Game, set, match: Ace your tennis skills

Tennis is a full-body, explosive sport. The game focuses on agility, endurance and rapid movement. Learn more about the benefits of tennis from a Baylor College of Medicine orthopedic surgeon.

“Tennis has a lot of forced pauses and explosive short bursts of activity, which is high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. The rapid elevation of heart rate with HIIT is beneficial and a more efficient way to workout and get cardio than jogging for example,” said Dr. Adil Ahmed, professor in the Joseph Barnhart Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Baylor.

Any activity that has an athletic component and balance component is not only beneficial for physical health, but for the nervous system as well.

Benefits

Tennis works all parts of the body. A tennis swing is generated from the core, requiring players to rotate their torso and hips. The core also works in strokes, as well as starting, stopping, turning and changing directions constantly. The legs, quads, hamstrings and glutes also work constantly with lateral movements.

Players use their pecs, lats, shoulder, deltoid and rotator muscles to generate force and accuracy with a stroke. Topspin on the ball requires the rotator cuff to work to nail fine movements.

Warmup

An active warmup filled with dynamic stretching is important before playing sports and exercising. Dynamic stretching in tennis consists of doing movements in a lighter fashion that mimics the rapid, explosive movements in tennis:

• Light jog
• Light back and forth shuttles
• Skips and hops
• Hip flexion exercises

“The last thing you want to do is go cold into an athletic activity. Your muscles aren’t warm, your tendons are stiff, and that’s how you get an injury,” Ahmed said. “To prevent that, you have to do enough active stretching to get your heart rate up a bit and a be a little short of breath, which is a true warmup.”

Common injuries

Tennis injuries often derive from overuse and improper form. While tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis, is a common term, most patients who have it do not play tennis or get the injury from tennis. “Tennis elbow” is a common injury from repetitive use, which can even occur in people who use their mouse too much or in truck drivers who spend hours behind the wheel steering, gripping and turning. In tennis, shoulder-related injuries or labral injuries are more common.

“The labrum is the shock-absorbing ring of cartilage around the shoulder socket. When you rotate with force in a forehand or come overhead with a serve, you put a lot of rotational force on that labrum to keep your shoulder stable,” Ahmed said.

Biceps tendon injuries also occur in tennis. The biceps tendon goes through a groove in the bone and is at a fixed point and travels to the joint. This is a common area to get tendinitis because any tendon that has a fixed point and moves frequently adjacent to that point is a stress point.

Wrist injuries, especially in the pinky side of the wrist, often stem from strokes. When using the wrist too much as opposed to the entire arm, that side flexes down at the end of a stroke and can lead to a compression of a shock-absorbing disc, which can result in chronic overuse injuries.

While rotator cuff tears are less common in tennis and more common in falls, people can get rotator cuff sprains in tennis from serving hard or hitting a shot with improper form.

Lack of warmup or inadequate footwear can result in ankle sprains.

Injury prevention

Dynamic stretching and a proper warmup are crucial components of injury prevention in any sport. Ahmed stresses the importance of not rushing through a warmup: It should take a solid 15 minutes so the body is warm and ready.

Proper form is required in the forehand, backhand, serves and volleys to prevent injury. The form must be correct instead of just overpowering the ball to get a hard hit. The feet must be planted when swinging and rotating the torso, and the shoulder gets into it to follow through the movement.

“In any sport that involves an instrument, there is a proper form you need not only to hit the ball hard and fast, but to repeatedly hit it without getting injured. Sometimes you have to hit the ball quick and that reaction can force you to have improper form, so adequate warmup and having good form as you play and not having the form drop off as you fatigue is important,” Ahmed said.

People often do not want to take the time and effort to seek guidance to address lingering issues and overuse injuries. Convincing patients to take time away from their sport or hobby is a challenge, but avoiding care leads to more pain and worse form.

“The injury gets worse; it spirals out of control and there is increasing pain when you try to push through it. The first thing that goes is your form, and you start compensating and having abnormal motion patterns. Those put you in a position to get more injured, and you’re in a downward spiral,” Ahmed said.

By Homa Warren