The long rally is a myth you should stop training for

Most points end within four shots, and yet almost every practice session is built around the rare marathon exchange.

Go and watch two hours of professional tennis and try to count the rallies that pass nine shots. You won't need many fingers. Highlight packages are made of them, which is why everyone thinks that's what tennis is, but the great bulk of points are decided in the first four strokes: serve, return, serve plus one, return plus one. Then the point is either over or it has settled into something neutral.

Practice does not reflect this at all. The standard session is two players hitting cross-court for twenty minutes, then down the line for twenty minutes, then some serves at the end when everyone's tired and bored. It's rhythm work in a game that is decided by disruption.

The neglected shot in all of this is the third one. The serve plus one. You've hit a good wide serve, the return comes back short and central, and now you have the entire court and roughly a second to decide what to do with it. Most club players, and plenty of professionals under pressure, do the same thing every time, which is hit a big forehand into the open court and hope. It's a shot with a wide range of outcomes and no real practice behind it, because you can't rehearse it in a cross-court drill.

The fourth ball is worse. Return plus one, off a serve you barely handled, arriving on your weaker wing while you're still recovering position. That's a genuinely difficult shot and it decides an enormous number of return games, and I have almost never seen anyone drill it on purpose.

None of which means endurance is irrelevant. It obviously isn't, because a five-set match accumulates and the fourth-set version of you needs legs. But endurance in tennis is about repeating short violent efforts, not about sustaining a long one, and a session of twenty-shot rallies trains a physiological quality that only partly overlaps with what you need.

My suggestion, and it costs nothing: build practice in blocks of four. Serve, return, one more, one more, stop, reset, go again. It feels disjointed and slightly unsatisfying compared to a lovely long rhythm rally, and it maps almost exactly onto how points are actually lost and won.

The long rally is the part of tennis that looks best on television. It's not the part that decides the score, and confusing the two is how players spend years getting better at something they rarely have to do.