Tennis is a great way to keep fit as well as being an enjoyable and sociable sport. If you have a competitive edge, that’s even better!

However, it is important to understand the stresses and strains that it can put upon your body, and that warm up exercise and a reasonable level of fitness before you go madly rushing around a tennis court is more than advisable and there are several workout routines that can help with this. You don’t have to be super fit, but even if playing tennis socially, you could easily cause injury to yourself.

Having taken this on board, you can now consider all the advantages of playing tennis. Once you are used to the level of activity that prevails in tennis, you can treat it as the equivalent of an excellent workout, both for your body and for your mind. You may also wish to lose weight and tennis will certainly help you on your way to a fitter and healthier you, at the same time as enabling you to drop a few pounds.

The main advantages of playing tennis for fitness are:

• Improves your cardiovascular performance by increasing your level of aerobic and anaerobic fitness. Your heart works harder, and you burn fat.
• Improves muscle tone and flexibility in your body. When playing tennis at an average level, you will be moving and stretching both legs and arms.
• Pace – once starting tennis on a regular basis, you will increase your speed of movement as you move around the court. At first, this may possibly make you slightly breathless, but this will pass once you start playing regularly, two or three times per week.
• Hand-eye coordination. Fitness is not just about muscle tone or speed, it also includes your brain health. You will be thinking harder about how to beat your opponent, or the next move to make. Clarity of mind improves dramatically once you have started to play and build up your physical fitness.
• Wellbeing – overall, particularly if you tend to feel sluggish or not good about your weight, shape or appearance, playing a good game of tennis will refresh your mind and make you feel better about yourself, and ready for the next game. Just the feeling of being fitter and maybe losing a few pounds will give you a great sense of achievement.

Using tennis as a workout really does benefit you as you are working on improving many different elements

Tennis coaches believe that if you play even only three hours per week, this will increase your fitness and general health by a significant percentage, more so than other sports such as basketball and even cycling.

Equally important to remember whilst playing is to keep moving, between points and after points, to prevent any build up of lactic acid in the muscles, which will slow you down. You can further help your fitness levels by gently warming up your body before playing.

Good pre-match exercise can be simple – some stretching, a few sprints up and down the court, a few hits using a ball machine (if available), or purely just knocking up against someone else who is exercising. You can increase your warm up routine as time goes on. Equally so, do a gentle warm down, to prevent aching muscles.

If you intend to play competitive tennis, there are far more ways of building up resistance enough to be able to play at this level. Longer distance running is essential if you play three set matches (usual at club level) as your stamina needs to reach a higher level.

You will probably find that you need to run at least 3 miles in a day to be able to perform in a much longer match. Once you can cope with this, increase your distance to around 5 miles as many times a week that you are capable of and have time for.

Strength training is also vital to sustainability for playing more arduous tennis

This does involve lifting weights, but it is important to do the bulk of your training standing up, as this is what you will do when playing. The main point of weight lifting, push ups, etc., is to strengthen shoulders and arms, but you also need to concentrate on leg movement and strength through to your ankles.

Training with ‘free weights’ is infinitely more beneficial than machines. Remember to train your whole body, not just one part of it. Repetition and intensity help towards maintaining dynamic effort (speed and force of movement), imperative during competitive tennis.

Sustainability of movement is the key to fitness and potentially, weight loss if required. Above all, enjoy your time on the court – it really does do you good!

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