(Even more) Shoulder care in tennis

Most players already keep their shoulders healthy to some extent, but a lot could probably do better. It could be integrated a bit more.

Looking back onto my (Luke) own practice and what I did with tennis players is they’ll do their band work in the warmups. Then some specific posteria shoulder work in the gym program, but that’s really about it and when the player then goes away for tournaments, they will often go through their band work super quick and there is not a lot of attention paid to it.

In Baseball it’s something that’s heavily integrated into the gym program and it’s something that they have specific days where they are assigned to do a program that would do a posterior rotator cuff program on top of the warmups where it’s also heavily integrated into. It’s also a really big focus in the off season. Taking the example of a tennis player, who might only have a couple of weeks off and then they start in preseason. You’ve got a good amount of reduction in the load in chronic load and you’ve got a big spike in your acute load. You’re probably not going to want to pick up a racket for a period of that, but you can definitely keep a band and you can keep the scapula and your posterior shoulder really strong and really tolerant. So, when you do go back, they’re not just starting from zero. And I think that’s something where there’s potentially a lesson to be learned around that.

Why tennis needs more workload monitoring

Tennis players have a very short off-season which means that players chronic workload and what they’re tolerant to is relatively high all the time because they’re having to train and compete most of the year. There’s value in understanding the players injury history in terms of informing you as a tennis coach on how many times are you going to feed in that wide forehand or full open stance backhand. How much repetition is the going to withstand? If the player has had a previous knee injury or they have some chronic knee pain through the patella. That’s something to be aware of and to count. Maybe they’ve had an abdominal strain, which is something to be aware of. Maybe they’ve had lower back pain, then the serve needs to be paid special attention to. The player might have had wrist injuries or wrist surgeries. If you’re feeding them lowballs, close to the baseline, they’re having to do a lot of wrist action to pick up that ball. That’s something to be aware of.

So, a lot of it depends on the player you have in front of you and their injury history and of what things are high risk to them. High and low load doesn’t equal for all players. Players have different histories. So, what may be a really low load or moderate load for one player without injury history is might actually be a high load for somebody else.

How tennis coaches best collaborate with S&C Coaches on planning

It depends whether it’s specific or whether it’s global.

If it’s global, looking at in terms of how an academy sets up training a good way to approach would be to lay out what you’re doing as a tennis coach. Collaboratively discuss; “Is this getting the most out of our players?”

Present the S&C coach with:
– What are our main drills?
– These are our main basket drills
– These are our main conditional drills of additional points
– These are all main ways in which we try and structure in place maybe our match play

Let the S&C coach know why and discuss if what you are doing is the best way to go about it.

If it’s specific to one player discuss questions like:
– What is the drill related to?
– What is the goal of the drill?
– Why are we using it?
– How often is the player going to be exposed to this?

Then ultimately it comes down to if we are going to expose the player, to something regularly,
– How do we then manipulate the volume and the intensity of that?
– What is the required intensity of that drill?

That will lead to the program dictating the volume that then also dictates the amount that the player repeatedly can be exposed to the specific element.

So, having clarity in terms of what exactly it is you’re trying to achieve is key because that’s then going to drive a better and more informed conversation and then having that be a collaborative one where you can put your heads together. Potentially watch video to assess the course. If possible, get the S&C coach to see it live, because not all S&C Coaches in tennis know tennis inside out like the back of the hand.

I (Luke) was at Soto Tennis Academy for 6-7 years and it took me a number of years before I (Luke) felt comfortable understanding a lot of the drills on court and understanding actually what they meant, how to quantify them and what actually was hard and what wasn’t. So, for somebody that maybe hasn’t spent a lot of time in tennis, just having the coach be open to saying, “Hey, can you come on, go and take a look at this and then can we go back and discuss that? That’s really valuable.

