If you’re like most of the country, you’ve been buried in snow, ice, or just sub-freezing temperatures for most of the winter. For those of you lucky enough to live in warmer climes, or with access to indoor facilities, your tennis frequency has probably been down with the holidays and the new year. So how do you get your body back in spring shape? I’d like to offer a few helpful suggestions to get you back on the road to prime tennis shape.
Soft Tissue Quality
No, I’m not calling you soft, Rambo. I’m referring to your muscles, ligaments, and connective tissues that make up your musculoskeletal system. If you’re like most of us, you have a job where you sit and look at a computer screen hour upon hour with pretty poor posture – caught you didn’t I? Does this look like you?
Thought so. Look at that cervical spine, all bent forward, back and shoulders hunched, and those hips! Oy vey, didn’t your mother ever tell you to sit up straight? This posture, repeated for days, weeks, and months can wreak havoc on your thoracic (upper back) and hip flexibility, which I understand are pretty important in tennis. Over time this posture can shorten the muscles we call the hip-flexors (the large muscles that raise your legs towards your chest), decreasing mobility and power through the area. The thoracic spine area also loses flexibility, creating more opportunity for injury when you start swinging a racquet again.
So, how do we overcome these limitations? Well, you want to start getting up and moving and stretching more often for one, and you need to work on gaining mobility in those areas. We can accomplish the latter in two ways.
The first is loosening up these tight muscles with some dynamic stretching and mobility work. Here are two great videos that address the hips.
The idea here is to open up the tightness in the hip-flexors using both static and dynamic movements that will activate the muscles and improve the range of motion over time.
The second method addresses the muscle fascia (the connective tissue that surrounds the muscles) itself. These techniques improve the quality of muscle tissue by working out scar tissue and bunched muscle fibers while relaxing the fascia that surrounds the fibers. I nabbed this video from Eric Cressey, who runs a top performance facility for pro athletes. If you’re interested in getting smarter about lifting and sports performance, I highly recommend checking out his site: http://ericcressey.com/blog
Implementing these techniques even a few times a week will do wonders for your mobility and flexibility in the key areas that we as tennis players utilize most frequently. The myofascial release techniques alone are worth doing, either before or after a gym or court workout. I’ve been using these every time I go to the gym and I can’t tell you how much they’ve helped alleviate pain and improve my on-court functionality.
Check them out and let me know what you think!
