6 Training Types That Should NEVER Leave Your Off-Court Program
Below are 6 training modalities that I believe should never leave a tennis player’s off-court training program.
Whether a player has a period without tournaments - or they’re in-between events - I believe the inclusion of these training types (in some form), is imperative to remain healthy and to perform at peak levels.
Let’s explore each in a little detail:
1 - Plyometric Training
If you only had to choose one training type to add to your off-court program, it would be plyometrics.
With so many variations that exist, it’s the ultimate preparatory modality for tennis (and sport in general).
You can perform plyometrics bilaterally…
Unilaterally…
Or contralaterally…
Beyond that, plyos can be performed in-place, or with an added challenge to posture and balance by doing them in a dynamic / locomotive manner.
Perhaps most importantly, we can perform plyos with varying degrees of intensity. I like to classify them into light, medium and max categories.
This is of particular importance to players who are practicing and/or competing a lot - and the reason we CAN include plyo training all-year round.
In-place LIGHT intensity plyo.
Locomotive plyo a MAX intensity.
For example, if we’ve got a match to prepare for, we might do some light plyometrics during the warm-up. Or a few sets of max intent plyos the day prior to a match - aiming to stimulate the neural response without overly fatiguing ourselves.
Either way, A+ for plyometrics!
2 - Power Training
Coming in at a close second, we have power. I look at this as simply loaded and unloaded jump training.
Here are a couple examples:
The reason these aren’t plyometric - even though they are jumping activities - relates primarily to the amount of time the foot is on the ground - termed the amortization phase.
Many sport scientists and coaches use a cut-off of about 0.25s of ground contact time (GCT) to label a jump as plyometric or not (below 0.25s = plyo; above 0.25s = non-plyo / jump).
Again, because of the variable nature of movement in tennis, using a wide range of plyos and jumps in training is important as this will better prepare players for those varied demands.
Consider moving aggressively to track down a wide forehand. The amount of force required to brake (yield) at the knee, hip and ankle will exceed a player’s body weight by 3x or more. Performing loaded and unloaded jumps not only improve the ability to express propulsion force, but also help during yielding moments (i.e. decelerating / braking).
With hundreds of these braking actions occurring during a tennis match, I’d want to prepare for that off the tennis court too!
3 - Short Sprints (Acceleration Training)
Anything above a 10m sprint and below a 35m sprint would be considered an acceleration training distance in my books. At least when it comes to tennis players (who aren’t accustomed to sprint training).
While most movements in tennis occur within a 3m radius (on average), there are plenty of benefits to short, maximal sprint work for players. For instance:
Court dimensions are larger than ever. It’s not uncommon for players to have to actually sprint 10-20m to track down a ball from one side of the court to the other. That’s the specificity aspect.
Performing sprint training can make you faster. This is obvious but often forgotten. Being generally faster is a quality I think every player would want.
Anaerobic speed reserve - this essentially means that if your maximal sprint speed has increased, you can perform at higher intensities for longer, delaying the onset of fatigue or tapping into longer energy supply systems. This boils down to efficiency.
Injury prevention. Sprinting is one of the most intense and potent stimuli you can find. It places various joints, muscles and other structures under high loading conditions. This is a good thing - we want that as it’ll act as a sort of inoculation against injury.
4 - Change-of-Direction Training
Tennis players and their coaches love to do various agility drills. You know the ones - throw a ball in the air and track it down. Use a ‘reactive ball’ and it becomes more unpredictable.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these drills, I think they miss out on a key feature of movement in tennis - instantaneous, high-force, ‘change-of-direction’ (COD) moments.
There are 3 phases to a COD movement - braking (i.e. decelerating - which we alluded to above), propulsion (re-acceleration after a COD) and the transition phase (the time between braking and propelling).
