Tennis is a sport that requires a high degree of timing and co-ordination to be played well. It consists of a large number of short explosive bursts of play and rest periods of varying lengths where an efficient aerobic system is needed for quick recovery.

The very top players over the past few decades (Navratolova, Graf, Borg, Connors, Lendl, Sampras, Nadal to mention a few) would have to be described as natural athletes with apparent high levels of strength.

Pro-Fit’s Court-Fit program is

1) The best prevention and remedy for over use injuries – being very much a one sided sport where large forces are generated with high frequency, tennis lends itself to over use or imbalance injuries. A special effort must be made to balance the strength of the muscles of the core musculature to ensure correct postural alignment. If our posture is compromised, any number of problems may manifest themselves. Another vital area is to keep the forearm in balance to try and counteract the dreaded tennis elbow.

2) Also able to increase the bodies overall strength to assist in generating more power – like golf and even boxing, most of the power that is displayed in a tennis stroke comes from rotation of the torso. If those muscles responsible for trunk rotation are targeted, then a stronger shot may be the result. We’re talking of Mo-stability here again.

3) Designed to increase speed and decrease movement time around the court – this is where resistance training can have the largest direct impact on the game of tennis. The entire game of tennis is punctuated with very short bursts of acceleration, quick stops and quick changes of direction. Tennis players, like sprinters are well known for their use of resistance training regimes to improve their times because of the advantage of having greater relative strength to enable them to overcome the inertia of their own bodyweight more rapidly. Meaning you can accelerate quicker off the mark. On the flipside, to slow down we use our legs as the braking mechanism emphasising more on deceleration. The greater relative strength in the lower body will mean a shorter stopping time and a quicker acceleration time combining again to provide more vital tenths of seconds to be able to prepare and execute the stroke. Fast feet and slow hands as they say.

At Pro-Fit, our main goal is to help you improve your physical condition and cope with the physical demands of this great sport, NOT to improve skill. That would require a Tennis coach. We are not tennis coaches, and we do not pretend to be. However, we are experts on human movement and kinesiology – In other words we’ll train you to hit a ball so hard that even your tennis coach will in awe.