Ten­nis Work­out for 2011

I would like to invite all of you to fol­low me as I begin my 2011 work­outs. OK, I have already started the reg­i­men but I haven‘t been post­ing yet. Nat­u­rally, as I post, I wel­come your feed­back. Your encour­age­ment, advice, even cri­tiques, are most cer­tainly wel­come. You will be wit­ness to my tri­umphs and fail­ures, suc­cesses and set­backs, I won’t be hold­ing back. My hope here is that by being as trans­par­ent as I pos­si­bly can that you will see the you, too, can get into ten­nis shape and stay injury-free while doing so. If I make a mis­take and over-train, it will be doc­u­mented. If I come across some some­thing truly mag­i­cal, that too will be here for you and you won’t have to pay a penny for it! OK, enough of the build-up. Time to back­track a lit­tle and give you some back­ground on my train­ing methods.

Cir­cu­lar Strength Train­ing for Tennis

You may have noticed some of the ads through­out the site regard­ing CST, or Cir­cu­lar Strength Train­ing. CST is the brain-child of Coach Scott Son­non. Coach Son­non often describes him­self as being born in the “shal­low end of the gene pool.” By this, he means that he was born with, shall we say, quite a few genetic defi­cien­cies. He has learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties as well as a less than per­fect phys­i­cal body to work with.

This is some­thing that I can relate to. Admit­tedly, I do not have the learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, but I am cer­tainly far from a stel­lar ath­lete. I have a slight case of sco­l­io­sis (cur­va­ture of the spine), my knees are slightly knocked (one leg is slightly longer than the other due to this con­di­tion), one eye sees bet­ter than the other and I am not exactly a spring chicken any­more. (At the time of this writ­ing, I am 51. So when I say “after 40 ten­nis,” I mean w-a-a-a-y after forty!)

Get­ting back to Coach Son­non, he has learned to take his per­ceived weak­nesses and turn them into strengths. He has devel­oped a sys­tem over the years that focuses on health first. You take care of your joints. You learn proper bio­me­chan­ics and focus on tech­nique. This really appealed to me and I have been a prac­ti­tioner since 2006. I’m not going to say I am in lock-step with Coach Son­non or CST in par­tic­u­lar. It is in my nature to ques­tion. How­ever, I have been able to adapt the CST prin­ci­ples to fit my per­son­al­ity and pref­er­ences. This is the beauty of CST. It is adapt­able. Or you can prac­tice it “straight out of the box.” You are going to see both of these prin­ci­ples put to the test through­out this year. Some months I am going to be doing “pure CST,” other months – includ­ing this month – I will be doing a hybrid of CST and other exer­cise methodologies.

A Work­out Is Born

You may be won­der­ing why I am doing a hybrid work­out. Why not stick with CST? Actu­ally, I could and I have done so. First off, I would like to show the adapt­abil­ity of CST. I am not alone in this regard. Some CST-certified coaches have been pro­mot­ing CST prod­ucts while at the same time doing joint ven­tures with other online fit­ness pro­fes­sion­als. These coaches choose top-quality fit­ness pros to align them­selves with while simul­ta­ne­ously spread­ing the CST gospel, so to speak. I’m tak­ing a slightly dif­fer­ent approach. A cou­ple of years ago, I pur­chased the P90X pro­gram out of curios­ity. I tried it and actu­ally liked the work­outs for the most part. How­ever, there were a few things that I didn’t like. If you are famil­iar with the pro­gram, right at the begin­ning of each DVD you’ll find an omi­nous warn­ing: P90X is an extreme work­out pro­gram, and if you are prone to knee, spine or other joint injuries, then P90X is not for you. OK, that is a para­phrase, but you get the gist. In fact, the actual warn­ing is more direct than that! So, even though the infomer­cial shows peo­ple of all ages and sizes par­tic­i­pat­ing in the reg­i­men, in all actu­al­ity a vast major­ity of folks shouldn’t use it! After all, if you’re a ten­nis player over the age of forty, you’re more than likely going to have joint injuries of some sort. Ten­nis elbow comes to mind imme­di­ately, of course, but shoul­der, knee, wrist and even lower back injuries are all rather com­mon­place. Yet, in the infomer­cial of a cou­ple years back, they shot a seg­ment around a ten­nis instruc­tor who had turned into a “lardo,” to use his own words. Any­way, I tried the pro­gram, and sure enough, I started get­ting those nig­gling lit­tle injuries around the serv­ing shoul­der, ten­nis elbow flare-ups, and my lower back even started to bother me a tad. So I shelved it for awhile and went back to my CST work­outs. Soon enough, the injuries healed and I was good as new. Yet, there were some things I liked about P90X. For one thing, I really liked the vari­ety. Also, just as in CST, there is built-in sophis­ti­ca­tion to the exer­cises. You’ll hear me harp on this time and time again as this site grows. Any­way, I tried it again only this time I took a CST approach. I made sure I per­formed lots of joint mobil­ity exer­cises and I incor­po­rated more yoga in the cool downs. This made a HUGE dif­fer­ence. I no longer got the injuries. How­ever, the ses­sions are around an hour long (or longer) and six days/week. Need­less to say, dur­ing ten­nis league sea­son, this was not a sched­ule I could keep. What to do? What about a hybrid pro­gram of P90X work­outs and shorter, more interval-based CST work­outs? Aha! Methinks I am onto some­thing! So, that is what I have con­cocted. Now please remem­ber, I have been doing CST work­outs for some­time now and I know a thing or two about putting together a work­out pro­gram. Although you are cer­tainly wel­come to try my work­outs, I would strongly sug­gest you famil­iar­ize your­self with the CST pro­to­col first. Then you can branch out as you start to mas­ter the con­cepts. Some of you may be ask­ing why I would blend inter­val work­outs with longer work­outs. Think about a ten­nis match. The points are usu­ally short. Even if you’re a base­line player and like long ral­lies, the major­ity of your points aren’t going to last more than a 30 sec­onds. How­ever, a ten­nis match lasts awhile, espe­cially sin­gles. So, the ideal exer­cise pro­gram would address the need for short bursts of energy but also the mus­cle endurance to last three sets, should the match go that long. There­fore I am incor­po­rat­ing the long work­outs of the P90X pro­gram with interval-based CST routines.

