Add-In: Power, Quickness and Agility to become a tennis warrior!

POWER, the underlying essence of tennis. It charges your legs with jet fighter afterburners and helicopter mobility, your serve becomes a high-caliber ballistic weapon while your groundstrokes fortify your baseline defense. Impenetrable. Duanting. Just ask anyone who's used a specific training program to augment their game, or better yet, ask their opponents.

Surprisingly, in this recreational sport's fitness training, power is a special weaponry that's usually under utilized. What follows is a strategic plan that allows you to develop your clients' ability to dominate their game, achieving on-court supremacy over their tennis playing friends...er, adversaries.

Power equals force x velocity. In application, it's how rapidly an athlete can contract specific muscles to effect movement. One great example is demonstrated by an Olympic-style weight lifter, performing a two-handed snatch with several hundred pounds. His muscles are contracting, fast and fully, to move the loaded bar about 4 feet in a fraction of a second. Another, a skilled martial artist is able to fend off several attackers at once, with instantaneously coordinated action. What's the difference between these two demostrations of power?

The Olympic lifter's ability is strength determined, whereas the martial artist's skill is predicated on speed. Maximal strength is developed at (necessarily) slower speeds, by virtue of the heavy loads required. The rapidly paced conditioning that develops speed is impossible with great load, and is thus best implemented with high velocity exercises. So what about a sport such as tennis that is neither one, single, all out effort, nor an immediate, omnidirectional flurry of actions?

First, sport specificty dictates that conditioning exercises must relate closely to your clients' activities movement patterns and performance pace. And, secondly, periodization accomodates this by marching participants through training stages that raise maximum strength, power output and ultimately translate that to the particulars of explosive tennis court combat.

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