills library organizes the same six areas from first lesson to competitive play.

Before a single stroke, get comfortable with the ball on your strings. A new player who can control the racquet face and meet the ball out in front learns every stroke faster, because the contact is no longer a surprise. These three drills ask for almost nothing: a racquet, a ball, and a few square feet of court. They build the feel that everything else stands on, and they are the ones to repeat on your own between lessons.

Once you can bounce the ball on the strings twenty times and keep a soft mini rally alive inside the service boxes, the racquet feels like part of your arm. That is the green light to add a real swing.

The forehand is where almost every beginner starts swinging, and for good reason. You hit it across your stronger side, the motion feels natural, and it is the stroke you will use most. These drills take you from a gentle hand feed to a cooperative crosscourt rally, then to landing the ball deep. Aim crosscourt while you learn. The diagonal gives you the most court and the lowest part of the net.

A forehand you can rally six times crosscourt and land past the service line is a forehand you can play a point with. The down-the-line shot, the inside-out forehand, and topspin for attack all come later, and the tennis drills library covers each of them once your rally forehand is steady.

New players dodge the backhand. They shuffle around it to hit a forehand, and a hole opens up on court that a real opponent will find every time. Grooving the backhand early stops that habit before it sets. Learn it with two hands first. The second hand adds stability and makes the racquet face much easier to control. These drills move from a hand feed to a shadow-and-feed rhythm to a cooperative crosscourt rally.

Five backhands in a row crosscourt means the side you used to avoid now holds up in a rally. That is real progress, and it is worth more than another hour of forehands. The slice, the one-hander, and the defensive backhand are all there in the full library when you want them.

The serve and the return start every point, and they pull in opposite directions for a beginner. The serve is the only shot nobody can rush you on. A calm, repeatable one is a real weapon. The return is the hardest shot to control, because the ball is coming at you with pace. The drills below build the serve from the toss up, and they keep the return simple: split, block, and get it back deep.

Get half your serves into the box and half your returns back in play and you can hold a real game together. Spin serves, spot serving, and the serve-plus-one pattern are next, and they live in the complete drills library when your basic serve and return are landing.

The volley is the happy surprise of a first tennis lesson. There is no full swing to time, so most beginners feel good at it within minutes, and it builds confidence fast. The trick is to punch, not swing. These two drills build the out-front contact point and the short, firm punch, starting from a catch so you feel exactly where the ball should meet the racquet.

A volley you can punch back over the net most of the time is enough to start finishing points at the net. The approach shot, the overhead, and the drop volley are the next layer, and the full library walks through each once your basic volley is reliable.

Good footwork is what holds a clean stroke together once the ball is moving. A perfect swing taken from the wrong spot still produces a weak ball. Two habits matter most for a beginner: the split step that gets you moving in time, and the recovery to the middle that keeps you ready for the next shot. Both drills below build a habit, so run them often and they fade into reflex.

Split before every ball and recover to the center after every shot, and you stop arriving late. That single change makes every stroke you have just learned land cleaner, because you reach the ball balanced instead of stretched. For the conditioning and movement patterns behind these habits, the 5 R's of tennis movement (Ready, Read, React, Respond, Recover) get a full breakdown in our tennis drills library.

The drills you picked along the way are waiting right here, gathered into one beginner session you can carry onto the court. A sensible first lesson runs about an hour: a few minutes on racquet and ball control, then ten or fifteen on the stroke you most want to build, a short serve block, and a soft cooperative rally to finish. Download or print the plan and you walk on court with a clear order to follow, knowing exactly what to hit first.

What a beginner needs changes fast. The racquet-control drills that fill your first week sit idle by the third, and a coach running a starter clinic ends up reshuffling the plan for whichever stroke each player is stuck on. A folder of saved clips works until two or three beginners are spread across different strokes. Coaching a new group runs smoother when Striveon's drill library keeps each starter drill in one searchable place, tagged by stroke and stamped with whatever note you wrote on court, so building next week's session is a two-minute job and the contact-to-rally order holds as players grow.

Progress is easy to miss when you are new and improving in small steps, so the readiness markers on each drill double as a way to track it. A forehand rally that reaches six, seven serves in the box out of ten, a return that lands back deep more often than not. Recording those early stroke milestones for each player with Striveon's athlete development tracking shows a coach who has earned the deeper stroke work and who could use another week on the basics. Once a stroke here feels automatic, the full tennis drills library takes over with the depth and tactics a developing player starts to want.

The same beginner drill is coached a little differently depending on who is holding the racquet. Every drill above serves a child at a first clinic, an adult picking the sport up later in life, and an older beginner easing in for fitness and fun. The strokes are identical; the equipment, the pace, and the expectation shift with the player.

Tennis Drills for Adult Beginners

Starting tennis as an adult is a different job from learning it as a child. You did not grow up tracking a ball onto a racquet, so the timing has to be built on purpose. Your background is an advantage, though. You learn fast from a clear cue, you can practice alone against a wall, and you understand why a drill matters.

Many adult beginners arrive from squash, badminton, or pickleball with a wristy, flicky swing that gives shots no margin. The fix is the same for almost everyone. Drill a low-to-high swing path and a full shoulder turn on both sides with the hand-fed reps above, until the motion feels normal. Starting on a smaller court with an orange or green ball, which bounces lower and slower, gives an adult more time to build clean strokes before moving to a full court and a regular ball.

Tennis Drills for Seniors and Fitness Beginners

Older beginners and anyone playing for health get the most from the lower-impact drills above, with longer rests and a gentler pace. The mini rally in the service boxes, the hand-fed forehand and backhand, and the catch-then-volley progression all build real strokes without the sprinting that a full-court drill demands. A lower-compression ball (orange or green) on a shorter court keeps rallies going longer with less running, which is where the fun and the fitness both come from.

The health draw is real. A 25-year Danish population study of 8,577 people found tennis was linked to the largest life-expectancy gain of any sport measured, 9.7 years over a sedentary group(opens in new tab), an effect the researchers tied in part to its social, interactive nature. Keep the sessions short, sociable, and cooperative, and a senior beginner builds skills and stays moving at the same time.

Beginner Drills for Kids

Children learning tennis need the same strokes, but coached as play, with shorter reps and a lot more games than instruction. Equipment matters most here. USTA Net Generation pathway regulations match the ball and court to the child's age: a red foam ball on a 36-foot court for ages 5 to 7, an orange ball on a 60-foot court for ages 7 to 9, a green ball on a 78-foot court for ages 9 to 11(opens in new tab), then a regular yellow ball on a full court above age 11. The slower, lower-bouncing balls keep rallies alive so a child spends the lesson playing real points.

Structured beginner programmes such as the LTA's Tennis Xpress(opens in new tab) build a first set of strokes over a handful of weekly sessions, which is the steady, little-and-often rhythm a new player learns fastest from. For a full age-tailored session built around younger players, our tennis practice plan templates arrange these basics into timed 60- and 90-minute blocks for kids, adults, and groups.