Why tennis coaches have to quantify tennis drills

It’s been shown many times, again, with a lot of different studies around quantifying load, that if everything is always high then you never really hit your peaks because there’s a form of monotony Everyone self-paces and it’s not possible to run a marathon at a 100 meters sprint pace. So there has to be some form of modifying intensity. If volume is high and we’re spending four hours on court it’s not possible to do the some of the hardest drills, four hours continuously. It’s also not possible to have some of your hardest days five days a week or five days in a row. So, I think prospectively planning out days with different lows, whether it be a high day, a medium, day or a low day is important.

So how do I quantify drills?
There is a lot of value in terms of understanding as to what your low drills, low intensity and what are your medium intensity drills, and what are your high intensity drills. Volume is going to have a strong interaction with that. Your low intensity drills you can have a higher volume of that. Medium, you’re going to need to bring that down a little bit and then your high intensity drill you definitely need to have a low volume.

The second part is twofold, where you look at how does that map out across the week. You’d like to be prospectively planning your week out to try and work towards a bigger goal in terms of how you’re trying to develop that player, whether it be technical, tactical, physical or mental.

You need to be asking yourself: “Am I simply just walking onto the court or into the gym doing this today because I see that on the court and it’s just sort of spur of the moment and just planning session to session or day to day, or am I planning my weeks out specifically with a goal in mind of trying to develop certain qualities within that player over time?”.

If you’re doing the latter, then there is definitely a space to think:
– What days are my high days where I’m really going to push the player from a technical, tactical, physical or mental perspective
– What are my medium days?
– What are my low days?

When you are quantifying lows it relates more with their previous injury history or potential injury risk. If you have a player with a previous wrist injury, potentially a lot of low forehand work might be a little bit of a red flag, and that’s something to be aware of. Another example of previous injury history could be elbow and you’d have to be conscious of the serve. Shoulder would be another example regarding the serve. If, the player has had previous knee injury, then some of your wider forehand or backhand work, depending on which leg it is and potentially serve as well with landing on that front leg. So, all of these are important factors to consider.

What could be changed based on the statistics now available?
Historically tennis is a sport which is high volume, high density with lots and lots of repetitions. There’s a lot of space, a lot of justification, a lot of reason for that. But there’s also a large amount of space now armed with the rally length information for us to say potentially more emphasis could be placed on shorter, sharper drills that are focusing on some of the more percentage-based very important parts of tennis.

So, working on the serve, working on the return, working on the serve +1 or return +1 are we doing that safely?

All of these are low volume. So, it makes sense to quantify a lot of the drills and understand where they sit and then where do they sit across a week and how you best place your players to get the most out of that training by having fluctuations. So, you have some peaks and troughs, you have some mountains, you have some valleys. If everything is always the same, it’s very difficult to get a change or potentially the changes are suboptimal if you’re doing that.

Let’s get low practical
Question: Depending on where you are in the season and what you are practicing towards. If you, e.g. have just done a drill that was physically very demanding and high intensity would it then be preferably to follow that physically very demanding drill, by having a low intensity physical drill, but then high demanding on a technical aspect could be practicing the dropshot or whatever small technical detail.

It depends on the players training age technical proficiency. So, if you’ve got somebody with a high training age and someone who is technically proficient in the area, that’s probably okay because the player will have a strong base to fall back on. Further they’re probably less likely to get injured from that, but they’re also less likely to experience repeated failure because they’re fatigued and you’re just pushing the boundaries out on something which they’re already quite good on, but they could potentially get better as well, under fatigue.

Getting better under fatigue is something other sports have done a lot of work on. They create worst case scenarios or practice technical drills while under fatigue because that’s ultimately where a lot of the success or failure falls upon is can you execute something which normally you would be able to do, but when you almost have to and sometimes that can be mental acuity or technical acuity. It can be tactical. It can be a combination of all of these things.

