The switch to clay courts requires the biggest adjustments to a player's game in the course of a season, but it is nowhere near as hard as it used to be to do.
Those new to the game may not remember the days of extremes between the clay-court specialists, who relied on patience and movement at the back of the court, to the serve-and-volley experts on grass courts.
The former world number one Marcelo Rios famously said during Wimbledon 1997 that grass was for "cows and soccer". He only played at SW19 three times in his 10-year career.
He was not alone. Clay-court specialists would regularly go deep in the French Open, and then give Wimbledon a miss.
Players of that standing doing the same now is almost unimaginable, but that is in part due to the surfaces changing.
Wimbledon is much slower than it ever used to be, meaning that serve-and-volley is a rare tactic and hard courts have gone the same way too.
The Australian Open this year was played on very slow courts making the remarkable six-hour final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal possible.
Both those great players would have found it far more difficult to win their Grand Slams on all surfaces on the courts of 20 years ago.
That is not to diminish all they have achieved, but it is a sign that tennis has evolved over recent years.
It used not be as simple as simply playing a couple of matches, adapting your foot movement and getting used to the bounce it took a wholesale change of approach to your game to conquer a new surface.
That's not to say that the changes to the courts are not, on the whole, for the better. I believe they are they certainly provide a better show for the spectator.
They also encourage players to follow the calendar, rather than limit their activities to one or two favoured surfaces.
But tennis must also be careful not to go too far the other way. Hard courts, clay and grass should all still pose their own unique challenges. Winning Roland Garros and Wimbledon in the same year, for instance, should be a very rare occurrence.
It would be nice, too, to see another week of grass court tennis on the calendar a four-week season comes and goes all too quickly.
If I could tweak any surface, though, it would be the hard courts. They have slowed dramatically in recent times, even at Grand Slams. The men with the most power and strength on service games should still have opportunities to exploit it.
Funnily enough, the different courts have never really affected women's tennis in the same way.
The cream has always risen to the top and the best players on one surface are typically the best on all the others at the same time.
Perhaps the difference in the power of the men's game and the power of the women's would explain that, perhaps it is a reflection depth of the talent in the two fields and maybe it is a combination of the two.
