The opening grand slam of the season is a mere two days away and all the players have been flooding the courts here at Melbourne Park to get in some last-minute practice sessions with some of their biggest rivals.

Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray practiced together on Rod Laver Arena on Friday with their coaches, Toni Nadal and Francis Roig from Team Rafa, and Amelie Mauresmo from Team Murray, joining them on court while Great Britain team captain Leon Smith was watching from the stands.

Unlike the other majors, the Australian Open only allows media to watch the first 15 minutes of the practice sessions taking place in the arenas so I only caught Nadal and Murray hitting serves before they started playing a practice set.

Over on Margaret Court Arena, defending champion Novak Djokovic was hitting with Spanish lefty, and former semi-finalist Fernando Verdasco. Their session was quite different as it seems they were focusing more on volume, going through what felt like 100-shot rallies and endless crosscourt exchanges.

During a break, Djokovic and Verdasco shared a bench while the Serb’s coach, Boris Becker, appeared to be talking to them about his serve and his foot-positioning on serve.

It dawned on me just how exciting it must be for some of the players to have a hitting session with Djokovic as they could end up getting free coaching and hearing some incredible stories from a legend like Becker.

Verdasco got up to show the German his own foot positioning on serve before he and Djokovic resumed with their marathon rallies.

Ending one of those exchanges, Verdasco flicked a forehand winner with so much power that Djokovic jokingly told the Spaniard: “When you have biceps like that of course you can hit a forehand like that.”

I’m pretty sure Verdasco would trade those biceps for at least one of Djokovic’s slams.

Djokovic is probably the fittest player on tour and it’s hard to imagine there is any part of his training regime that gives him a hard time but the world No.1 on Friday revealed his least favourite portion of his pre-season preparations.

“I think it would be uphill sprints. I live in Monte Carlo so there’s a lot of hills. My coach tells me ‘you see that top of the hill, just wave when you get there’,” said Djokovic.

Sprinting up a mountain in Monaco? Sounds like fun to me.