When performing agility drills, there’s a high perceptual demand compared. Again, this isn’t bad BUT, the physical part of a COD is diminished considerably. Consider this, could you achieve more intensity in a movement if you ONLY had to think about going from point A to point B (and then back to point A)? Or if you also had to think about where the ball was heading, how you’d catch it, with which hand etc.?
The latter scenario actually sounds a lot like what you’re going to be doing on a tennis court anyway - track a ball down, make a decision, organize your body to hit a quality shot, strike the ball, and then get back into position.
Players do this millions of times per week during practices and matches. They’re already getting so much ‘agility’ in their day-to-day training - must we beat it to death?
If I put my physical preparation coach hat on, I want to make sure that A) a player is able to change direction more efficiently, with more speed, quality etc and B) that when they step on the court, these changes of direction aren’t more demanding than they need to be (because we’ve done the hard COD training off the court).
Do more pre-planned, intensive, COD training… you’ll thank me later for it (see video examples below).
5 - Heavy Strength Training
We’re starting to see more pros performing heavy strength training (finally!). There are so many reasons it’s a valuable training quality, like:
Creating lots of tension in the targeted muscles…
High neural drive…
Elicits an anabolic hormonal response…
And when performed through large ranges of motion, we stimulate lots of muscle and take tissue through the entire length-tension curve. This effectively allows us to gain strength at various ranges of motion. A good thing given that our joints go through some pretty extreme ranges on the tennis court.
One aspect of muscle recruitment that many aren’t familiar with - called Henneman's size principle - tells us that as more force is needed, motor units are recruited in order of their magnitude of force output. In other words, if we don’t have high force demands, we’ll only recruit slow-twitch muscle fibers. If however, the force demands are high (like they’d be during a heavy back squat), the body will recruit type 2 muscle fibers to meet those demands (bc type 2 are associated with high force).
Lastly, tennis players obviously need strong legs, but they also need their lower-body to produce high forces under various conditions. Deep squats, lunges and deadlift variations can all be used here.
Just don’t neglect the upper-body - studies have found that overhead athletes can increase overhead throwing and striking (in various sports) after a few training cycles of upper-body strength training.
6 - High-Rep Strength Training
The weight room shouldn’t only be used for heavy compound lifts. Accessory exercises, single-joint movements and tissue-specific lifting is also recommended.
Why? One reason - similar to above - is the length-tension relationship. We can put certain tissues through large ranges and in fact, the small overload can help accentuate those ranges (adding an extensibility component to training). Many recent studies have shown that full range of motion (ROM) strength training can actually elicit the same flexibility adaptations as static stretching (holding a stretch for a prolonged period of time) BUT, the increases in strength are far greater with strength training vs static stretching. A great option if your training time is limited.
There’s potential that these lighter, higher rep exercises can also decrease injury risk. Mechanisms include a higher load bearing capacity AND, the increased size of the muscle + surrounding tissues may also be protective.
Many fear getting ‘too big’ as a result of strength training but that’s simply erroneous thinking. It’s extremely difficult to add significant size from strength training - especially considering the amount of time tennis players spend on the tennis court.
If anything, an individual that is new to strength training will often simply improve their body composition (less fat + more muscle). I’d take that trade any day of the week.
Final Take
While you might be asking about med ball training, stretching and conditioning - I think that all 3 of these can be important but I don’t believe they NEED to be included all year round.
With regards to med balls, you can see my recent take in this YouTube clip.
And flexibility is probably going to improve in most players via full ROM strength training anyway (if additional ranges are needed, those can be tackled on a case by case basis).
As for conditioning - I do typically include some form or another with most players. That said, if you’re already practicing a lot of tennis AND playing matches/tournaments on top of that, additional conditioning is just beating players into the ground.
Most players I encounter are actually in a state of fatigue (which often looks a lot like lack of conditioning). Getting fresh and having a properly designed program can help attenuate this. But similar to flexibility, conditionig is implemented strategically based on player needs.
The other 6 qualities that were presented above, however, are non-negotiables. Avoid them at your own peril.