Why Tennis Players Need Strength Training

What I’ve noticed as a performance coach and personal trainer is clear as day: tennis players need strength training. I’m here to promote the idea of why tennis players need strength training by breaking down the why, the how, and the when. That doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced tennis athletes are not hard workers in the weight room. Working with tennis athletes of all ages and level of talent, I’ve noticed a trend. Coaches and parents push the idea that strength training in going to negatively affect their son’s or daughter’s tennis performance.

TL;DR: Tennis strength training is important for long term development, reducing the risk of injury, and part of a long-term development model if you know how to program exercises.

Being uneducated or unexperienced in a field that you claim to know the most of because your son or daughter is in a certain sport can be pretty obvious. That would be the equivalent of going to a surgeon who’s spent years of schooling, practice, and successful operations that you want to do it your way, not what the doctor discussed how the procedure would occur. It just doesn’t make sense.

Tennis Players Need Strength Training

There’s a notion that tennis strength training is going to make an athlete slow. That’s a sure fire assumption if you do it wrong. Do you know what would happen if you poured water down the same pipe that your car has directed for your transmission fluid? Probably the same thing: it would get slower or more likely break down.

Understanding why tennis players need strength training is important is the first step in becoming more resilient and consistent on the playing field, in this case, the court. Then understand the “how.” There are differences between how tennis strength training differs from basketball or volleyball training. Finally the “when” is how athletes at different stages of their long-term development model require a different focus of tennis strength training.

When your why is big enough,

you will find your how.

Injuries in sports is inevitable and as sport performance coaches we cannot eliminate injuries – we can only reduce the probability of them. Out of the 16 sports recorded in a longitudinal study, 14 were team sports and have elements in their sports where contact could lead to injury. A majority of injuries do come from contact situations (58% in games & 41.6% in practices), but that doesn’t eliminate the risk.

From 2009-2014, the NCAA recorded overall injury rates being similar for soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, and both indoor and outdoor track and field. With tennis being a non-contact sport, we have to turn our attention to why tennis athletes are becoming injured. We can look at three potential reasons: overuse injury, weakened muscle groups, low tolerance to position they were trying to achieve.

There is a simple recipe I like to always follow. If you’re healthy, you can practice more. If you can practice more, you can better your best. If you’re unhealthy or injured, you have to spend time to both rest and rehab. You cannot practice and you cannot better your best. That is missed competitions and staying at a competitive level. This is your why. This is why tennis strength training becomes important.

Absolutely. The incidence rate from overuse injuries can be reduced by focusing on strength training and addressing muscle imbalances. We also have to address the concept of tendinous athletes and their risk of injury. Tennis players need strength training in order to protect the tendons when they transfer force. Supporting your tendons with muscle can help you become stronger and reduce the risk of injury.

Research shows that introducing strength training can not only grow muscle but affect tendon stiffness. Increased levels of tendon stiffness or the force required to stretch per unit of distance, can alter how rapid force is generated. Additional benefits include increased total number of collagen fibrils, diameter of collagen fibrils, and increased fibril packing density.

You’ve made it this far in reading this post and understand the how and why tennis players need strength training for athletic performance. Now let’s enter the when. Tennis strength training has different faces.

• Even youth tennis players need strength training (5-9). Their primary focus should be motor control, light extensive plyometrics, isometrics, and multiplanar movements that are all fun. Kids need high levels of variation and small sided games that reinforce the right mechanics for landing, jumping, throwing and de-acceleration with their tennis strength training.
• With young teens (10-14), the primary focus should continue with youth athletes except now transitioning more from extensive to intensive plyometrics, introduction to ground-based strength training, change of direction mechanics, and monitoring their growth in the puberty stages. There is no need to push the envelope if there is discomfort around joints that usually see growth plate development. The greatest risk is pushing when time is on your side and monitoring the hours of practice.
• With teens between 15-19, the primary focus should shift to more power-based strength movement along with advancements in all categories with young teen development. The focus with tennis strength training in this age group is consistency and good form.

There you have it: the why, how, and when for my case on why tennis players need strength training. If you need more proof, please search up and use the eye-test on the athletic build of players in the 80’s versus players on tour now. Let’s also look at the averages of first serve speeds over time. The game is faster and more competitive than ever before. That competitive edge came from the athletes utilizing tennis strength training methods.

If you wanted to learn more in detail about how a long-term development model works with strength training, stay in tuned to the blog or feel free to contact me to discuss more.