The four essential qualities which are required for playing good tennis on court are stamina, staying power, flexibility and sense of immaculate coordination. All these skills can be honed for further improvement to make your reflexes faster and give you the strength to play longer and tougher sets.
There are plenty of things which you could do to improve your staying power in the field and the ability to play tennis well. These include:
• Slow and steady bursts of exercises like sprinting, jumping and practice vigorous swinging of the racket.
• You must practice with very little resting or recovery time between your exercises. Tennis is a very fast-paced game and you are given very short down time while playing on court.
• Practice running with more lateral movements.
• The endurance level can be enhanced if you play for longer duration at a time.
There are two primary types of fitness levels required for improving your playing abilities:
1. Physical –To play a good game of tennis, your physical stamina, overall fitness, endurance level and body flexibility are of great importance.
2. Mental –Mental strength includes your skills in movement coordination and tactical ability – both vital in the field of tennis.
The only way you can bring down your proneness to on-court injuries is to do the right kind of exercises to develop your physical stamina. These include:
Shuttle Sprints: Try to run from the base line to the serving barrier as rapidly as you possibly can.
Ball Retrieval: For this, put a line of balls along the fence and then run as fast as you can to retrieve them one by one and put them back in the basket. You must time your self and see the improvement in speed.
Ball Drops: Ask someone to drop a series of balls all of a sudden. You must grab them before they touch the ground. The level of accuracy with which you do this should improve gradually as this is a good exercise to test your mental alertness and sense of reflex.
Balloon and Foot Balance: For this exercise, blow up two balloons and let them hang in mid-air by repeatedly hitting them with your racket or by kicking them upwards. Thought it sounds easy enough just try and find the difficulty level yourself!
Ball and Shoulder Catch: This exercise involves you looking straight ahead and someone throwing balls from behind your back. As one ball comes over your shoulders, try hitting it with your racket into the net.
A good game of tennis requires that both sections of your body, the upper and lower, must be equally fit and agile. To improve the strength of the lower section of your body, you could try a few of these exercises:
• High knee run.
• Leg squats.
• Front and rear lunges
• walking squats.
Similarly, the upper part of the body can be honed further by doing these exercises:
• Punching.
• Three-quarter presses.
• Speedball.
• Swinging.
• Triceps dips.
To avoid any injury or sprain during these exercises, you must do some stretching exercises before and after your workouts. Never try to do all the exercises together and over-strain yourself. In stead, pace out your exercise schedule according to your personal abilities. One of the best options is to do a cardio workout for about 30 minutes thrice a week. Once you are comfortable with this schedule, you could add a day or two of strength training to your regular work out program. All these steps will surely see a vast improvement of performance level on the court.
