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TennisOne Lessons Simple Suggestions for Better Tennis after the Age of 40 Daryl Fisher Are you over 40 and find that tennis causes more injuries than it did when you were younger? Do you wish that you could compete better with players half your age? What follows are some simple suggestions for injury prevention and shot selection as we age. The Obvious and the Not So Obvious
To get the obvious out of the way, it is not easy getting older, but that does not mean that you have to surrender immediately and completely to the forces of nature. Along these lines it is likely unsurprising that such things as getting fitter, eating better, doing yoga, and playing on softer surfaces will help. For most health and fitness related topics there are hundreds of articles, books, and videos, so finding additional information should not be a problem for you. Less obvious is that most of the sources of information on the topic of health and fitness appear to be primarily concerned with whether you exercise at all rather than on being concerned with age related exercise differences. A specific and crucial difference is that we do not always recover as quickly from exercise as we did when we were younger. (If that was the case, Andre Agassi would probably still be playing on the tour.) This fact has subtle but important athletic consequences, primarily from the perspective of reducing the likelihood of injury. One of the answers to increasing our resistance to injuries is to get fitter, and while getting fitter does help with preventing injuries, it is perhaps slightly ironic that in order to get fitter we must exercise, the exact thing from which we no longer recover as quickly. Because of this irony it is incomplete to just suggest getting fitter. We must also adjust how we get fit to accommodate our changing ability to recover. Ideas on How to Change To help address the challenge of a changing ability to recover, it has been my experience that consistent health and fitness efforts are helpful and practical. Consistent efforts, even if small ones, can add up to big differences. To further promote my suggestion of small but consistent efforts, it has been my observation that many people occasionally avoid making health and fitness efforts because they perceive them as major chores or hassles as opposed to enjoyable parts of their daily lives. Perhaps the people I am observing just need to play more tennis! “Just 5 more minutes” might be a chore on a stationary exercise machine, but “5 more minutes” of tennis is one of the few things I am generally happy to do.
The suggestion with regard to consistency above is generally true, but a perhaps more useful insight for those over 40 is to avoid misunderstanding “consistency” to mean that you should attempt the “mind over matter” school of thought and push through your matches and workouts for the sake of consistency. A friend of mine, Chuck, ran at least 5 miles per day for over 15 years no matter how he felt (unless he was very sick), and, on one hand, credit to his tenacity, he is a strong willed man, but the bad news was that he did severe damage to his knees as a result. To avoid doing serious damage to yourself in your health and fitness efforts, I highly encourage you to “listen to your body.” If you feel that exercise is breaking your body down and that you need to reduce your workouts or take some time off, perhaps you should do just that. Rather than a break from exercise altogether, however, perhaps you could instead try different and lower impact types of exercise. This concept is often put into the category of “active rest.” Walking, riding a bicycle, swimming, push ups, and pull ups are generally fine examples of lower impact exercise that will still keep you moving when you are not on the tennis court. “Listening to your body” will help you understand what exercises you are able to safely do at any given time. Cultivate ease Cultivating ease means intentionally developing more smoothness and gracefulness to your movement and your strokes. Playing with greater ease and smoothness is difficult to describe and talk about, but many of us know it when we see it when watching someone like Roger Federer play tennis. It is not to suggest a complete and total release of all muscular tension to the point that you are like a wet noodle, but it is to suggest that you make strokes that do not require a sense of strain. It is a bit like many day-to-day movements in the sense that effort occurs but is not felt.
If your strokes feel like an effort, something is with certainty wrong. One thing that could be wrong is that your technique could be incorrect making it difficult for you to efficiently handle or generate power, thereby leading to excess tension in order to overcome the inefficiency. Alternatively, even if your technique is perfect, you could still be muscling shots. This is subtle but extremely common. Imagine doing bicep curls with the weight of a tennis racquet. For most of us this is a very easy motion. We can, however, make it into a strain that we feel through our arms and hands. Behaving like an actor, we can pretend that lifting a tennis racquet is an incredible strain by having some muscles work against others. In the same way that you can walk with grace and ease, you can also walk stiffly. If you feel a strain when you are hitting a tennis ball with good technique, then you are making unnecessary strain in exactly this way. Any of the sources of tension can be the potential cause of injuries and of premature fatigue at the very least. Getting rid of excess tension is far from an easy task, but for the most part it is a function of realizing that it is important enough to become aware of it. For more information related to playing in a relaxed way, I would like to suggest reading my other TennisOne.com articles on this topic:
Practical Ideas for Beating People That Are Half Our Age So now on to very practical ideas and the question, “How does someone over 40 years old compete better against younger players?” (I can imagine an older person calling a kid a “whippersnapper,” and given the way tennis seems to be played by those of the younger generation this word seems appropriate in a way different from its actual meaning.) I have had a number of chances to ask myself that question, and a few of my experiments have been successful. First, I would like to suggest using less topspin. To hit hard and to hit a lot of topspin requires a fair amount of energy and physical effort. Decades ago I had energy to burn and was glad to trade some of it for the added margin of error gained from additional topspin, but, as I have aged, I find that I do not always care to make the same level of effort.
Additionally, at least among the young male category, most of the opponents that are half my age or less have grown up hitting against topspin and pace, and as a result they are very comfortable playing against it. Not only are such players often less comfortable playing against flatter shots, they are perhaps even more uncomfortable playing against underspin. One of the reasons that younger players are uncomfortable playing against underspin is that they are unaccustomed to it. Many younger players have become accustomed to a faster game where they swing quickly against a shot that is coming at them quickly. To hit shots against a player that is accustomed to such play helps their comfort level and ability to win, not yours. It is often confusing and troublesome for players that are accustomed to playing against topspin and pace to have to generate their own. A student of mine that played number one for her high school team, in fact, started every match with underspin shots to see if they made her opponents uncomfortable. Underspin was surprisingly effective against some very skilled players. And I will never forget a hard hitting 18 year old yelling at an underspinning friend of mine, Mark, to “hit the ball!” Of course my friend used more underspin than ever and proceeded to win the match. There are numerous reasons to further encourage underspin. It can be hit with a short backswing, and this generally allows for better timing and better disguise. It is also a physically easy shot to hit. It requires less in the way of precise footwork to get the ball into a comfortable strike zone, and in this way requires less running. Frankly, underspin wins every contest other than the ability to hit with pace, and as suggested above, in a competitive match pace might benefit the younger and faster. To add to all of that, a slower ball through the air, in fact, might allow more time to recover. Conclusion Perhaps there is some irony in the fact that I am offering some simple suggestions for playing better tennis after the age of 40 because right now I am hobbled with a pulled lower back muscle injury. I mentioned my injury to a tennis veteran named Claude when he asked me how I was doing and he replied, “Welcome to getting older!” On that note, I would like make clear that I am not holding myself out as having perfected the art of getting older. And as a precautionary note, let me add, please consult your doctor before engaging in any exercise program. For those of you that have thought that I am doing some things well in terms of health and fitness and should write an article about it, thank you, but I feel that it is more accurate to say that I am just still eager to learn. Perhaps you will be kind enough to help me by sending your own experiences and insights via email to tennisone. Your comments are welcome. Let us know what you think about Daryl Fisher's article by emailing us here at TennisOne. |
