Best Exercises for Tennis Conditioning – Introduction
What are the best exercises for tennis fitness, strength, and power?
When it comes to sports that require a high degree of strength, tennis probably isn’t one that immediately springs to mind.
After all, tennis balls weigh about two ounces/56 grams, and the average tennis racket is ten ounces or 280 grams.
However, despite the low weight of tennis equipment, playing tennis actually requires significant amounts of upper and lower body strength, power, and endurance.
Tennis players also need to be aerobically and anaerobically fit, agile, and highly mobile.
Tennis is an explosive start/stop sport, which is why muscle strength is so important.
Serving, sprinting from the back of the court to the net and back again, changing direction, and lunging to reach the ball are all tests of muscular conditioning.
Being strong may also reduce your risk of injuries.
For example, many back, knee, elbow, and shoulder injuries can be prevented with regular strength training.
So, if you want to be a better tennis player and keep playing for many, MANY years, strength workouts should be part of your tennis training.
This article reveals the best exercises for tennis and provides you with a full-body workout to try.
What Are The Best Exercises for Tennis Players?
Looking to add some zip to your serves?
Want to make sure you can get from the front to the back of the court like greased lightning?
Want an unstoppable backhand?
For better conditioning, strength, and power, these are the exercises you need to include in your tennis strength training workouts:
- Lunge and twist
- Pull-ups/chin-ups
- Push-ups
- Split-squat jumps
- Lateral deficit squats
- Medicine ball slam
- Power cleans
7 Best Exercises for Tennis Descriptions
#1. Lunge and twist
Target muscles: Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus, abductors, adductors, core.
Tennis strength training exercises don’t come much more sport-specific than the lunge and twist.
For example, a lot of tennis shots are played while lunging for the ball, and torso rotation is the key to a powerful stroke.
This exercise develops both of these characteristics and also helps with balance and mobility.
How to do it:
- Hold a medicine ball or single dumbbell/kettlebell in front of your hips.
- Stand with your feet together.
- Pull your shoulders down and back and brace your core.
- Take a large step forward with your left leg while simultaneously turning your upper body and lowering the weight down to the outside of your front thigh.
- Bend your legs and descend until your front knee is just above the floor.
- Push off your front leg and bring your feet back together.
- Repeat on the opposite side.
Medicine Ball Lunge and Twist
#2. Pull-up/chin-up
Target muscles: Latissimus dorsi, biceps, forearms, mid-traps, rhomboids, posterior deltoids.
Hitting a backhand involves the muscles on the back of your shoulders and upper back.
Pull-ups and chin-ups are arguably the most effective and efficient ways to strengthen these muscles.
Chin-ups and pull-ups will also enhance your grip strength, which can help prevent the dreaded tennis elbow injury.
Pull-ups are done with an overhand, slightly wider than shoulder-width grip, while chin-ups are done with a narrower underhand or neutral grip.
Do all these variations to ensure you train your muscles from all available directions.
How to do it:
- Hang from a bar with an underhand, overhand, or neutral grip.
- Pull your shoulders down and back and brace your core.
- Without kicking or swinging, bend your arms and pull your chin up and over the bar.
- Pull your elbows down and back to engage your upper back. Keep your wrists straight.
- Descend under control and repeat.
- Can’t do pull-ups (yet)?
- Try incline rows or band-assisted pull-ups and chin-ups.
Jumping Pull-ups, Banded Chin-ups, Paused Pull-ups
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#3. Push-ups
Target muscles: Pectoralis major, anterior deltoids, triceps, core.
The forehand tennis stroke involves the muscle on the front of your body.
While you could do things like bench presses and machine chest presses to strengthen these muscles, the humble push-up is much more accessible as you can do it anywhere and anytime.
How to do it:
- Squat down and place your hands flat on the floor, so they’re about shoulder-width apart.
- Your fingers should be pointing forward.
- Walk your feet out and back into an extended arm plank position.
- Brace your abs.
- Your entire body should be straight.
- Bend your arms and lower your chest down to within an inch of the floor.
- Do not crane your neck forward.
- Push yourself back up to full arm extension and repeat.
- Make this exercise easier by bending your legs and resting on your knees.
- Alternatively, make it harder by raising your feet, placing your hands on raised surfaces to increase your range of motion, or wearing a weighted vest.
Push-ups with a Weighted Vest
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#4. Split squat jumps
Target muscles: Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus, abductors, adductors, core.
Changing direction requires explosive strength.
Your body is going one way, but then you need to quickly stop and reverse direction.
Stopping and then reversing means overcoming your momentum and body weight, which requires a lot of muscular effort.
Jumping exercises are one of the best ways to increase explosive muscle power, and this type of training is called plyometrics.
While you could just do regular bilateral or two-legged squat jumps to improve leg power, split squat jumps are more tennis-specific.
How to do it:
- Step forward and into a lunge stance.
- Bend your legs and lower your rear knee down to within an inch of the floor.
