Tennis is one of the few sports that require the players to transition through different surfaces on a regular basis. Although there are dozens of different surfaces around the world, for sake of discussion there are three major groups of surfaces that players typically compete on:  hard-courts, clay-courts and grass-courts. These different court surfaces result in different movement requirements due to the speed, cushioning and friction of the court. The eminent University of Pennsylvania Physicist and tennis sport scientist Dr. Howard Brody found that the horizontal frictional force greatly effects ball speed and is a determining factor in court speed (Brody, 1995). There can be as much as a 15% difference in ball speed after the bounce, depending on the court surface. Typically a clay-court is slower than a hard-court. This reduction in ball speed allows athletes more time to reach the ball, therefore lengthening the duration of points played on clay-courts. A computerized notational analysis of 252 professional singles matches found that rallies on clay courts at the professional level were significantly longer than any other surface (O’Donoghue et al 2001).  In a study looking at the percentage of baseline rallies at the four Grand Slams found:

•    French Open (claycourt) 51%
•    Australian Open (hardcourt) 46%
•    US Open (hardcourt) 35%
•    Wimbledon (grass) 19%

Another interesting difference between surfaces is that on hardcourts professional players are under increased time-pressure 45% of time, compared with only 29% on clay-courts (Pieper et al 2007). Therefore, court surfaces do play a role in the movement requirements of tennis athletes and training needs to be adapted based on these differences.

These studies just highlight the need for different focused training based on the type of surface that the athlete will be training and competes. It is important to take into consideration the surface and the workloads that are involved in the different surfaces when focusing on tennis-specific movement training.

References:

Weber, K., S. Pieper, et al. (2007). "Characteristics and significance of running speed at the Australian Open 2006 for training and injury prevention." Medicine and Science in Tennis 12(1): 14-17.

iTPA's Executive Director Dr. Mark Kovacs was interviewed on today's ParentingAces radio show and discussed fitness and injury prevention for the junior tennis player. You can listen to the hour-long recorded version at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ur10s/2012/11/19/parenting-aces

Thanks ParentingAces for the opportunity, and the great discussion on fitness for the junior tennis player. If anyone has any more questions feel free to post them!

Are You Training The Most Efficient Way For Tennis Specific Movement?

Tennis movement is highly situation specific and is performed in a reactive environment. This irregularity of movement requires both general movement training, but more importantly tennis-specific movement training. The need to continually respond to situations requires a fine understanding of the athlete’s game style, strategy, movement strengths and weakness. Movement for tennis is both simple and complex.

In competitive tennis, the average point length is less than 10 seconds with the recovery between points usually between 20-25 seconds. Tennis players make an average of four directional changes per point, but any given point can range from a single movement to more than 20 directional changes during a long rally. Also, it is important to remember that most movements occur in seven yards or less. Most tennis players can cover 2-3 feet more moving to the forehand side compared to the backhand side. Understanding some of these basics are very important for the coach, but just as beneficial for the individual player at any level of the game.

The majority of tennis movements are in a lateral direction. In a study of professional players’ movement, it was found that more than 70% of movements were side-to-side with less than 20% of movements in forward linear direction and less than 8% of movements in a backward linear direction (Weber et al, 2007). This is an important statistic, because the development of lateral acceleration and deceleration in the distances described above are the major determining factors in great tennis movement. It is known that linear acceleration, linear maximum velocity and agility are all separate and distinct biomotor skills that need to be trained separately, as training one biomotor skill will not directly impact the improvement of the other. Therefore, preferred training recommendations for tennis should be to focus to focus training time between 60-80% on lateral and multi-direction movements, 10-30% on linear movements.

References:

Weber, K., S. Pieper, et al. (2007). "Characteristics and significance of running speed at the Australian Open 2006 for training and injury prevention." Medicine and Science in Tennis 12(1): 14-17.