Tennis Conditioning
Tennis is a sport that is mostly stuck in the past when it comes to both strength training, and conditioning. One look at the USTA website or their YouTube channel and you’ll see what I mean. Tennis coaches tend to demand aerobic cardiovascular conditioning (way too much of it), and shy away from strength training. But when you look at the demands of the sport, you’ll see how backwards that is. We’re going to talk about that today.
The Demands
Tennis is a game unlike any other, where there are points inside games inside sets, inside matches. Your goal is to win points, to win games, and accumulate enough games to win sets, and win enough sets (2-3 depending on if it’s a slam) to win the match. While points do build on each other within each game, once the game is over you get a completely clean slate and you still have an opportunity to win the set.
A typical youth tennis match lasts between 45 and 120 minutes, with the average sitting right around the 90 minute mark. Now at first glance, you might think that it’s much like a marathon, however this doesn’t tell the whole story. Roughly 20-25% of youth tennis matches are actual tennis action, the rest of the time is spent at rest between sets and active recovery in-between points. This means that, on average, there is roughly 18-22 minutes of actual tennis play/effort per match.
The standard width of a tennis court is 27.5 feet, and the length from the net to the baseline is 39 feet on each side of the court. This means there is roughly 1053 square feet of playable space for each player. This means that tennis is mostly categorized by quick bursts of effort, acceleration, deceleration, and change of direction. On the court, the athlete is consistently accelerating, decelerating, or waiting to move and at no point are they opening up to max velocity sprinting. This matters when programming exercises and effort levels in training.
Tennis is a sport categorized by short bouts of maximal effort, rapid acceleration and deceleration, changing of direction, small space play, and plenty of recovery where roughly 20% of a match is actual tennis play. Now, we’re going to move onto various studies breaking down game play for different age groups and levels of play.
The Studies
While there is a need to go over the demands of tennis as a whole, today we’re going to focus our efforts on youth tennis. We’re going to break this down into four different groups:
U14 Male National Level Players
Mixed Gender Adolescent (15-16 years old)
Elite Junior Female Players ~17 y/o on average
U16-U18 Males on Clay Court
We’re going to break down effort levels, and effort times.
U14 Male National Level Players
In 2017, Job Fridriksson Kolman, Martin van der Lei, and Chris Visscher wrote an article in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching titled Success in National Level Junior Tennis: Tactical Perspectives where they found that on average, points lasted roughly 5.8 seconds with a standard deviation of 4.61s. On average, each point consisted of 4.8 strokes with roughly 50% of rallies ending in less than three strokes.
Mixed Gender Adolescent (15-16 years old)
In 2011, Pedro José Torres-Luque, David Cabello-Manrique, Juan M. Cortell-Tormo, and Enrique Ortega wrote an article titled An Analysis of Competition in Young Tennis Players in the European Journal of Sport Science. In this study, they found that points lasted, on average, 9.08 seconds and there was an average rest period of 24.5 seconds (1:2.7 work to rest ratio). This equated to roughly 5.1 strokes per point.
Elite Junior Females - Average of 17 y/o
In 2007, Juan M. Murias, David R. Lanatta, José L. Arce, and Salvador M. Quintana wrote an article titled Match Activity and Physiological Responses During a Junior Female Singles Tennis Tournament that was published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine. In this study, they found that the average rally duration was 8.2 seconds long, with an average of 17.7 second rest periods (1:2.2 work to rest ratio) between points. The effective playing time for each match was 22.9% of total match time.
U16 and U18 Male Amateur Players - Clay Courts
In 2021, Javier Sánchez-Sánchez, David Cabello-Manrique, Jorge Pérez-Gómez, José Luis Felipe, Leonor Gallardo, and Enrique Ortega wrote an article titled ATR versus Traditional Periodisation in Adolescent Amateur Tennis Players in Apunts. Medicina de l'Esport, or Apunt Sports Medicine for us English speakers. In this study they found that the average point lasted 5.5 seconds, with an average of 3.73 shots per point, and an average of 91.2 points per point.
