Last night, members of Comberton Tennis Club’s ladies 1st team booked a session with us in order to learn more about dynamic warm up and injury prevention for tennis…

Comberton is a [relatively] new town just outside of Cambridge, and so Comberton Tennis Club is a [relatively] new club; when one of their first team got in touch to book a session with us, we were delighted.

They asked us to talk about warming up and about injury prevention – both topics that are high on our hot list – so we put together a session that encompassed a whistle-stop tour of dynamic warm up, core stability, injury prevention, movement patterns and agility… …plus a wrap-up of how those concepts all come together to impact upon the players career longevity and performance levels.

“We thoroughly enjoyed this session, it was very very useful,” said Tamryn, who organised the session for the ladies, “We hadn’t been aware of how our movement patterns will affect us on court and how they transfer into tennis. To be honest, just from a general body awareness perspective it was valuable – we can improve our well being considerably by doing more of this type of stuff; If we had better core stability etc. then our limbs would’nt be hurting us.”

“We’re a relatively new team looking to step it up and compete at a higher level – so we’ll be up against a higher level of competitor. This is going to be a great start to get us thinking about what we can and should be doing to stay keep ourselves injury free and performing well.”

This week a national level tennis player has started working with us to resolve a lingering abdominal pain that’s been hampering her matches this past season.

Laura, who has been County champion at every age group from under-10 to seniors, developed a mysterious abdominal pain during a key tournament (in which she beat the world #452 ranked player) and has spent the last 9 months trying to find a cure…

Laura has been a tennis champion since she was a young girl, has been involved in various U14 and U18 international tournaments and even made it into the final qualifiers of a key pre-Wimbledon tournament only to be beaten by the winner of the French Open.

Having graduated up in the seniors, she injured herself at the $50K tournament in Barnstaple in October of last year. This abdominal injury has meant that she’s been unable to string a decent match together (or even serve on some occasions) since, which is obviously a massive impact on a player of that calibre.

She’s been to various consultants and physio to try and fix the problem and has even been told to “stop playing tennis for a year.”

The good news is that we think we have a good idea what it is, what’s causing it and how it can be fixed. The other good news is that, if we’re right, it’ll be significantly less than a year(!) and she should even see some performance improvements to boot!

So – with a bit of luck, we’ll be able to help her string a series of matches together and she’ll be able to fulfill her potential!

As ever, we’ll keep you updated…

There’s currently a lot of misconceptions and misinformation surrounding the topic of coaching young athletes. The fact is that young athletes can actually start learning movement patterns and other strength & conditioning concepts an awful lot earlier than the general population expects.

These photographs of Aisha, a young athlete that we coach, graphically illustrate this point. Aisha is an aspiring professional tennis player who was runner-up in the county level under-9s tournament in 2009.