Today we show you how to warm up like a professional tennis player.
Scott and Nate here from Play Your Court. Today we’re going to show you how to warm up like the pros.
Scott and I came out and hit a couple balls today. And because we’re super old, and about 100 injuries between the two of us, we decided that we were going to warm up. So we went ahead and we hit some laps and did some of the stuff that we basically do to get ready – no static stretching to start. That’s important! Right now we just did some dynamic stretching, some laps. But, we were going to do a little workout, uh to continue the warmup. And we thought it would be fun if we went ahead and filmed it.
A lot of this stuff is taught as high performance that we actually incorporate in our high performance academies and tennis lessons. And if you look around, you’ll actually see some of the top guys doing a lot of these drills as well.
TENNIS WARM UP DRILLS
- The first drill we’re face to face here at the center service line I’m going to toss the ball over Nate’s head. He’s got to let it bounce once. He’s going to track it down. Make this as challenging as you want for your friends. Just working on the quick explosion. And tracking that ball. Turning and tracking down that lob this is a great exercise.
- The next drill that we’re going to do we’ve got our trusty friend, the medicine ball here. And we’re going to start off cooperative. We’re just going to get loose, we’re going to work through the stroke. This is actually fantastic for the core. And kind of the driving power of what you’re going to find on the stroke. We’re going to start off cooperative. Then we’re going to play a game after four or five throws. We’re going to start playing points. If the ball bounces twice, he’ll lose the point. So you can see just a really good drill working on getting warmed up, that kinetic chain of really using the legs to drive the medicine ball.
- So in this one we’re going to start warming up the reflexes. And we’re going to do a little bit of volleying back and forth. And we’re going to try to work down the net and back as many times as we can. We’re starting to warm up the hands and tracking the ball with the eyes. Because at the end of the day it’s all about eye-hand! You’ve got to warm up your eyes. I know people think that’s ridiculous, but it’s like, it’s a muscle in your body, you got to engage before you start playing. When you go the tennis court don’t go right back to the baseline and start hitting balls. Whether you’re warming up or it’s mini tennis or whatever, give yourself a chance to actually warm up.
- We’re going to show you one more. We’re going to play toe tag. Basically we’re going to stay in the service boxes. He’s got to tag my toes with his toes. And if he does, then I’m it and I have to get his toes. We learned this from Roger Federer, so it must be okay. We saw a video of him, um, actually doing this with Severin Luthi. And he was having a blast with it. Um, and just cracking up. I was like, “What on Earth are they doing?” They basically said it was toe tag. So, uh, we’ve incorporated it in our academies. Now here’s one important note, If you step on someone’s toe, right, maybe, probably reach out and grab them. Be careful here, we don’t want to see rolled ankles, we don’t want to see you stomping on people’s toes. So how this works is Scott and I are going to start on the middle line. When Trevor, our main man behind the camera says go, we’re going to start. He’s going to put 30 seconds on the clock, and the game is over whoever is it loses. Ordinarily it’d be like three minutes but Scott’s really out of shape so we’ll do 30 seconds.
So little fun games here. The thing is you’re not going to do these things if it’s not fun. So variety is really the spice of life for these exercises.
I would tell you more about our tennis community but I’m too tired, so please like our video, subscribe to our channel, write in the comments where I can go to lose some weight. We’ll talk to you guys soon.
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