Fitness

Strength Training for Tennis Players

by Stefan Lundgren

Introduction

Whether your sport is the marathon, weight-lifting or tennis, strength training should be an important part of any training regimen. Depending on your goals, there are many different ways to train and increase your strength.

For the marathon runner, it is important that the length of their strides be maintained after hours of running. For the weight-lifter it is important to be able to deliver a maximum amount of power work for a few seconds. In both cases, the athlete is working hard but there are very different sets of muscle fibers and energy systems being activated by these different athletes. In the game of tennis, you need to be fit after hours of playing but you also need to be able to deliver a maximum amount of work for a few seconds. These facts are telling us that as a tennis player, you need to have an all-round and varied strength training program.

What Makes Muscles Grow?

We've all heard the cliche "use it or lose it," but what does it really mean? Muscles depend on muscle activity and they adapt to your requirements. What happens during strength-training is that the muscle fibers are being worn out. This sounds more frightening than it is. Your ability to renew your muscle fibers is remarkable and with the help of proper nutrition, enough rest, and regular and proper training, the muscles will be renewed and become even stronger and bigger than before. The wearing-out phase is what makes your muscles ache and makes them feel stiff. Even the most well conditioned tennis player will feel aching and stiffness, so you should not worry about it. The fact is, if you don't feel this way, then your training regimen is too easy. As your fitness improves, your body will adapt to the training more quickly and the stiffness and the aches will become less pronounced.

Strength Training for Children and Youth

It is acceptable to allow children and youth to participate in strength training regimens. However, it's important to stress that this be an all-around strength training program, which means that the whole body is being developed and the program is in harmony with the child's physical progress.

For children and young juniors, it's important that the body be used as the weight and that weights and dumbbells not be used. It's especially important to avoid putting more pressure than the weight of the body when training sensitive parts like the spine, joints and growth-zones. It's more important to increase the number of repetitions than to increase the pressure. Therefore, you have to avoid training with weights until the youngster is close to full-grown (16-18) and in this stage, the use of weights can slowly increase.

How to Plan Strength Training

When reading about strength training, you often see the words "set" and "reps" used in conjunction. "Set" means that you are performing one drill a certain number of times without rest.

"Reps" refers to the amount of time you are performing a drill without any rest. For example: 3 x 15, 3 refers to the sets and 15 refers to the reps, so you are doing 3 sets of 15. As a tennis player it is important to vary the strength training, especially the reps. When you are training with a low amount of reps, you will develop muscles that can perform a short and heavy workout, and when you are training with a high number of reps, you will develop muscles that can work for a long time. As a tennis player, you need both types of muscles, and therefore you have to train between 2-5 sets and 6-25 reps. Regarding drills, it is beneficial to use as many different ones as possible because even if you believe that many of these drills are similar, they will never train the muscle in the same way. Therefore, it's important that you try to alternate the drills in order to make sure that you are training and using all of your muscles. How often should you train? This is, of course, a matter of how much time and will-power you have, but as a rule of thumb, a trained muscle needs 48 hours of rest before training should resume. When you are training, you are wearing out the muscle fibers. It takes 24 hours for the muscles to be rebuilt and another 24 hours to add new muscle fibers. It is better to train less then more because if you train too often, the training will do more damage than good.

How to Plan a Training Session

A training session should always begin with a good warm-up. Get the blood circulation going with the help of running, bicycling, using the step-machine, etc. Continue with this until you feel warm and then stretch.

After warming-up, you can start your strength training. A good way to conduct your training is to train one muscle group at time. Strength training should consist of 8-12 drills and has to last approximately one hour. Try to keep a high tempo going and avoid all talk between drills so that concentration is maintained, as concentration is a very important part of training. Try to focus on the muscle that you are training. End the training with a few minutes on the bike to loosen up the body and to increase the circulation of the blood so that it can move the slag products from the muscles. Do not forget to stretch in order to maintain flexibility and to avoid the worst types of training pain.

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