Three easy warm-up exercises to do before every tennis session
A warm-up helps to prepare your body for more intense exercise or activity by gradually elevating your heart rate.
It’s key to ‘awaken’ your muscles and prepare them for exercise or sport to help avoid injury and to help get your mind in the game.
Our LTA experts are on hand to give you three essential warm-up exercises that you can do before every tennis session to ensure that your body and mind are ready for anything out on court.
Shuttles
Shuttle exercises help to incorporate basic movement patterns which will help improve your game when playing tennis.
The exercise sequence finishes with walking lunges, these dynamic stretches work the key muscle groups used when playing tennis such as the quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings and calves.
How to do Shuttles
- Jog to a line and back
- Sidestep to line and back, (keep a wide base, stay low and keep a gap between feet)
- Skip forwards and back with high knees, (create airtime and power with arms)
- Walking butt kicks, (knee pointing down to achieve quad stretch)
- Walking lunges, (knees at 90-90 degrees, back straight and rotate arms over front leg)
- Repeat the above sequence several times
Double Ball Throw
This exercise focuses on your co-ordination and reaction speed which are key to improve your tennis skills. The exercise also works on your receiving skills as you will be reading the income ball.
Double ball throws include rotational movements and – replicate groundstroke tennis movements.
Tennis isn’t just a solo sport; this exercise helps to build your co-operation and teamwork skills as you are working with a partner.
How to do Double Ball Throw
- Stand three metres apart, facing your partner
- One person starts with a tennis ball, the other with a football
- Person with football twists to either side of body and throws ball to partner, (like a rugby pass)
- At the same time, partner throws tennis ball down with a bounce
- Both try to catch the incoming ball at the same time
- Reverse roles and repeat
- Move each other around to make more challenging
X Drill
This exercise includes tennis specific footwork and movement patterns. It practices returning to a good recovery position and shadows strokes relevant to the game.
How to do the X Drill
- Mark out five different coloured cones on the ground to resemble the face of a dice
- Start on centre cone
- Move to each cone as quickly as possible, returning to the centre each time
- If you have a friend with you, they could call out cones at random
- To make more challenging, shadow a volley (front two cones) or a groundstroke (back two cones) before returning to centre