If you take the opposite example. If you have a young tennis player, they’re not physically mature yet and they don’t have a full repertoire from a technical perspective. If you then place them in that fatigued environment, you’re potentially setting them up for failure. That can maybe have some impact from a psychological perspective. Further it can impact the development on the specific shot that you’re trying to have them execute. So, it depends on if you’re talking about somebody who’s has a higher level, then it’s a really good way of developing them in a fatigued state. For younger players, take a step back, look at it from a bigger picture and ask yourself: “What’s the objective here? And is that player ready for that kind of exposure?

…and if we take a look more globally on the weekly planning of a tennis player?

Q: Would it then make sense to have e.g. a Wednesday afternoon session that in general is relatively low intensity?

Yeah, definitely. Having either a Wednesday or a Thursday be a low load day or a half half day. There’s a lot of evidence and a lot of logical thought processes that support that. It’s very difficult to go hard and heavy every day. It definitely makes sense breaking up the week, whether it be a five-day training week or a six-day training week into two chunks. You might then have two-three days on hard, followed by half day lower and then by three days on.

It’s very difficult to look at training weeks from a Monday to Sunday or Monday to Saturday perspective. From an individual perspective and players who are competing the tour it makes more sense to look at it from a number of training days. So, you may not have a week. The week may not go from Monday to Sunday. Your training week might start on a Tuesday, and you may have all the way through till maybe the following Wednesday. So then at which point you have eight days of training. How are you going to structure those eight days? So, you have a match and then instead you are counting match minus one, minus two, minus three.

This way of approaching planning is very typical in other sports, but in the academy environments, the Monday to Sunday, the typical calendar week makes sense because that’s how a lot of it operates. On a more individual level, tennis doesn’t operate on a Monday to Sunday basis. You can be out on a Tuesday, you can be out on a Friday, you can be out whenever and starting a period of a short training exposure. So, looking at it from training day one up to training day six, or breaking up the days in terms of two-three days on with a low day, I think definitely makes a lot of sense.

How to approach an increase in tennis players serve amount

When tennis players are typically increasing the amount of serves quite quickly or maybe a little bit further down the track, they start to develop a little bit of shoulder pain. This probably speaks to a wider understanding of workloads, quantifying it and how we go about doing that. I (Luke) think this, particularly for tennis, is a really important one. Potentially one of the most important ones, because the classical way of increasing the number of serves is often like; I’m going to serve the basket, I’m going to serve two baskets, but the size of baskets and number of balls in a basket, is vastly different. It’s also quite common practice for a coach to stand at the back or to the side of the player and to feed in balls every now and again. There will be some discussion between each ball or in between a cluster of balls. Often it ends up with the coach saying: “Let’s just do a couple more” as a player start to get a feeling or start to get the movement better. There is this desire for the coach for a few more balls to be grooved. Quite quickly, you can get a little bit ahead of yourself when you’re doing more than what you’ve planned.

The first step – Serve count
Start with an actual ball count. It’s a quantification of what the players workload is. What is their current threshold? What’s that player used to right now? What their current habits around how much they train, how many hours do they train? How many balls do they typically serve? And how many times a week You might end up knowing that a player is serving approximately 40 balls and then the next step is to..

The second step – Use google maps
Decide as a coach how many serves you would like the player to be serving a day/a week to have the opportunity to develop the technical changes that you desire for the player to develop. From that understand how big a gap there is between the current workload and where you would like to see the serve count to be in the future. Think of this as using google maps. You have to put in your current location and your desired destination before it comes up with ideas of how to reach your destination. You need to have an understanding of what the player has been doing because that is what their bodies will be tolerant to. And then where you would like them to go. You might not want them to do much different but if you want them to be doing more then you need to safely map out that route rather than immediately jumping there. Let’s say that the player is currently serving 40 balls a day and you would like that number to be 60 balls a day. It’s safe to progressively do that over time – so how do you get from 40 to 60 balls?

