Tennis Warm Up and Stretch Those Muscles!

Doing a few stretching exercises before playing tennis is very important. Although a simple sport, playing tennis requires strenuous effort. On TV, you may have seen that the first thing the professional players do when they step onto the tennis court is to warm up for ten minutes by performing services and hits. What you do not see on TV is that they had already done extensive stretching before they greet their fans on the court.

As recreational players we do not have to dedicate a long time to pre-tennis exercises. However, we should definitely spend at least fifteen minutes to prepare our muscles before involving ourselves in vigorous tennis activity. Warming up before playing tennis will not only protect you from potential sports injuries, but will also improve your performance in the game as well. In this post we will talk about a few easy stretching exercises.

You can start your warm up exercises with a light jog around the court. Jogging is very important for tennis for there is a lot of running going on in a tennis game. Speaking from experience I can say that you will notice a great deal of difference in your tennis performance if you only dedicate at least half an hour of your time twice a week to jogging. You will build up more strength as you go along. You can also skip ropes instead of jogging. Roger Federer said in one of his interviews that he does intense rope skipping, like most of the athletes, as an exercise. Remember the better you move the more points you will win on the tennis court!

After having jogging or skipping rope, you can do basic trunk and neck twisting exercises. Make sure to also stretch your arms and loosen your shoulders. Forward and backward circles with your arms will help take the tension off of your shoulders before you start playing. Here's a link to some arm stretches. 

 

If you are playing on a hard court, it will help to so some spine flexing exercises. Some sumo squats and hamstring stretches will loosen up the back and legs. You can do this by spreading your feet wide and squatting down while ensuring that your knees are aligned with your little toes. Once you feel the stretch in your inner thighs you can come out of the squat and lift your arms over your head to feel also a little bit of stretch in the arms.

Finally, before hitting the tennis balls with your opponent; do some shadowing. Shadowing is simply mimicking the movements that you will be doing on the tennis court; only without the tennis ball. It is a warm up every professional tennis player displays on the tennis court before the actual match begins. Shadow your backhand swing; shadow your service. And of course, practice, practice and practice.

Here’s Maria Sharapova doing some warm ups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DzTrhUmbD0

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