How Long Does It Take To Get Good At Tennis? (Full Guide)

Tennis is a fun sport that works your physical and mental attributes. It’s really great! However, tennis isn’t like running, where you just start and do well. Tennis requires a great amount of dedicated training to get to the level where it is fun and physically and mentally hard.

This rises the question, how long does it take to get to that level? Well, stick with me and find out! I’ll also tell you how to get good at tennis faster, how often you should play to improve faster, the hardest part about tennis, and more. You’ll find real gold nuggets below, so read closely.

But first, how long does it take to get good at tennis!

Depending on how you define a good tennis player, it can take 6 months or 20 years. Assuming that a good tennis player can hold rallies and do all basic strokes, the realistic timeframe is 1 to 3 years. The amount of practice, fitness level, and adoption skills affect the time.

It is tough to tell how long it takes to get good at tennis because everyone has different definitions of good. Do you want to play relaxed tennis with your friends or reach the pro level? The time difference here is +10years for sure.

However, in this article, I’m going with the timeframe that a good tennis player can hold rallies well, do all the basic strokes such as forehand, backhand, serve, volley, and spin in addition to decent footwork. This often takes 1 to +3 years, depending on many factors.

Now, let’s take a look at how you can get to that level faster!

Related: 21 Incredible Tennis Tips: Improve To The Next Level

How to Get Good At Tennis Fast?

There are many things to do to fasten the time you will become good at tennis. The most obvious, of course, is practice!

1. Practice more

The famous saying goes that if you want to become a master at something, you need to practice it 10 000 hours. There is a huge gap between a good and master tennis player, so you don’t need to practice even the 10th to get good at the basics.

If your goal is to get decent in tennis in 1 year, that is 52 weeks. Let’s say that you play twice per week for 2 hours each time; that’s only 208 hours to get from zero to good. However, if you would play 3 times per week, 3 hours per session, that would be a huge increase to 468 hours which could get you there.

Look at the table below and see how many hours you would get a year, depending on your training days and time.

Training Days/Week	Training Time/Session	Total Training Time/Year
1 time	2 hours	104 hours
2 times	2 hours	208 hours
2 times	3 hours	312 hours
3 times	1 hour	156 hours
3 times	3 hours	468 hours
4 times	3 hours	624 hours
5 times	2 hours	520 hours
5 times	3 hours	780 hours

As you can see, the practice amount has huge differences in how much time you have to hone on your skill which will determine whether you will become good at tennis.

I believe that when you are close to the 500-hour line, you would be able to do most of the basic strokes and skills in tennis and that you could hold up good rallies for a longer time, making you a decent tennis player in the least.

2. Train with a better player than you are

If you want to improve in tennis, a significant thing to understand is that you need to train with better players than you are. If you play only with people that have a similar skill set to you, or people that don’t have as good skills as you, you really won’t improve.

Playing with people who have similar skills is more fun because you will win points and fare better; however, to improve, you need to endure failures and overcome them. This means you need to train with a friend that is better than you, hire a tennis coach, or ask a good stranger to train with you.

Read also: How Hard Is Tennis Compared To Other Sports?

3. Find your weaknesses

Another thing that isn’t as fun as playing only with a forehand to a similarly skilled player as you are. However, you need to find and train your weaknesses more instead of your strengths if you want to improve faster than usual.

This means to practice your serve, backhand, and volley instead of only forehand. You should quickly notice your weaknesses by thinking about your favorite thing in tennis and what is your least favorite.

Often, something that doesn’t feel so much fun is something you need to train on, and once you start training those things, you will be rewarded for your hard work.

4. Implement new strategies and equipment

You need to be smart in your training to maximize the improvement from each of your training sessions. This means coming up with new drills, implementing new training strategies, using tools such as tennis machines, and more!

I highly suggest that you invest in one tennis lesson even when they are rather expensive, at least in the long run. You could ask for tips, drill suggestions, your weaknesses, and more from just one lesson, which would give you the means to improve for the whole year!

However, if you don’t want group or private tennis lessons, you can use the powerful world of the internet! You can get dozens if not hundreds of drill suggestions from YouTube, for example, so I highly recommend that you spend a couple of hours looking at different channels and videos to see what you can do on the tennis court instead of hitting the ball with your forehand.

5. Improve your body fitness

One of my favorite things that I see many people ignore is the effect of your fitness level and body on tennis. Tennis isn’t the most fitness-focused sport, so don’t make the assumption you need to look like a greek god or goddess to play tennis.

However, your body strength, flexibility, body fat, and muscle mass will affect how strong, agile, and flexible you are on the court.

I highly recommend that you do some sort of strength training, whether that is at the gym or your home, and add some stretching to your daily life. You will quickly see that your tennis becomes easier as it used to be, and your everyday chores will feel that as well!

Learn more: Can Tennis Cause Back Pain? (Warning Included)

6. Watch good players train

Last but not least, visual learning is often ignored or underestimated. Of course, when you actually go out there and try things yourself, you will improve faster. However, by watching pros do the thing you want to improve on, you can get tips, compare yourself, and notice what you are perhaps doing wrong, which will prevent time wasted on the wrong things that could mess up your whole tennis performance.

You can watch live tennis, tennis on tv, tennis reruns on Youtube, Youtube lessons from advanced players, or buy a course that shows exactly what and how to train. The options are limitless, and you can pick the one best suited for you.

How Often Should I Play Tennis to Improve?

As you learned above, the amount you practice affects how fast you will improve. However, what is the optimal amount to improve well?

You can see weekly improvement if you train at least two times per week. However, three times or more is the optimal amount to really notice good improvement. Consistency is the key, and you should train at least close to two hours each session to get the benefits from each training.

If you want to improve well, you should rather train 3 times per week that lasts 2 hours each, rather than one 6-hour session.

How Hard Is It to Get Good At Tennis?

According to ESPN, tennis is the 7th hardest sport in the world, so it’s safe to say it’s no piece of cake getting good at it.

It’s hard to get good at tennis because it’s one of the world’s hardest sports. It requires tremendous skills in hand-eye coordination, agility, endurance, and power. Tennis has many skills that you need to master, such as serving, strokes, volley, and spin. Mentally, tennis is extremely tough as well.

There are more than 8000 sports in the world, and as tennis is considered the 7th hardest by ESPN and in the top 10 hardest in many other types of research, it belongs to the 1% of hardest sports in the world.

So yes, tennis is hard to learn, but you can learn anything with determination, time, and resourcefulness, including tennis!

What Is the Hardest Part About Tennis?

There are so many skills in tennis, such as endurance, agility, strength, hand-eye coordination, flexibility, and all the strokes, serves, and volleys, without forgetting the mental side of the sport. This raises the question, what is the hardest part about tennis?

The hardest part about tennis is hand-eye coordination. This means how your hands and eyes work together, which is the most important and hardest part in tennis because you need to accurately decide how you will act and where you will strike in less than a second in every shot, excluding the serve.

What Is the Hardest Racket Sport In the World?

There are dozens of racket sports, and the most popular ones are tennis, cricket, table tennis, badminton, padel, pickleball, and squash. All of them are fun, but which one is the hardest racket sport?

Tennis is the hardest racket sport in the world and one of the hardest sports altogether. Tennis is hard to learn and even harder to reach to the pro levels because of the versatility of the skills needed. However, badminton isn’t far behind tennis being the fastest sport in the world.