The third step – The 10 percent rule
There is quite a lot of research on workload across various sport, cricket, rugby, and baseball, where there is strong evidence to show that if you go above a general 10 percent change in workload, whether that be a global workload, everything that you’re doing or something specific, roughly a 10 percent change is higher in risk if you go above that. So, you want to generally try to keep a 10 percent rule and you’ll be in fairly safe space when you are increasing the serve amount.

The fourth step – General things to keep in mind
If a player is going through a growth period, they are more likely to have losses of coordination. If you are not aware of the cause of the lost coordination you might as a coach want to do more repetitions in order to regain their skill set on the serve. Unfortunately, what you’ll often end up doing is adding more fuel to the fire onto a maturing body that’s growing and is not quite ready. Consequently, the player might start to get knee pain, shoulder pain. So, it’s important to always keep the players biological age, their training age and their current tolerance based on what they are used to combined with their injury history in mind. If you have got all of those factors in mind you have got yourself a well-rounded context for yourself to know how to move forward. It’s not always possible to keep all of the parameters in check yourself, which is why it’s important to have conversations with multiple team members including the tennis coach, fitness coach, the physio and/or the parents. If you do this, you are going to make more informed decisions.

#96: Luke Passman – “How to safely increase the number of serves”

 

Hi guys, In this episode you are going to listen to Luke Passman. Luke worked 6 years at the Soto Tennis Academy as the Head of Sport Science Support and have for the past 2 years been the Strength and Conditioning Coordinator at The New York Mets.

You’ll get to know:

  • The Google Earth Analogy
  • Why and how to quantify Tennis drills
  • What Tennis can learn from Baseball

Enjoy the show!

Timestamps

01:30 How to safely progress serve count in tennis
08:00 Using the Google earth analogy to help tennis players
11:00 Why there is a need to quantify tennis drills
15:30 How to balance intensity, repetitions and volume in tennis practices
18:00 How to plan a tennis player’s weekly practices from a physical point of view
20:10 How tennis coaches can approach S&C coaches to plan a tennis player’s schedule
24:00 What tennis can learn from baseball
27:10 What Luke would change where he to go back to Tennis S&C
29:30 Why you need to build strong relationships as an S&C Coach
30:45 Problem solving coaching and how to get organizations to change
31:30 Why technology needs to be on tap not on top
332:40 The biggest myth is that tennis players can’t lift weights
34:50 How different approaches work in different cultures
36:00 Favorite Books: “The Chimp Paradox” and “Conscious Coaching”
37:00 Luke Passman’s advice to tennis players, parents and coaches
38:00 How to stay updated on Luke Passman

Money will not make you a better tennis player

This is a bit against commercial interest, but it’s very easy for people to spend big money and think that their son or daughter will become a better tennis player. I don’t think that is the case. If I (Carl Maes) want to make a lot of money, that’s probably the route that I should be going. But I (Carl) think from an integrity point of view, I (Carl) need to be honest with people. Even if that means losing a client.

I (Carl) often get asked by parents whether “it’s all worth the time and the money?” I (Carl) believe It’s worth it, but that doesn’t mean that your son or daughter will become better tennis players. I (Carl) always try to go back to tennis being a metaphor of life. When you’re on a tennis court, you need to look for solutions. You have to deal with adversity. You need discipline in training. It might enhance your life getting in touch with different cultures on your tennis journey. So, I (Carl) like to focus more on those things because the biggest myth for me (Carl) is that people think that the more they spend on their son or daughter’s career, the better they will get.

That is not the case. Yes, you can go to Barbados or to some faraway country to pick up a few ITF points a little bit quicker than other players who can’t afford that. But I (Carl) do believe that cream will rise to the top. That if you’re good enough, the support will come from somewhere to make it happen. Unfortunately, money is a limiting factor, and we are losing a lot talent because of it. But that doesn’t mean if you have the money that you will become a great tennis player.