The Jan­u­ary Workout

OK, here we go. I am going to break down the rou­tines for you. Each day, I am going to record my work­outs for you all to see. If I skip a work­out, you’ll know it. If I get injured or do some­thing stu­pid, you’ll know it too. What I’m hop­ing will hap­pen is that I will show great progress over the year and you can profit from my knowl­edge. We’ll see. Any­way, here goes:

Day One: Intu­Flow^® (RMAX) This is a DVD that I STRONGLY sug­gest every­one pur­chase. You can also find the entire pro­gram on YouTube. How­ever, if you’re like me, you’ll want it in your per­sonal library. This exer­cise rou­tine addresses joint mobil­ity. Since I have been doing Intu­Flow^® for a while, I will be cycling through all four stages of it: begin­ner, inter­me­di­ate, advanced and master.

Day Two: Flow­Fit^® (RMAX) Another flag­ship pro­gram from RMAX, the par­ent com­pany for the CST line. This rou­tine is fun! Bro­ken down into indi­vid­ual exer­cises or into dynamic flows, I’m sure you’ll find Flow­Fit^® as reward­ing as I do. I will be doing the flows since I am quite famil­iar with the rou­tines. I’ll start off on Level 2 and will slowly advance through Level 4.

Day Three: Shoul­der and Arms, Ab Rip­per X (P90X) I will be work­ing the shoul­ders and arms (and if you’re famil­iar with P90X, you’ll know I’ll be work­ing out just about every other mus­cle group, too, just to a lesser degree). This is a GPP (gen­eral phys­i­cal pre­pared­ness) rou­tine to get my shoul­ders ready for a sea­son of serv­ing, vol­ley­ing, and base­line rallies.

Day Four: Power Yoga (Bryan Kest) I’m tak­ing a break from both RMAX and P90X on this day. I pre­fer Bryan Kest’s Power Yoga rou­tines to the one in P90X. Kest allows for more cus­tomiza­tion of the pos­tures, which I pre­fer. Some poses, due to my phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, are more dif­fi­cult for me to get into than oth­ers. I would rather the yoga con­form to me rather than the other way around. Just a per­sonal pref­er­ence. This month I will be per­form­ing the Weight Loss program.

Day Five: Legs and Back, Ab Rip­per X (P90X) This one is a toughie but also one of my favorites. Lots of chin-ups, pull-ups, lower body exer­cises and of course, the core exer­cises from hell!

Day Six: Tac­fit Com­mando (Scott Son­non) Got to fin­ish the week off with the tough­est of them all. This rou­tine is based upon the Tabata pro­to­col of short, intense exer­cise fol­lowed by a brief period of rest, then back at it again. You’ll see as I log the workouts.

There you have it! It’s tough, but I am not afraid. This rou­tine will last four weeks. It has built-in recov­ery, so I shouldn’t be in any dan­ger of injury or over-training. After the four weeks are up, I’ll change the rou­tine. I’ll slowly be build­ing up for spring ten­nis sea­son. Once ten­nis sea­son arrives, I prob­a­bly won’t be work­ing out six out of every seven days. This is the way you’ll want to train, too. Make sure you give your­self time for a life and for your ten­nis! Now, on to my work­out and my first post!