SECRET TO A HEALTHY TENNIS BODY
The human body wasn’t exactly designed to play long hours of tennis. Unfortunately, those pesky injuries that are behind the reason why you can’t play anymore or are held back from playing tennis enough to improve are due to your lack of body management.
Body management is the area of training that prevents injuries from happening. The main training areas are flexibility mobility, preventive exercise training, and load management.
Firstly, mobility and flexibility are important for the prevention of many injuries! Maintaining good mobility through our joints and muscles takes us a long way to keeping a healthy body. Stretching, foam rollers, trigger balls, yoga, and mobility training are all ways to keep yourself mobile and flexible. Tight hips, shoulders, backs, and calves are major contributors to many tennis juries and need to keep in good conditioning, or else the rest of them will suffer!
Check some of the links below to learn more.
Preventative training are exercises that strengthen the areas which are at risk in tennis players. These include shoulders, forearms, wrists, lower backs, ankles and knees. Small exercises you can get from your physiotherapist or tennis specialist trainer can provide you with the armor to protect yourself from tennis injuries and keep you on the court. To truly understand what exercises you need to do you need to make you see someone who has worked with tennis players for many years.
And finally, load management! This is a tricky one, but it goes a long way to eliminating injury from your tennis career. Load management is making sure you train enough but not too much. Training wants to be flowing with most weeks either slightly higher than the last or slightly less than the last. It’s when you start having massive tennis weeks when previous weeks have been very low. This brings about a spike in activity which is a shock to the body and leads to the body breaking down or becoming aggravated. This can often happen when a bunch of tournaments occurs and you want to play them all! But you end up hurting yourself. The key is to not make too many changes rapidly, this can be with your physical workloads but also with changes in equipment, such as string, racquets, and shoes.
So if you are some who suffers from an injury-prone body – these are the areas you really need to think about.
A great way to avoid these problems is to plan your training to ensure you avoid any sudden changes in physical workloads. Try to avoid big training weeks after very light ones, listen to your body when it is feeling tight and tired and be proactive with your body! Don’t wait for an injury to spark your desire to see a specialist who offers preventative training programs. No one likes being on the sidelines with injury – take a step towards longevity in tennis and start looking after your body and it will look after you on the court!
For further information go to the link below in t-movement.com