Tennis Player Running for Endurance

Talk to your tennis coach. My thought is that you get enough work with playing tennis that much each day, but I have no real idea. Women pros only play best of 3 sets anyway. Just play tennis.

If a runner asked, “How much tennis should I play to get better at running?” what would you tell him?

hey there, zyzz here

if you want a real answer:

a. having the aerobic base from running can help you recover much better on the court constantly. we can see this as a few high-level strength coaches nowadays try to build some form of an aerobic base in their olympic lifters by making them do things like 50% bench into a 50% squat for 8 mins straight. now, I'm not recommending you do that, but that's the idea.

b. I think the thing that would most directly translate into better tennis performance is adding some form of either lactate threshold run / aerobic threshold run. now if you're going to do this, definitely only 2-3 times week max. i don't want you to get a bit overtrained bro. probably 2x a week would be best. one day would be 2.5 miles @ lactate threshold, which will feel pretty hard

other day for an aerobic threshold would be 25-30 mintues @ a steady but effortful pace. probably a full 55 seconds slower than your lactate threshold pace.

c. don't forget your sport is mainly about acceleration. Make sure to finish with some acceleration work / start with it. (starting with acceleration work would give you the best gains, but doing the acceleration stuff post run won't require a long warmup). just make sure you keep up the speed stuff, you don't wanna get decently slow twitch, ok?

Definitely talk to your coach first. If you're ranked top 100 juniors and train 4-5 hours per day, I'm sure you have a coach. Barely anyone on here has experience with tennis and running, so I'm sure your coach would know better. Good luck in your tennis career!

You have more than enough sport specific training (tennis) so i recommend easy runs as addition. If you know your HRmax a good orientation is 70% +-5 beats of it. Start with 3 days/week of easy running for 30 minutes and see how your body reacts. Later increase to 60-70 minutes, 3-5 times/week. Coordinate this with your coach.

All the best.

Tennis, like basketball, football, baseball, etc are skill sports. When you get tired your skills diminish. If you don't get tired they diminish less.

Run for endurance and you won't get as tired and your skills will be better maintained throughout the game/match.

Tennis, on the other hand, does absolutely nothing to help with running.

I can't understand why some sports don't do more endurance training. Football players show up so early to get ready for a game and then come 4th quarter can't play well being tired. If you add up the foot prints in a good tennis match you easily get four to five miles.

So this guy comes over from New Zealand to Rice for a Tennis scholarship. He was always running to condition for endurance. Sean Wade would go on to run the Marathon in the 1996 Olympics.

The tennis team at Rice kept losing 3 set matches. The coach made them all start running for conditioning and had the track/XC coach make them do some workouts. Wade would clock times that were as good as the distance runners and got recruited to switch over.

Tennis today is an endurance sport. Racket technology now allows players to hit longer rallies without tearing up their bodies. Just look at how long players lasted back in the days of Becker, Agassi, etc. and compare them to all the 30+ year olds who are dominating tennis today.

Running is a key supplement to tennis players' endurance training. Caroline Wozniacki would run 4-6 miles a day when training to help her endurance on the court. But the amount of running you do and whether you do speed work or just jog easy is something that a tennis endurance coach will know the answer to, not a running coach.

It’s not racquet technology that is responsible for players playing longer, it’s The Juice.

You should not be on this site. No underage female should be on this site. (for your own benefit)

hii!
thanks for answering :), and sorry it took me like a month to get back to u, (i had a pretty crazy month, 4 weeks, 4 tourneys, 4 diff countries (and i book my flights the day of lol, so they all end up being all-nighters and red-eyes :(, unfortunately that is unavoidable cuz idk what tournaments i'm gonna get into until like literally 3 days before (sorry, ur prolly not interested in how tennis wrks lol, if u are let me know haha), also tryna graduate hs, so yea its been a rough month), anyways, didn't rlly have time to acc try running since then, and i forgot abt this post lol.