The 3 aspects to include in female tennis players warmups

The 3rd shot

Relatively the serve is more dominant in the men’s game than in the women’s game. If the serve is not the most dominant stroke on the women’s side, which stroke would it then be? It’s the return. The return is often the most undertrained stroke in women’s tennis. Now, I don’t want girls to start practicing return from the first moment they start warming up, but there’s another shot that we need to train specifically if the return is so dominant and that’s the third ball, the ball after the serve.

We know from Craig O’Shannessy how important winning or losing points in the first 4 strokes are. There is one great exercise during the warmup that you can do. I’ve (Carl Maes) done this with Kim Clijsters. Kirsten Flipkens, with Elise Mertens and Sorana Cirstea.

Warm up for 10 minutes on the baseline and then have the players step inside the baseline for 2 minutes only. The player on the other side might not even recognize it. When a player goes inside the baseline it’s actually the shot that they receive often after they serve. Because when you serve, you land inside the baseline. You do your split step there and you get this massive return from Maria Sharapova right into your feet. That is a shot you need to practice every single day, in my opinion. It doesn’t need to be for 20 minutes. Just make it as part of your warmup. You’ve got less time because the distance is shorter, you get bullets in your feet, so what you have to do is you need to be a little bit wider and a little bit lower. And whilst you’re doing that, you also don’t have the same time, as you have got with your normal forehand. You would normally load and then you would drive up with your legs, your hips and your shoulder. You don’t have that time. So, what you do during these 2 minutes, is that you stay where you are, wide and low and you just open up your hips and you make sure you can finish with your elbow out in front. So, you focus on the first part, which needs to happen very fast and you focus on the end point. You will see if you practice this with your players, how much more comfortable they will get playing inside the baseline.

Indirectly, subconsciously, they are working on the 3 ball, which is such an important technical stroke in women’s tennis.

The drive volleys

In the very start when you are practicing the drive volleys with female players you can and properly should spend entire drills 10-20 minutes on the drive volley, but when the players have got the basics of the drive volley going forward in their career I (Carl) don’t believe that you need to spend one dedicated drill to drive volleys. Instead spend 2-3 minutes during all warmups as that is enough for feeling, timing and recognition. Ask yourself how many times the girls that you work with smash in a match?

It will properly be close to zero. However, what do we always do when we warm up? We go to the net, we play a few volleys, and then we do a few smashes. Should we do a few smashes as they occur once in a while in a match, sure.

Now, let me ask a second question. How many opportunities when you are watching that match, how many times when they are playing a match do think “Oh, you should have come forward and taken the ball out of the air?” It will be much, much more. So, for me. I don’t want to make it too extreme. Forget about the smash warmup, but make sure that your female players hit a couple of drive volleys in every warmup.

The 70/70 principle

Female players need to be able to play at a certain rhythm and pace, which is almost like a metronome. I call it the 70/70 concept. That means if you receive a ball at 70 kilometers per hour, you need to be able to send it back at 70 kilometers per hour. It could be 80, it could be 90. It’s that principle. You need to be able to find that rhythm and that’s your foundation. Everything that comes on top is extra. If you don’t have that foundation, you’ll struggle very much in today’s women’s tennis.

The execution of the drive volley is easy – the anticipation is hard

Especially in female tennis where there are less opportunities to approach the net with an approach shot followed by a volley the drive volley becomes a very important stroke.

The execution, it’s a little bit easier. It’s difficult in the sense that it’s a high ball and the timing is a more difficult because it’s coming from high out of the air and it’s dropping faster. The moment we make contact, the ball is falling down, whereas in a normal forehand or backhand, the ball will be rising, and it might be hanging still the moment we make contact with the ball. So that’s the difficult part.

But I’ve (Carl Maes) got experience even with younger kids from the age of 8-9 years old, they can take that ball out of the air. You’ll be surprised how quickly even with orange and green ball players; how easy they learn how to time the ball correctly. So that’s why I’m (Carl) saying that is slightly easier.

