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  • Ace your way to success with Harpers Fitness

    16-Jun-09


    No matter what time of year Tennis is a sport playable both indoors and outdoors.  Should you feel inspired to dust off your rackets and take up tennis why not get started with Harpers Fitness.  We offer fantastic training tips and advice that guarantee it will be game, set and match in your favour.

    Tennis is great for keeping fit as it is quick, fun and the constant sprinting around the court is fantastic for building your cardio vascular fitness. If you’re seeing visions of yourself playing at Wimbledon in years to come, then your first port of call should be Harpers Fitness centre.

    Harpers fitness has developed a tennis performance programme which is certain to transform all aspiring tennis players into shape. The programme is designed to provide the skills and fitness that are needed to enjoy a good game of tennis. The programme will also provide useful in-depth tips on how to improve throughout the programme.

    David Coulthard, Harpers Fitness regional health and fitness manager offers six top tips for those looking to improve the various aspects of their game.

    AGILITY: The average tennis player will move on average 3 metres per shot and 8-12 metres per point. Not very far, however quickness and the ability to rapidly change direction is essential. Therefore multi-planar and multi-directional exercises are a must. Multi-directional lunges and clock squats will help with your body dealing with this type of environment.

    BALANCE: When serving you leave the ground and are still required to produce accurate powerful movements, moving whilst accurately connecting with the ball all require awesome balance. Introduce single leg work, BOSU’s, Swiss Balls, stability disc’s etc these will all develop your balance. Complete upper body exercises to really stress the body. Upper body work will elevate your centre of gravity forcing you to work harder to maintain you balance.

    CORE STRENGTH: In the serve you leave the ground, meaning that you core has to be able to produce the power to hit the ball with venom, every shot in a rally requires you to generate power through rotational movements through your core. If you have a weak or imbalanced core you will develop an over use injury or you won’t be able to hit the ball over the net! You must train the core with rotational movements, wood chops use a cable or medicine ball (I prefer medicine ball as it will force you off balance more than cables.

    KEY MUSCLES: These have to be the pectorals and shoulders; you only have to look at Rafael Nadal to see this. These muscles are the key muscles when the body looks to transfer power through the core and into the arms and along to the racket. So exercises like medicine chest throws, med ball slams onto the floor and press-up claps are best.

    TENNIS ELBOW: It is essential to effectively train frequently used muscles i.e. wrist flexors and extensors (complete wrist extensions and flexions) but also work you rotator cuffs to bring about good shoulder stabilisation, internal and external rotations with each shoulder. To do this it is best to use a cable machine. Failure to complete muscular balance work like this will lead to tennis elbow, should the game be played on a regular basis.

    CV FITNESS: the tennis game is mostly anaerobic therefore it’s played at speed with very little recovery. A typical rally could last between 6-10seconds with about 25seconds recovery between games, up to 90 seconds if you have to change end. This recovery does no give you long. Intense intervals will help you adapt to this, use arm bikes, treadmills and steppers. I suggest a work rest ratio of either 1:1 or 1:3. So either 30 seconds hard work to 30 seconds rest or 30 seconds very hard work to 90 seconds rest.