Junior Tournament Training - Personal Coaching - Women's Leagues - Seasonal Court Time - Robbie Wagner

There are two paths junior players can follow in their tennis career. Majority of players follow the path of rapid and early tournament success where the tennis training consists solely of learning how to hit a tennis ball. Such specialized training ensures early success because children before puberty are relatively equal in size, speed, endurance, and strength, and because slow strokes and relatively small stroke repertory allows them to play simple tactics, where they will make the least number of mistakes due to many hours of stroke training. The second path is one of patient, long-term, and systematic development where in addition to technique training, young players will acquire solid physical foundation necessary in later development. When discussing the physical conditioning of a tennis players in ages between 9-13, I am not referring to getting the child bulked up, or having them run countless sprints until they drop dead. The key element in conditioning training at this stage is coordination (not just tennis coordination, but the general one also). Improving general coordination will help players acquire tennis technique easier, and will help to better integration of improved abilities in later years (speed, strength, power, endurance…) into tennis technique. That means when athletes begin to physically mature in and after puberty better physical abilities will help tennis technique the best only if coordination has been trained in previous years.

Coordination will therefore be a focal point, however not the only one, of conditioning training in ages 9-13. The goal of training coordination is equipping the central nervous system – brain with the capacity to make muscles perform different movements (brain makes muscles move). Training will help children acquire different skills most of which are not tennis specific. Acquiring one new skill means the brain has just developed a new neural channel/pattern to the muscles. The more skills athletes learn the more patterns he/she has. An athlete that posses many motoric skills (good coordination) will:

• develop complex tennis technique more easily (during tennis stroke more than 100 muscles are involved)
• perform tennis strokes in a more effective, efficient, and effortless manner
• be able to solve difficult tennis situations more successfully when the pace of the game increases (serving fast, returning fast serves, getting to fast passing shots, quick reactions at the net…)
• be able to implement precision, speed, strength, and economy of movement
• develop speed better because the central nervous system is essential to speed acquisition
• develop tennis specific coordination easier due to the presence of general coordination
• transfer conditioning components (strength, power, flexibility, endurance) into tennis technique more successfully.

The brain of a child at this age is 90% that of an adults, which means they are very capable of learning complex motor skills. Evidently, the quality and the number of different skills the player brings to the game early in life will later influence the level of a player’s playing ability.  Therefore, the player will have less difficulty in achieving a top tennis performance with high precision.
The second major part of conditioning training in this stage is training for speed, as it needs to be systematically trained throughout the whole tennis career. Omissions in this development cannot be made up for at a later stage. A potential top player can be prevented from or hindered in reaching a high level at an early age.

For a long time many coaches suggested that performing sport specific exercises from an early age was the best way to develop an optimal training program. They argued in order to yield the fastest results a training program must follow motor skill specificity (meaning play tennis only), and if conditioning was to take place the exercises selected must mimic tennis patterns and involve only those muscle groups used in tennis. They further argued that if a conditioning program of Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi helped them stay at the top for years that young kids should follow the same program. There are still many cases where 11 year old children do the same conditioning exercises that top professional athletes do. Such an approach was an attempt to achieve quick results where children were exposed to highly specific and intensive training without taking the time to build a good base. Such a narrow minded approach where the vast majority of training was spent on tennis, and physical conditioning, if it was done, highly mimicked  running and strengthening exercises of elite players, produced successful players at an early age, but at the same time hindered their ability to achieve a high performance level and put them in a high risk of body overuse, over-training, and injuries.

We must understand that young kids are not small adults. What I am proposing is multilateral physical development, where in addition to tennis, young players will be physically trained from an early age for demands of competitive tennis. In the case of our club (assuming that at age of 18 players leave for college) I am proposing a 6-8 year conditioning plan, that will be developed according to the players’ biological age.

In an athletes development there are stages when the body responds most positively to certain stimuli. For example, during and after the late stages of puberty, due to hormonal changes, is when the body responds best to strength and power training. Similarly, coordination is best trained between ages 9-13. Therefore, physical conditioning must expose children to a variety of skills, drills, games, relays, and other exercises that enriches their skill experience and as a result improve their coordination dramatically during the early years. A well coordinated athlete will spend less energy performing tennis strokes and movement, will be more effective with their strokes, will learn new tactical and technical skill easier, and will better adjust to difficult situations during tennis matches.

The general outline of a long term conditioning program would be as follows:

• Ages 9-13
  1. Develop good coordination and balance
  2. Acquire a variety of skills
  3. Introduce strength training at the end of this stage (only involving overcoming body weight)
  4. Start the development of speed
  5. Introduce flexibility training
• Ages 13-15
  1. Emphasize agility work
  2. Prepare the body for strength training that starts in next stage
  3. Develop aerobic endurance
  4. Improve flexibility and speed
• Ages 16-18
  1. Start more extensive weight lifting and power training
  2. Further improve speed, agility, and flexibility
  3. Work on aerobic and anaerobic endurance.

Viktor Marinkovic