What is the most difficult part is recognizing the situation when you need to move forward, because if you’re standing 2 meters behind the baseline consistently, by the time you get to this high ball, you might have been practicing this drive volley with your coach where he/she has fed balls from a basket with you waiting inside the court. If you are 2 meters behind the baseline, by the time you get into court, this ball is bouncing and you’re playing a normal forehand or backhand. So, this is why the anticipation and recognizing the opportunity to move forward, is key.

I’ve (Carl) got a small practical tip for everybody that’s listening and likes the drive volley concept. Don’t feed these balls from the middle of the court because players will not play drive volleys when the ball is coming from the middle of the court. First, if you do this for ten minutes, my recommendation would be 5 minutes in the forehand corner and 5 minutes in the backhand corner. Then there’s a small extra caveat I (Carl) think you need to do. Don’t feed the ball with you being in a comfortable position where you are feeding balls from the basket.

Treat your players to this little extra visual feedback and feed the ball whilst you are in difficulties. This might look a little bit strange but try to visualize the following. When you feed this high ball, throw it to the side of yourself, let it bounce first, let it bounce low and you have to stretch for the ball and then feed the ball, because this is exactly what the player needs to recognize on the other side of the net, when the opponent is in the tramlines and you can see the back of the opponent. That’s really when they are in difficulties. That’s the moment when your player needs to come from 1-2 meter behind the baseline to 1 meter inside the baseline, and that is when you feed the ball.

So, two important details don’t feed from the middle of the court, feed it from the corner and pretend as if you are in difficulties. Show them your back and then feed the ball upwards. It will give them a much better recognition when they are playing a rally in the next drill/match.

In the very start when you are practicing the drive volleys with female players you can and properly should spend entire drills 10-20 minutes on the drive volley, but when the players have got the basics of the drive volley going forward in their career I (Carl) don’t believe that you need to spend one dedicated drill to drive volleys. Instead spend 2-3 minutes during all warmups as that is enough for feeling, timing and recognition. Ask yourself how many times the girls that you work with smash in a match?

It will properly be close to zero. However, what do we always do when we warm up? We go to the net, we play a few volleys, and then we do a few smashes. Should we do a few smashes as they occur once in a while in a match, sure.

Now, let me ask a second question. How many opportunities when you are watching that match, how many times when they are playing a match do think “Oh, you should have come forward and taken the ball out of the air?” It will be much, much more. So, for me. I don’t want to make it too extreme. Forget about the smash warmup, but make sure that your female players hit a couple of drive volleys in every warmup.

Why your arm shouldn’t be fully extended in the tennis serve

The easiest test that everybody can is just grab your racquet and extend your arm fully next to your head. Extend it completely as high up as you can and then try to pronate with your forearm. Pronation is the part from the elbow to the hand where we open up the palm of our hand. You see that the impact on the racket head is actually not so big. You see it turn and this is when the pronation is only giving direction to the ball. We go a little bit more out wide; we go a little bit more slice. That’s what the pronation is doing when we have our arms completely stretched.

The same goes if we now go to the upper arm between the elbow and the shoulder, we can internally rotate that as well. You’ll see when you do this with a complete straight arm the impact on the racket head is not so big. It helps the pronation a little bit, but in terms of the racket head speed not much is happening.

Now try to do this same movements with your arm slightly bent, not 90 degrees. It’s a little bit less so if there’s a small bend in your elbow and then do the same movement. We start with the external rotation when the racket going back and the internal rotation. You see what happens with your racket head. All of a sudden, a big range of motion happening with the racket head. So that is why when we are talking about this multi segment serve, starting from the bottom up with our leg drive, hips, shoulders and ending with our arm. Our arm should not be completely extended because we lose too much racquet head speed if we try to hit the ball as high as we can. Clearly, the higher we can hit the ball, the better. But it should not be with the compromise of extending our arm completely because we still need to be able to have a small bend in the arm and a small angle in the wrist as well. So, we can really use this internal rotation to smack that serve.