A tennis bag backs you up

I’m sure if you saw a sports bag lying on the floor of your club, unattended, you wouldn’t be tempted to look into it. It’ll smell horrible, and there will be nothing interesting in there.

It may tell you a lot about the person who uses it though.

The best tools 

Now that you know that a sports bag isn’t interesting, I’m going to take a chance and tell you about mine. Here's a simple contents list first : -

. Three rackets

. Spare racket tape

. Change of socks + shirt

. A big towel

. Two caps

. Sunglasses x 2

. Plasters, strapping tape

. Elbow protection x 2

. Wrist protection x 1

. Knee protection x 2

. Gloves – right–handed golf glove x 3; pair of thin winter gloves; pair of ski gloves

. Water – 3 bottles x 1.5 litre

. Balls – three new tins of four

. Muesli bars – about six’ll be in there, I won’t guarantee that they are all exactly within their sell-by dates!

. A €5 note and some small change in a tin

. Shampoo – mini bottle

. Deodorant

. Medical Certificate

. Federation Licence

All this weighs over 15 kgs.

Healthy living 

Nothing remarkable in any of this. You can tell from my bag what particularities I have as a tennis player. Let’s deal with the medical equipment first.

I’m a cap and sunglasses wearer. Only in the sunshine of course, but I cannot play well looking directly with the naked eye into the sunlight. I know that if caps and sunglasses didn’t exist, I’d find ways round it, but thankfully they do exist. When I was young nobody wore these, maybe because they were a bit flash, or effeminate. So for a tennis friend from my youth I’d now be unrecognizable. Incognito.

However, I seem to be an excessive cap and sunglasses wearer – in the teams where I play I’m the only one in sunglasses, and about one in ten wears a cap, in sunshine. I don’t understand this – it is so much easier to play with them on.

What I particularly don’t like is when children are not wearing caps. This is nothing to do with playing comfort, it is protection against the sun. With our modern children being outside less and less, they are particularly fragile in the sun. Sunstroke is horrible - on at least three occasions I’ve been laid low for a week with it. Parents, also not used to chivvying their children outside forget to equip them with a cap. They don’t see the danger of the sun.

Sunglasses are something else. I’m not trying to look cool like Roy Orbison (though I’ve got to admit, if you want me to name someone who is cool, it’d be him). Sunglasses aren’t really there to take out the blinding glare of the sun. Even with sunglasses on, you don’t throw your service toss into the sun, or else you’d lose your ball, just like with sunglasses. No, the real advantage is the general softening of the light. In long matches, and especially when you are playing sequences of matches in the sun, your eyes don’t become tired. Eye fatigue is missed by so many coaches, players and doctors.
 

Fatigue can happen anywhere on your body

Also in the bag I have elbow, wrist and knee bandages. I’m an old man, a fit old man, but you just wait till you get to my age, and try and hit the ball harder than when you were eighteen. Your joints just cannot take it. I never go on court without an elbow brace.
When I gave sixty hours of on-court lessons per week in clubs, my elbow suffered. With workouttennis.com I am principally playing and practising match tennis, much harder than before you'd think. However, the pain is now much less a hindrance.
 

Take precautions!

The wrist support is a funny one. I’m a wristy player. I’ve heard coaches and experts rubbish my technique because I use so much! They may be right, if you are comparing my hitting with what you see in the coaching manual models. But that’s how it is, and I like the way I hit. This puts strain on my wrist, and the wrist support seems on the face of it to block my wrist, to stop that wristiness in the shots. I don’t really want that, but I actually believe that the opposite happens. The wrist support gives me confidence to throw my wrist at the ball with even more recklessness. When the support isn’t there I am careful and reasonable with my wrist. When it is there I start hitting differently. So the wrist support is a mood thing. I can’t say that I’ve ever had any significant wrist injury.
 

Confidence is everything

 Now, there is something in my bag that is extremely odd, and makes me a laughing stock, or more respectfully, he’s the “guy who plays in a golf glove”. Since the early days, but with increasing age, I have had chronic problems with blisters and splits on not only the playing hand, but the other one too.
If you watch me on a normal match day, and I take the glove off, I have a plaster, with strapping over my forefinger bottom joint, and thumb bottom joint. There are various other hardenings of the skin, and crevasses, especially on the pads of the fingers and under the finger nails and in the webbing. My right hand is a terrible mess, and it’s getting worse!

So on the worst areas I have some proper bandaging, but the rest is protected by a soft, all leather, golf glove (in fact a glove for a left hander in golf, I am right-handed in tennis). I buy the best golf gloves too. It’s a terrible expense, because they are not really designed for tennis, and so they too split in those worst areas. After a few matches they get thrown out when the holes appear. If I wanted to get really rich, I’d go to the Golf Glove manufacturer, and produce a “tennis glove.” I not so sure about demand, however!

The blisters and splits are a chronic problem, and for which I smear all sorts of creams, liquids and powders morning and night on medical advice. Sometimes this seems to work well. At the moment, we are in the middle of winter here, my hands are just doing their own bad reaction thing, and it’s very disagreeable.
 

Research into tennis injury.

I have a big towel in the bag, so I sweat a great deal. Don’t laugh! If you ran around as much as I do, you’d sweat! I have shampoo, deodorant and a change of clothes, always, so you’ll be also glad to hear I’m the cleanest, sweetest smelling guy down at the tennis club!

I carry three rackets in my bag. That tells you I either keep changing my racket, or I break strings, and it’s the latter. I play with a wire-like, seemingly indestructible, string, and I break a string, in matchplay, after about four hours. In practice I break the same string after eight hours. Incredible, don’t you think? I know a little bit about string technology, but this is simply the fact that in matches I hit the ball harder and spin the ball more viciously.

Emergency food is available in the bag. Every now and then I get my eating wrong. I'm not perfect. A wave of dizziness creeps over me, and I can hardly lift my racket. Eat a muesli bar and I'll guarantee you'll be feeling OK in twenty minutes. In that twenty minutes you might have lost the match already! Muesli bars vary a lot, but I’ve found some great ones. When I have permission to recommend them to you I’ll give you the link!

There are plenty of new balls in my bag. Only my favourite variety are stored, always the same ones. I hate to say it, but they're the most expensive ones. I'm working on the sponsorship as I write!

In the bag side pocket, I've got my medical certification and licence, which is obligatory in match play. I’ve got a Euro 5 note in there, where I might be tempted to pay exorbitant club prices for chemicals-filled drinks for my opponent. If I can't beat him I can poison him!
 

Federation obligations