Tennis Conditioning
Dynamic warm-up and Stretching
Anyone who practices sports, plays tennis or dances tango knows the importance of being healthy and fit. Our daily activities are affected by the way that we take care of ourselves physically and mentally.
Tennis, like life, is a never ending improving process. There are many different factors that help to influence our performance. Diet, working out, sleep, mental….at the end what we see is a balance between internal factors (genes) and external factors (environment). The better the balance, the better we’ll be ready to face our challenges. There is not much that we can do about our genes, but there is a lot that we can do to help them.
Warm-up
Prior to any physical activity, we should always prepare our body to what it is going to do. In the past, people were told to do some static stretching before entering the tennis court, for example. Lately, it has been shown that stretching is recommended post any physical activity and not before. Stretching helps to maintain and improve range motion during the cool down phase of any activity.
It is interesting to pay attention to the words that we use. Why stretching, a static process, when in fact what we want to do is gradually be ready to run, jump, hit, etc. before dancing tango or playing tennis?
How can we prepare our body before any physical activity? Warm-up is the answer. By mimicking the movements to the event and gradually increasing the intensity of them. The basic idea is to gradually increase the temperature of our body -of our muscles.
In addition, warming-up increases blood flow and the transport of chemicals like fat and carbs helping to the overall performance of the muscles.
In tennis, before start hitting, one should be able to do some jogging around the court, some lunges, arm circles, trunk twists, etc. for at least 10 minutes. Then, one can do some polite hitting like volleys, groundstrokes, rallies and serves. The idea is to gradually increase the intensity to avoid any possible injury. Some players, before going to the court, they even take a hot shower to warm-up their muscles.
As a tennis-pro one mentioned to us, the way that we are going to play our match is going to depend on the way that we warmed-up. If we hit like crazy during the warm-up; then we will play the match with no control, probably loose and get hurt.
Save the stretching for the cool-down -after the match.
Cool-down
We had a fun and long match, we tried our best and luckily, we won! Now, is time to relax and cool-down. But, we should better hurry up because we should do that while our muscles are still warm.
In order to improve our range of motion, relax our muscles, prevent the risk of injuries and reduce muscle soreness while increasing their flexibility; we should always stretch after any physical activity like dancing tango, for example. In the case of tennis, we should stretch all major muscles. Tennis is a whole body work out.
In summary, do dynamic warm-up before the match and do static stretching after the match -while cooling-down.
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