however, i had some time yesterday, acc thats a lie, i didnt rlly have time, but i didnt have a match so yea, (acc tbh, yesterday was prolly not a good day to go for a run, considering i woke up at 6am to do school, did fitness, tennis, stretching, tennis again, and then a friend i have been travelling with convinced me to go on a hike with him (this tournament is like in the mountains lol, so he wanted to "experience it"), (it was 7km, and he had a day off from tnns, so idk why i even went with him, but whatever, thats not the point).

anyways, i downloaded this app, i think it's called runkeeper, idk something like that (btw, don't download it, it eats gigs like crazy (i'm on a sim card cuz i travel, and it ate up 2 gigs, so i had to delete it lol)). anyways, i basically went on a "run", idek if u could call it that honestly, since it didn't even last 5 and a half minutes (i was aiming for 20), so thats kinda pathetic, and i think it was 1.8km (also pathetic lol, i think my friend goes and does like 6km every other day, so this was embarassing but whatever, i'm gonna just say it was cuz i was very tired, there were lots of hills and my back was killing me (long story). anyways, after doing that, i remembered i made this post, so i went back to it cuz i obvs have no idea what i am doing, and i need all the help i can get haha.

anyways, after reading ur post, i have some questions for u lol. okay so first of all, what in the world is a lactate or threshold run? also what's an aerobic threshold run? i tried googling it but i'm still confused. also, i don't think i can run for 25-30 minutes lol, like do that slow jog thing, yea sure, but acc run, i don't think so, maybe like 7-10 minutes if i rlly tried but defo not 25 lol, and i don't see the point of doing a slow jog cuz tennis is mostly high intensity, so i dont think that would be helpful (if it would plz tell me why lol). so what would u recommend to like build up to 25 minutes? also, what is acceleration stuff? is that just like sprinting? anyways, thanks for the advice, and sorry for the late response again!

thanks for the advice :), yea i have a coach obviously, but she is a tennis coach, and she literally does not know anything about fitness or running lol. as for my fitness coach, i have not seen him in months lol (this tour has been lasting longer than expected, and he doesn't travel with me), but i did actually ask him about running before i left, and he said i could do it if i wanted, but that he wasn't rlly an expert with that (he is more of a like physical therapy/injury prevention person, so i guess he just doesn't rlly know much about it. and thanks for the good luck!

hey there, never played tennis, but it seems to me that you guys do a lot of sprinting left and right and it seems tiring. Maybe just run as fast as you can for as long as you can twice a day and I am sure that will help you're endurance, but definitely ask your coach first, since I have no experience here.

This is the right idea, except I'd suggest not worrying about heart rate or other metrics. Just run 20-30 minutes easy every day. It takes about six weeks to see some benefit, so you would want to commit to it for at least that long, after which you can decide whether you feel that it is helping.

While tennis is, as you say, mostly high intensity, so is a race. Yet the foundation of training for racing is usually a fair amount of easy to steady running. The idea is that building a solid base of endurance allows you to do a lot more of the intense training needed to race. In your case, you'll get your intensity from tennis-specific training.

I expect you would also find it helpful to talk to some older pro players. Look for the really old ones, maybe 30 years old. Ask what has worked for them to keep playing at a high level for many years. Coaches are of course a good resource, but there is really no substitute for the experience of people who've been where you want to go.

Today even lower ranked players can have an entire team of coaches, physios, nutritionists etc. Not even the best players made enough money to afford that in the 1990s.

I have played tennis for more than thirty years and in my youth I was a competitive md runner. For what it is worth my observations are these: the more serious tennis players incorporate aerobic training in their programme. It might be sessions on the bike (often in the gym) or regular runs. If your drills on court are working you hard you don't need to do too much anaerobic work (sprints) in your endurance training. You also risk overdoing it and incurring injury. I lot of players I knew would incorporate a half hour run several times a week to build up their aerobic base; not slow jogging but at a higher steady pace and maybe throw in a few stride-outs or wind-sprints. If they were on the bike they would do much the same. If you're doing it the right way you will feel it in your legs and your lungs. But you don't want to push yourself to the point of exhaustion. With the amount of tennis you're playing your body could break down.

thanks for the advice Armstronglivs, never played tennisidontplaytennis ! :)

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