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Assessment of Physical Performance for Individualized Training Prescription in Tennis

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Tennis Medicine

Abstract

Tennis requires a complex interaction of technical, tactical, psychological, and several physical components (i.e., strength, agility) and metabolic pathways (i.e., aerobic and anaerobic) [1] (Fig. 12.1). In order to achieve an optimum cost-benefit ratio of training input, goals and contents during physical conditioning must be defined according to the specific workload and the most important limiting performance factors in tennis but also closely corresponding to the individual needs (strengths and weaknesses) of each athlete. The dominance of the technical and tactical requirements for tennis performance can be figured out by an upper position in a hierarchical model of performance-limiting aspects (Fig. 12.1). The weekly training volume has to be adjusted correspondingly, and the respective volume for physical conditioning remains comparably low. Therefore, on an elite performance level, it becomes of predominant importance that physical training has to be combined with technical and tactical training on-court and during off-court sessions that should meet precisely the individual requirements which have to be regularly assessed by physical performance tests [2–5].

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Ferrauti, A., Ulbricht, A., Fernandez-Fernandez, J. (2018). Assessment of Physical Performance for Individualized Training Prescription in Tennis. In: Di Giacomo, G., Ellenbecker, T., Kibler, W. (eds) Tennis Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71498-1_12

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