Tennis - a workout or a game?

The term workout didn't exist when I learned tennis. It was expected that you were to get fit, but that involved running round the block a few times in the few weeks before a tournament. How far we have come.

I'm guessing, but the first time the word workout broke out on the world stage was probably from Jane Fonda. I'll let you look up the complete Jane Fonda story, but she was a famous Hollywood actress who not only managed to maintain her acting skills well into older age, she also managed to look great too.

I'm sure part of the motivation was to prolong her career, but most of it must have come from her inner desire to look and feel great for as long as possible. Living in California she had better opportunity to exploit this than anyone else. California already had this reputation for sunshine, fruit, outdoor living, being free, successful and revolutionary. The Hollywood film boom, together with TV series, engendered a film star that was an ideal, a role model for all viewers around the world.

Schwarzenegger followed soon after. Although he went down a more bodybuilding, than a workout, route, there is no question that the two ethics are closely linked.

Muscle-bound

Jane Fonda created a workout for women called aerobics. Men may scoff at this dance routine, but viewed purely as a physical exercise, aerobics are excellent for all sportspeople. It is fun, and easy, for all ages, and targets muscle groups that we forget how to use otherwise. I was persuaded to do aerobics classes several times, and although the classes were about 95% women, I really enjoyed all of them.

Supple

The term aerobic became synonymous with dancing, prancing women in leotards, but in fact was pinched from biology.

There are aerobics and anaerobics, both being those bodily exercises that require oxygen. With aerobics the oxygen demand of the body is below that needed to carry out the exercise. Therefore these will be longer, softer, endurance type exercises. You should not get puffed!

An anaerobic workout is nasty. There will be excessive oxygen demands, so sprinting, bodybuilding, and sprint road cycling will belong to this group.

Aerobic

Lance Armstrong famously claimed that all he did in his varied off season training programme was prepare himself for his Tour de France aerobic nature of cycling, by doing a lot of anaerobic training.

By the time the big one came along, the Tour de France, he'd ride round France on an aerobic exercise, that is, in complete oxygen comfort.

The workout ethic

ATP

In aerobic exercise oxygen is ever present and plentiful, so you burn off fat and glucose in order to produce Adenosine Triphosphate, the main energy carrier. Glucose is the most readily available energy source, so will be burned first. Fat needs breaking down to produce glucose, which takes time.

Sometimes you can be at zero on glucose, and the fat is being converted, but not quickly enough to produce any glucose energy. Here you will be completely dead, hardly able to put one foot in front of the other.

Some people say that playing tennis singles is always an anaerobic activity, requiring sprints, power, heavy acceleration. In fact playing doubles properly is much the same. For me they are both anaerobic - explosions, with limited, or dangerously insufficient, oxygen supplies.

Violent energy burns

An aerobic workout base is great for tennis because, over time, it gets the body to build up greater comfort levels when hitting balls. You develop endurance. The next time someone tells you that they hit balls for eight hours in one day, you know how they did it - it was nearly all aerobic!

A tennis match is largely an anaerobic exercise, with violence and oxygen burn at stress levels for potentially three hours. We mustn't forget the rest periods between points, that make it a manageable anaerobic power and strength test.

On my workout pages I'll be recommending sites that deal with these two types of exercise. You need to train both, and be aware of which type of exercise, on or off court, you are doing.

The objective, getting fitter, is to raise your aerobic threshold - play a tennis match in comfort. The way to raise this threshold is to have anaerobic exercises of various types in your routine.

Start with a little aerobic medicine ball one!

An easy aerobic workout

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