We love tennis here at Max Power. And we love training tennis players – from top-level juniors to college athletes to recreational players.
Most people probably think of tennis as a skill-based sport, like golf. You go out, you hit a bunch of balls, you (hopefully) get better. If you want to improve your game, you hire a tennis pro, right?
You wouldn’t think of strength training as an essential part of a tennis player’s toolbox. But tennis is a power sport – just like lacrosse and volleyball.
For serious tennis players – the juniors who want to play in college or beyond and the weekend warriors who travel to USTA amateur tournaments – increasing their strength can improve their game.
Things to Consider if You’re a Tennis Player
1. Protect your hips, knees and ankles
Tennis is all about rotation. That’s a lot of stress on your legs and core. We help our tennis athletes strengthen their stabilizer muscles, tendons and ligaments to protect the joints in their lower half.
2. Bring sexy back
What we’ve found is that tennis players tend to be more developed in the anterior (front) halves of their body. Posterior development is critical to creating total body balance – especially the glutes and hamstrings. Developing the posterior chain is crucial to creating total body balance in any athlete. We also focus on building the lower, mid and upper back in our tennis players.
3. Shoulder the workload
Strong legs keep you running and a strong core generates torque and power, but you can’t play tennis if you’ve got a bum shoulder. When strength training, a good deal of emphasis should be placed on protecting the shoulder muscles, specifically the 3 muscles of the rotator cuff.
4. Power up
Training compound movements like squats or even Olympic lifts can help you increase your speed for those short bursts around the court. We also work with our tennis players on footwork, agility drills for changing direction, and coordination of the upper and lower body.
