Hi Folks it’s Tom Antion here with another trick to keep our extra large bodies cool. It was 99 degrees here in Virginia Beach over the weekend with my car reading 105 when I got in to it. Just too hot for me to get in a good practice session.

I called my local club and I guess everyone else was at the beach because they had plenty of courts open mid day. I planned to simply take my ball machine and practice but Carolyn the lady that works there is always putting people together to hit so I left my ball machine in the car and hit with a nice guy named Narain.

This guy weighs less than half my weight and is probably 15 years younger than me. He’s a good hitter too, so I knew I’d be doing some serious running as we practiced groundstroke points for nearly two hours.

Here’s the trick.

Scope out carefully your local indoor courts. What you want to know is the best places where the usually lame A/C. units blow cold air on the indoor courts during the summer.  I picked the side of the court that had the best A/C and found out the exact places on the court where the bulk of the cold air hit.

When picking up a ball or waiting for Narain to do so, (without making it too obvious), I would go to the spot on the back court where the cold air was hitting and breath very deeply. Using this technique I made it easily through a two hour pretty much continuous groundstroke practice session.

Do whatever it takes to give the best performance you can muster.