Putting This All Together
If we take all of this information, we can reasonably conclude the following averages:
Total Match Time
90 minutes
Percentage of Match > Tennis Action
22.9%
Point Time
7.15 seconds
Strokes Per Point
4.55 strokes
Rest Periods Per Point
21.1 seconds
Work to Rest Ratio
1:2.95
This information is the basis of the demands for the sport of tennis and should be our compass when it comes to programming strength training, speed training, and conditioning. I want to reiterate that these are numbers for youth tennis, and not college or pro tennis. As the development and talent increases, the point times tend to get extended and thus everything else with it.
Programming Conditioning for Tennis
Traditionally, tennis consists of long slow distance training (running miles), and anaerobic (15-60 seconds) training consisting of longer sprints, or longer bike sprints. While these aren’t inherently bad, they don’t tackle the demands of the athlete on the court.
This type of conditioning is a relic of older coaches ion the sport. Many coaches believe “this is what we did, so this is what you should do” without even understanding the physiological demands of the sport of tennis. Hell, the place that I work at demands the kids run 2.1 miles around “the loop” a few times per week, while asking to neglect any real strength training.
This type of conditioning can be a problem for a few reasons:
It doesn’t prepare the athlete for the court. It’s the wrong energy systems.
It creates what’s called training interference where you pull the athlete in too many directions and instead of adapting to all the stressors, you adapt to none of them and actually get worse at all of them.
It wastes time, and energy.
It leads to overuse injury.
Wrong Energy Systems
If you go back to the studies we went over in the beginning of this article you’ll remember that, on average, points are 7.15 seconds long. This means that tennis is mostly an alactic sport that becomes lactic over the course of sets and matches. Our lactic/glycolytic energy system doesn’t really kick in until around 9-10 seconds, meaning that the energy created during each point is made from ATP and creatine phosphate, with long enough (21 seconds) to regenerate this energy source. Now, that doesn’t mean that tennis isn’t ever lactic, it definitely is. However, the overwhelming majority of energy production is not, so our training needs to reflect this.
Instead of running miles, or doing 100-300 yard sprints for conditioning, we should perform:
5-20 yard sprints
Change of direction drills
Weight training
Jumps
Medicine ball throws
If you want to get better for the court, you need to tackle the demands of the court.
Training Interference
There was a meta analysis produced in 2012 titled Concurrent Training: A Meta-analysis Examining Interference of Aerobic and Resistance Exercises where they examined 21 various studies to investigate whether or not aerobic training, anaerobic conditioning, and strength training could be beneficial when performed in conjunction with each other.
This study found that training for various adaptations simultaneously actually had negative effects on all adaptations. For example, training for strength and endurance in the same training block made the athletes worse at both, instead of increasing those qualities. There is a breakdown from our instagram on the study if you’re interested.
If this sounds like Greek to you, that’s ok I’ll break it down here. The easiest way to think about this phenomenon called Training Interference, is to think about running miles and training for strength simultaneously.
Many athletes will do this because they want to be both conditioned, and strong for their sport while possibly even putting on muscle in the process. So they’ll do aerobic conditioning (running miles) while also focusing on strength training while in the gym at the same time. On the surface this seems like a good idea, however the studies all point to this being not only an exercise in futility, but detrimental to your overall development.
In this example, the athlete’s mile times will go up, while their strength goes down. This is obviously unwanted.
So why does this matter? Because tennis matches and practices are characterized by energy systems and efforts that are completely antithetical to running miles. If you throw long slow distance running into your program, you will almost assuredly get worse on the court. You’ll think that you’re not conditioned and add more conditioning into the mix, which will only make your problems far WORSE, instead of better.
So, in an effort to get more conditioned, stronger, and faster, you’ve now become less conditioned, weaker, and slower. Instead, you should focus your “conditioning” (training in general) on work that matches effort levels, energy system demands, speed and space demands, and your overall goals.
Waste of Time and Energy
Far too often in youth sports, we’ll push aside real development in an effort to become more conditioned. The problem with this is that it takes away from development in order to push something that’s not even really needed and can in fact be detrimental to both short term, and long term development and play.
I put together an episode of Strength Coach Rants on in season conditioning, and that can be found here. It’s entirely too in depth to get into here in this article, but the short of it is that conditioning adaptations last a really long time, and they don’t take that long to acquire.
