OLF @ The LTA with the Women’s Tennis Team
OLF has been recruited to work with the Women’s British tennis team for their preparation work for next year’s season. It’s early days, but preparation has already started for next year’s tournaments and OLF are helping out with their strength and conditioning. As I was kindly reminded before we started, their season never really stops and they get very limited time off. So OLF had to make the today’s training, fun, exciting and challenging! At the moment, the team are working through their 2 week pre season strength and conditioning camp run by LTA strength coach Steve Kotze. Our mission from Steve was to get them mobilised, moving and more powerful. Sounds like the perfect mission for OLF! Our kit list for training day 1 was made up of boxing kit, kettlebells, Bulgarian Bags, HIRTS trainers and a stopwatch!!
The first area we focussed on was mobility, with tennis players one of the major focus areas is to improve mobility through the ankle, hip and thoracic/shoulder complexes (isn’t everyone’s!). After some great warm up games to wake the girls up, we did a sequence of mobility drills and mobilisers to help open up the major complexes. With the athletes function and range improving it was time to get them doing what they really wanted to do… Box! For some reason this is what they were really here for, something to do with a lot of aggression that needed to be let off! There are some key cross over’s from boxing to tennis the major one’s being the ability to apply power through the body and transfer this into the levers (arms), utilising ground reaction forces to get maximal power through the body and finally learning how to breathing can effect power production. After a bit of time explaining and practicing the techniques it was time to get the gloves on and go for it. The surprise on the coach’s faces was great when the girls applied this new knowledge and their punches were knock outs!
Once we’d successfully got the results from the boxing session that was required it was time to introduce the British tennis team to Bulgarian bags! The bag is a great tool for power and force production, plus the movements are tri-planar and really work through some of the chains that a tennis player needs to improve. We spent some time looking at the spin and the arm throws to teach them the major body mechanics and then it was time to get that grip working! A few circuits of spins, power snatches and arms throw did the job and the forearms were starting to burn!
The finale was a brilliant mix of speed resistance work, power, agility and quickness. Using the HIRTS trainer we got our athletes clipped in as the coaches became the anchors. The first drills were focussing on agility and quickness in different planes of motion. After some forward facing and backward facing sets of this we moved into some speed work around the court. This worked really well to get the athletes changing direction and performing similar lateral movement patterns to on court movement. The final part of the HIRTS training section was for anaerobic conditioning where we worked on straight line movement with a mix of sprints, jumps and high knee drills. The competitive spirit was coming out and the girls worked right through to the end.
After all that intense work, day 1 of the OLF’s conditioning work with the LTA was over and it was time to pack up and head back to the training centre. It was great to work with these athletes and help get them ready for next year’s season. We’ll be back there next week for part 2, it’s going to be more intense and more challenging!
Check out the clip below of the training session and keep an eye out for part 2 next week.
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Tags: British Tennis, bulgarian bags, HIRTS, kettlebells, LTA, OLF
