The great tennis professionals have mastered the art of quickness, endurance, and power due to the single most important aspect of their game – balance. That attribute, which helps prevent injury and allows other aspects of their game to excel, is the key to success because it underlies all movements. Balance controls coordination, the center of gravity, body angles, and any unstable equilibrium encountered on the court.
Although not everyone can be as quick as Coco Gauff, you can still become a complete athlete by training like the best. So, what tennis-specific conditioning program should you follow to push your tennis game to the next level?
Experts contend that it’s vital to train movements, not muscles. The brain does not recognize individual muscles but instead patterns of movements. Performance and function result from a series of integrated and coordinated movements. Therefore, movements should be trained as opposed to training isolated muscles and then hoping to transfer that strength to a functional movement. Balance and training movements are also necessary for success in soccer, basketball, golf, and gymnastics, but below are some ways you can adjust your tennis conditioning to improve your game.
Improving quickness and agility
Quickness and agility allow you to dart from side to side, change directions, and start and stop quickly. Research shows a five-second point can require as many as four directional changes. That’s about one change every second. Tennis-specific conditioning should include court drills combined with plyometric exercises – explosive movements designed to create power, such as squat jumps, side shuffles, and two-leg jumps – are a great way to enhance quickness and agility.
Improving endurance and stamina
Endurance training for tennis is slightly different from cardiovascular programs for health and weight loss. Those programs usually emphasize maintaining your target heart rate for at least 30 minutes. Tennis, however, requires stamina in repeated high-intensity efforts. A match may include 300 to 500 short bursts of anaerobic effort, each five to 10 seconds long. Tennis-specific conditioning provides aerobic endurance to play long matches and to recover quickly between points.
Experts also say that interval training is a great way to achieve both anaerobic and aerobic conditioning. Interval training is a cardiovascular/endurance exercise where you alternate between “intervals” of high-intensity and low-intensity exercise. For example, sprinting for 10 seconds followed by walking for 30 seconds and then repeating the sequence for 30-60 minutes.
Improving movement, not muscle
Traditional strength programs have failed to consider how much strength is enough and how much is necessary. Since strength is easier to develop than other qualities, athletes have spent more time improving strength rather than developing speed, timing, balance, and other skills that would put their strength to greater use in performance. Strength is not an end, but a means to an end. The key is the application of strength.
Instead of copying Olympic lifters (their only purpose is to gain as much strength as possible), tennis players need to concentrate on total body conditioning to achieve effective balance and coordination. An excellent exercise for tennis players to achieve balance is Pilates. The Pilates method of body conditioning restores the body’s natural balance and harmony. By focusing on abdominal and back muscles, individuals can improve their posture and help relieve the stress put on the lower back caused by poor flexibility in the hamstrings and weak abdominal muscles. Pilates also improves muscle flexibility joint mobility, adds strength without bulk, and aids in injury prevention. These all translate to tennis success.
Tennis-specific conditioning is important for all players, not just the pros. Working on balance and training movements instead of muscles guarantees greater success on the court.
