With so many great tennis courts locally in Hackney ( including London Fields, Hackney Downs and Victoria Park) we’ve discovered many of our clients love playing tennis and would like to improve their tennis fitness.
Plus, with 2 major tennis tournaments imminent in London this June and July – Queens and Wimbledon – we thought some of you might like some tips on how to improve your tennis fitness.
Although not an official LTA tennis trainer but a keen amateur player, head personal trainer Daigo, can use his knowledge of strength and agility conditioning to help you improve your tennis fitness. Whether it’s reducing your unforced error count; maximising your serve or forehand speed or simply improving your agility around the court, we’ll focus on different parts of your game that need improvements.
With personal training for tennis fitness goals, Daigo brings a variety of equipment to each workout, including those focusing on strength (barbells and dumbbells); explosiveness (medicine balls and battle ropes) and agility (speed ladders and hurdles).
Whether you’re taking one to one or group tennis lessons already or completely new to tennis fitness, we’ll design a programme around your weekly schedule.
Our Top 3 Tennis Fitness Tips
1. Train standing not sitting
One big problem of the gym is the temptation to exercise whilst seated at the machines. It simply fails to fully target your core – a key area of fitness in tennis, as guess what, you’re always standing when playing tennis!
As exercise machines limit your range of motion and control the movement, in line with our motto ‘escape the gym’, we prescribe 95% of your exercises whilst in a standing position. We also like to train you outdoors as this mimics the environment you’ll most likely be playing in.
2. Train multiple muscle groups and movements
In general most of our training focuses on training all your muscle groups rather than targeted isolation (unless there’s a specific rehab goal e.g. injured ankle or tennis specific power goal: increase serve speed). With every strength exercise we prescribe that strength needs to transfer to the court and your game.
As most of a tennis game takes your body through all three planes simultaneously we try and mimic this in your training, rather than focusing on training in the sagital (one) or bilateral (two) planes. An example of this is your gait throughout a tennis match: it’s said you’ll spend 85% of your time on one leg, using all 3 planes of motion!
3. Include elements of explosive training
If we feel you’re ready to incorporate explosive training into your programme this can really benefit your game, in terms of racquet speed and power. We use explosive training equipment such as medicine balls (power slams into the floor) and battle ropes (side whips into the floor) to get your body used to these explosive movements in a controlled manner.
FEEL LIKE A GYM ROBOT? 