Post-Match Tennis Exercises and Stretching
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Filed Under Tennis Conditioning, Tennis Exercises
Have you ever played a real tough match only to wake up the next day with killer stiffness and pain in your sides and your hips? You can’t really understand the pain unless you’ve experienced it, but it feels like real work just to get out of bed and lift your feet off the ground. The pain is caused by a build-up of lactic acid in your muscle tissues. When you haven’t used the specific muscles that you use playing tennis, you’re going to go through this period of stiffness, the good news is that it only lasts about 2-3 days. but you do have to keep using the muscles to keep from having to go through this pain again
Here’s some tennis exercises and conditioning stretches that will help minimize that recovery time and also the pain.
If you’re like most tennis players returning after some time off, try the exercises below. They’ll help fix the pain and get you back to relatively painless playing soon.
- Use the nearest fence or wall and put both hands on it
- Next, slightly bend both of your knees
- Place your right ankle on your left knee. Yes it’s going to be a bit painful to do this at first but there is really no way around it. It’s a small price to pay to get rid of the longer term pain
- Now slowly bend your left knee and lower your hips toward the ground
- Hold that position for about ten seconds, then switch legs and repeat the same procedure
- Repeat this complete repetition about 2 - 4 times
You’ll feel right away that this stretch really hits your hips and will greatly help to get the lactic acid out of your muscle tissue faster. The next morning, you will still probably be somewhat stiff. If you do, take a nice hot shower and repeat the stretching exercises described above IMMEDIATELY after the shower.
The hot water from your shower will help to loosen up your muscles. You’ll feel the loosening immediately and this will actually allow you to get a deeper stretch than you were getting the day before right after your match. You’ll also reduce you chance of injury.
Note: This stretch can also be used as a pre-match stretch to loosen up your hips whether you feel stiffness or not. By loosening up your hip muscles before the match, you stand a better chance of avoiding serious stiffness after your match. Repeat this exercise for two or three sets of 8-10 seconds before going out to play your match.
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