Pierre Lamarche

As a tennis player, most of us are always told to stretch. Okay, but stretch what? And why should I stretch? Also, what is stretching actually doing? As an athlete, we need reasons and goals attached to the activities we do, otherwise we are perhaps wasting time.

What happens if you can’t conjure up a Plan A strategy that gives you an obvious game plan edge over your opponent? Then you go to Plan B, which relies on a wearing-away process. We all have limited reserves of willpower, and we can only withstand stress and concentrate for so long. Plan B relies on the fact that you can win matches by exhausting your opponents mentally. Most people can concentrate pretty well for 30 minutes, but few can keep it up for hours. So even if you see no glaring weaknesses at first, 2 hours later, when your opponents’ minds have tired and their wills have dissipated, their games may leak like sieves.

The Lawn Tennis Association’s misfiring performance department is to get a health-check from Bob Brett, the experienced and respected Australian coach who has worked with Boris Becker and Marin Cilic, among many others.

According to USTA statistics, a tennis match can last between 45 minutes to 5 hours. Points duration typically lasts less than 10 seconds with a 20 to 25 seconds rest between each point. A best of 3 sets match requires 300 to 500 high-intensity efforts. Most of the time, tennis players do not have enough time to recover completely and restore after each match. So different strategies need to be put in place to help the player recover as fast as possible between games and tournaments, or after fitness and tennis practice, using hydrotherapies (such as cold, warm water), musculoskeletal aspects (like stretching, foam roller), dietary supplements (proteins). Sleep is also important to facilitate the anabolic process. Recovery is paramount to success. If done correctly, it can make a huge difference.

We have started a new series called, “Effective Coaching”. Many coaches feel they are “good”, But what does that actually mean? We are re-framing the question to be, “Are you effective?” Does what you coach and how you interact with the players actually transform the way they play? In many places, coaching could be described as, “a better player than you hitting with you (or feeding you balls) and telling you what you did wrong or throwing out “tips”. Not a very systematic approach. Can you imagine if children would learn math or languages at school through random “tips”? To really transform, a player needs the coach to create an environment that maximizes assimilation of skills.

Tennis may be being played in the warmer climes of Dubai, Rio de Janeiro and Delray Beach this week, but in this part of the world more people will identify with what Novak Djokovic was doing recently – cleaning the snow off the roof of his car.