Viewing entries tagged
medicine ball
I don’t believe that medicine ball training does much in terms of ‘power’ development. There it is, I said it.
My opinion has changed on this topic. I once thought that throwing med balls would develop rotational or overhead power and that this would lead to an increase in groundstroke or serve speed.
I held this belief for a number of reasons.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again - the most specific form of training for tennis is playing tennis! Thus, tennis training - which includes on-court drills, live ball hitting, practice sets (and even tournament matches) - is the truest form of ‘sport-specific physical training’ for tennis.
So if you hear someone talk about ‘sport-specific training’ and they’re jumping on a bosu ball, performing shadow swings on the beach or some other random exercise, that is NOT sport specificity.
One of those ways is to use med balls for non-throwing scenarios. I know, for the most part, med balls are used for throwing purposes (and made for this reason as well). Throwing allows us to have a shorter deceleration phase and extend the propulsion phase - akin to doing a jump squat instead of a barbell squat for the development of lower-body power.
Medicine ball training is a widely popular training modality amongst tennis players at all ages and levels. More specifically, med ball (MB) training is primarily used to augment rotational power. For a review of the underpinning science and theory on this topic, please take a look at a previous post on this topic. Why augment rotational power though? Today's game is classified as power based - players are hitting the felt off the ball. The rationale from a training perspective is as follows: increase rotational power and you'll increase hitting speeds - whether that's groundstroke or serve speeds.
Many coaches and players often speak of the importance of power in tennis. From movement characteristics to its development during the execution of groundstrokes, serves and so forth. But power in and of itself simply means the rate at which work is performed. When you’re running at a steady sub-max pace, you’re still producing power - but I don’t think that’s the power a tennis player is after, do you? What we’re more concerned with is MAXIMUM POWER - this is the quality that helps when exploding into a big forehand or going for an all out first serve. In this post, we'll briefly outline max power and it's relationship to force output and velocity. We'll also provide video examples of a number of general & specific exercises for the development of max power in tennis and to conclude, a general framework will be outlined so that coaches and players can program/implement med ball exercises into their training regimes.
