Tennis asks for an unusual combination: repeated short sprints with hard decelerations, rotational power, overhead work at the shoulder, and enough aerobic base to keep doing all of it for two or three hours. Train for one of those and neglect the rest and the neglected quality becomes the injury.
Nothing on this page is medical advice. It is a description of common patterns intended to help you take them seriously early. Persistent pain is a question for a clinician who can examine you, and the general injury-prevention literature is well summarised by bodies such as the American College of Sports Medicine.
The qualities worth training
- Deceleration strength. The most underrated. Stopping a sprint to a wide ball loads the legs far more than accelerating did. Trained with split squats, lateral lunges and controlled eccentric work — lowering slowly under load.
- Change of direction. Repeated short lateral efforts, not long straight runs. Shuttles and court-shaped patterns beat road running for specificity.
- Rotational power. Every groundstroke is a rotation initiated at the hips. Medicine-ball rotational throws are the most direct transfer available.
- Shoulder and scapular endurance. Serving is a high-volume overhead activity. External rotation work with a light band, scapular retraction and controlled overhead pressing keep the shoulder tolerant of it.
- Aerobic base. Enough to recover between points across three sets. Modest steady work two or three times a week is sufficient; you are not training for a marathon.
Load management beats stretching
The best-supported single principle in sports injury prevention is unglamorous: most overuse injuries follow a rapid increase in load. Not a lack of stretching, not a lack of talent — a sudden jump in how much you did.
The classic pattern is the player who plays once a week for a year, books a week-long tennis holiday, plays four hours a day, and develops shoulder or elbow pain on day three. Their technique did not change. Their weekly load went up sixfold.
The practical rule is to increase weekly playing volume gradually rather than in jumps, and to treat any sharp increase — a tournament, a camp, a new weekly match — as something to build towards over a few weeks. If you must jump, expect to need more recovery, not less.
The four areas that account for most tennis complaints
The shoulder
Serving repeatedly loads the rotator cuff and the structures around it, and pain here typically builds over weeks rather than appearing suddenly. Prevention is band external rotations, scapular control work and — most importantly — capping serving volume in any single session. Practising serves for an hour when you normally serve for ten minutes is a classic precipitant.
The elbow
Lateral elbow pain — the condition commonly called tennis elbow — is a tendon problem at the outside of the elbow, aggravated by gripping and by repeated shock. Three tennis-specific contributors are worth knowing: a stiff string bed (dead polyester at high tension is the harshest combination available, as the string page explains), a grip that is too small, causing over-gripping, and late contact on the backhand, which transmits shock into an already-extended wrist. Address the equipment first; it is quick, cheap and reversible.
The knee
Patellar tendon pain from repeated jumping and decelerating, and general knee load from lateral movement. Hard courts are the least forgiving surface for this. Quadriceps strength, particularly eccentric, is the main protective factor, and shoes with genuinely intact cushioning matter more than most players accept.
The ankle
Acute lateral sprains from landing awkwardly or rolling on a wide ball. Two protective factors dominate: proper tennis shoes with a wide, stable base rather than running shoes, and single-leg balance work, which improves the proprioception that lets you correct before the ankle rolls. If you have sprained an ankle once, the risk of doing it again is elevated, and balance work is worth genuinely committing to.
Warming up properly
Static stretching before play is not a warm-up and there is reason to think it can blunt power output. Do this instead, in about ten minutes:
- Three to five minutes of light movement to raise temperature — easy jogging, side-shuffles, skipping.
- Dynamic mobility: leg swings, hip openers, trunk rotations, arm circles, band external rotations.
- Progressive hitting: mini-tennis inside the service boxes, then to the baseline, gradually adding pace.
- Serve before the first game. Nearly everybody skips this and then hits their first full-power serve completely cold, which is precisely the loading pattern the shoulder tolerates worst.
Save static stretching for after play, when it is useful for flexibility and does no harm to performance.
Recovery
Sleep is the single most effective recovery intervention available and the one most readily traded away. Beyond that: refuel and rehydrate in the couple of hours after playing, keep at least one genuine rest day a week, and treat a niggle that persists beyond a week or two as information rather than as something to play through. Overuse injuries are far easier to manage early, and the players who lose whole seasons are usually the ones who did not stop when it was still a niggle.