- Using your arms for extra momentum, jump up and into the air.
- Swing your front leg backward and your rear leg forward, so you land with your feet reversed.
- Descend into another rep and repeat.
Split Squat Jumps
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#5. Lateral deficit squats
Target muscles: Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus, abductors, adductors, core.
Squats are the king of lower body exercises, but regular back and front squats are not very tennis specific.
Lateral deficit squats are much more useful for tennis players as they take you out of the sagittal (forward/backward) movement plane and work your muscles side to side or laterally – the frontal plane.
Tennis involves lots of lateral movements.
How to do it:
- Stand on a raised 4 to a 6-inch platform with your feet together, core braced.
- Hold dumbbells by your sides, a single weight in front of your chest, wear a weighted vest, or do this exercise unweighted.
- Take a step out to the side, bend your legs, and descend into a squat, so your thighs are roughly parallel to the floor.
- Push off the floor and return to the starting position.
- Repeat on the same side or alternate legs as preferred.
Goblet Lateral Deficit Squats
#6. Medicine ball slam
Target muscles: Latissimus dorsi, core.
This exercise will add some real heat to your serve and overhead shots.
It’s also perfect for high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and circuits.
If you don’t have a medicine ball, you can also replicate this exercise with a resistance band fixed to an overhead anchor, which is an exercise called band slams.
How to do it:
- Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent.
- Hold a medicine ball in both hands.
- Raise the ball above your head and come up onto your tiptoes.
- Putting your entire body into the throw, hurl the ball down to the floor just in front of your feet.
- Catch the ball as it bounces and repeat.
- Take care NOT to use a gel-filled ball for this exercise as it will split.
- Instead, use a slam ball, old-school leather medicine ball, or solid rubber medicine ball.
- Alternatively, you can use a slam bag, which is a type of sandbag.
Overhead Slams With Resistance Band
#7. Power cleans
Target muscles: Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus, deltoids, trapezius, erector spinae, biceps, forearms.
If you only have time for one tennis strength exercise, the power clean should be it.
Power cleans work almost every muscle in your body and teaches them to become more explosive.
Working on your power clean will build strength, power, and speed throughout your entire body.
While this is a technically challenging exercise, if you start light and spend a few weeks practicing, you’ll quickly find that it is also very rewarding.
However, you MUST be able to do a good deadlift before trying to try power cleans.
How to do it:
- Place your barbell on the floor.
- It should be about 7-9 inches high.
- Use full-sized bumper plates or if that’s too heavy, rest your bar on blocks.
- Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart and toes under the bar.
- Squat down and hold the bar with a shoulder-width, overhand grip.
- Straighten your arms, drop your hips, lift your chest, and brace your core.
- Stand up explosively (deadlift) and, as the bar nears your mid-thighs, pull it up the front of your body to about chest height.
- Bend your knees slightly and drive your elbows forward to catch the bar across your anterior (front) deltoids.
- Stand upright to complete your rep.
- Lower the bar to your hips and then back down to the floor.
- Reset your core and grip and repeat.
Power Clean and Hang Clean Demonstration
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Strength Training for Tennis Workout
While you could just add a few of these exercises to your existing gym workout, you’ll get better results from a more structured approach to training.
Do this workout 1-2 times per week in conjunction with some low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and playing tennis.
Of course, before you start your workout, you must prepare your body for what you’re about to do.
If you don’t have time to warm up, you don’t have time to work out.
Warming up will make your workouts safer and more productive.
Begin with 5-10 minutes of cardio, e.g., jumping rope, rowing, air-bike, treadmill, or elliptical, and then do joint mobility and dynamic flexibility exercises for your knees, hips, shoulders, and lower back.
Finally, do 1-2 sets of each exercise using light/no weights to refamiliarize yourself with each movement.
If any of the exercises are new to you, or you are a strength training newbie, start light and only increase your weights when you have mastered each exercise.
HASHIMASHI’S Strength Training for Tennis Fitness and Power Workout
Exercises 3a and 3b are to be done as a superset.
Perform your pull-ups/chin-ups, and then immediately drop down and do your push-ups.
Rest for the allocated time and repeat the pairing.
AMRAP means as many reps as possible.
Continue until you reach form failure, i.e., are unable to do more reps using the correct technique.
Best Exercises for Tennis – Wrapping Up
Despite illusions to the contrary, tennis is not an easy or gentle sport.
In contrast, it requires a high level of fitness and agility combined with good muscular endurance, strength, and power.
Therefore, even if you only play for recreation, tennis is a fantastic way to transform your body.
And if you are competing, like any sport, focusing on competition means you will probably push yourself far harder than you realize, and if you are not physically prepared, this can lead to injury.
So, prepare your body for the demands of tennis with the best tennis strength training exercises and workouts.
Not only will you become a better player, but you’ll also reduce your risk of chronic and acute injuries.
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Rich is a NASM-CPT (Certified Personal Trainer),