It Often Leads to Injury
Long slow distance training often leads to overuse injury. This happens so often that there are injuries that are so common with distance running that they’re named after running. An example of this would be runner’s knee.
Running is often seen as low impact, but that’s not really true. When running, you have to overcome 1.5-2x your body weight with every step. The workload of running a mile, even at a moderate effort, is extraordinarily high. Here’s an example:
A mile is 5280 feet long. The average person takes between 1500-2500 (we’ll call it 2000 for the sake of this example) steps when running or jogging a mile. Let’s take an athlete that weighs 150lbs for the sake of this example, to give us real numbers.
An average 150lb athlète will take 2000 steps to complete a mile, and with each step have to overcome 300lbs of force. 2000 steps multiplied by 300lbs of force means that the total workload will be 600,000lbs over the course of one mile. That’s a TON of work.
Now this heavy workload could be bad enough, but imagine that you have some kind of movement discrepancy/imbalances like pronated feet, or internally rotated hips, or the dreaded externally rotated tibia. This unusually high level of workload thrown on top of movement discrepancy will exacerbate and accelerate any kind of injury. We’re not talking about catastrophic things like ACL tears, but we are talking about arthritis, chondromalacia patella, “internal derangement of the knee,” shin splints, back issues, just to name a few.
And all of this injury potential is also coupled with possibly/probably mak\ing yourself worse for the court in every possible way. Less strength, less speed, worse aerobic conditioning, worse anaerobic conditioning, and higher injury potential all come with running long distances.
What We Should Be Doing Instead
So, hopefully I haven’t destroyed too much of your world when it comes to conditioning and training for tennis. I know a lot of this is seen as different, or even possibly wrong but I would implore you to look at the physiology of the body, the demands of tennis, and then look at how you’re preparing for the court. Chances are, you could stand to make a few changes and improve your play on the court.
Conditioning
Instead of running miles, your conditioning should focus on:
Repeated 10-20 yard sprints (remember the dimensions of a tennis court)
Change of direction drills
Higher volume weight training
Sled pushing and pulling
Sporadic bike sprints ranging from 3-12 seconds with 1:2 work to rest ratios for rest periods
All of this training will become both anaerobic and aerobic over time, so there’s realistically zero reason to incorporate distance running. You can focus both your time, and effort on this training, while being able to reap the benefits of running distances, without having to run distances. It’s a win win!
Speed
Your focus should be on accelerating, and decelerating, and reaccelerating. Think of the dimensions of a tennis court, and then work on getting fast in those spaces. 5-10 yard sprints, medicine ball throws, dynamic effort barbell work, Olympic lift variations, etc.
On the court, you need to be fast for a few yards at a time, thus there is little benefit to maximal velocity sprinting when it comes to your speed, there are benefits outside of that, but that’s a topic for another day.
Strength
Tennis is a sport that seems to be lost in “functional” training much of the time. This kind of training is typically categorized by light loads, single leg movements, and multi-plane training. While this type of training has its place, it neglects actually getting stronger.
Why is relative and absolute strength so important? Strength is going to have a positive effect on every single other adaptation. Speed, resiliency, power, flexibility, mobility, and even conditioning. This reel here gives a good breakdown for the myriad of benefits legitimate strength training can provide.
If you truly want to get stronger for the court, you need to focus on compound movements, with legitimate loads on the bar. Here are the primal movement patterns, which should be the basis of your movement programming:
Squat patterns
Lunge patterns
Hinge patterns
Upper body push patterns
Upper body pull patterns
Rotational movements
Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to heavy back squat, or heavy bench press. It means that you need to include variations of these movements. Goblet squats, DB lunges, Incline DB presses, etc are all acceptable movements that can be used to get stronger for the court.
Putting It All Together
I’ve been in this field long enough to understand what goes on in youth sports. Far too often strength and speed training is pushed to the side in an effort to include more conditioning. This minimizes actual development in favor of immediate performance.
You need to think of your training as something that is best slow cooked, with an end goal of 3-5 years from now, not on a week to week basis. You’re training to play pro/college, not to win the 14U local tournament this weekend.
You need to include legitimate strength training, actual speed training, and work capacity development/conditioning that is conducive to success on the court. Throw away the mile runs, and get your butt in the gym!
