Does upper-body work before tennis hurt your game?
Mostly not, because your legs do most of the moving. In a study of 20 veteran men aged about 45, an hour of simulated match play covered 3.2 to 3.6 km of stop-start running, with heart rate around 149 beats a minute, though the ball was in play only 22 to 24% of the time. That is a lot of short sprints, braking and pushing off, all of it from the legs.
Fatigue seems to stay where you made it. Sporer and Wenger had 16 men do sets of bench press and leg press at different times after aerobic training. Four and eight hours later, the men managed fewer leg press repetitions; by 24 hours they had recovered. The authors concluded that the impairment appears localised to the muscle groups the aerobic work used. That study ran in the other direction from a gym-then-tennis day, but the principle carries: a session that trained your chest, back and arms should leave the legs you play on largely as they were.
The exception is the arm you hit with. Every serve and groundstroke goes through the shoulder, forearm and grip, so our view is to keep heavy shoulder pressing and grip work for after you play, or for a day without tennis.
Does the order matter, or the gap?
The gap. A 2022 meta-analysis of 43 studies in healthy adults, led by Schumann, looked at what happens to strength when endurance training is added to it over weeks. Maximal strength and muscle size were not blunted. Gains in explosive strength were, but only when both were done in one session, 20 minutes or less apart; with at least 3 hours between them, the effect was not significant. The authors found no evidence that the order made a difference: what mattered was how close together the two were. That is about what the gym builds over weeks, not how you play that evening.
Those studies used running and cycling, not tennis, so treat them as a guide. For a tennis player the practical version is simple. Put as many hours between the gym and the court as your day allows and, in our view, on a day with both, do first whichever matters more. On a match day, that is the tennis. The fuller science of mixing the two kinds of work is in running and lifting.
How many hours should heavy legs get before you play?
Hours at the least, and a day or two if the sets went to failure. Morán-Navarro and colleagues had 10 resistance-trained men do the bench press and full squat three ways with the same load: three sets of ten to failure, three sets of five, and six sets of five. Failure caused the biggest immediate drop in jump height and bar speed, even against six sets of five, which matched it for total work. Recovery after the sets of five was significantly faster between 24 and 48 hours; failure slowed recovery for up to 24 to 48 hours.
New exercises cost more again. A review of muscle soreness by Cheung and colleagues found it is most common at the start of a season and whenever an activity is new, and that eccentric work, the lowering half of a lift, causes more muscle micro-injury than other kinds. Soreness can reduce range of motion, shock absorption and peak torque, all three of which a split step and a push-off rely on. The review advised bringing eccentric or new exercises in over one or two weeks, and easing off for a day or two after a session that leaves you sore.
Lifting on the eve of a match is covered on a page of its own. In short, anything that day stays short, light and familiar; the evidence, including whether a few fast reps can help, is in the gym the day before a match.
| What you trained | The same morning | The day before | Two days before |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper body: chest, back, armsSporer and Wenger; our view on the hitting arm | Fine for your legs, with a few hours between. Keep heavy shoulder and grip work for later. | Fine. | Fine. |
| Trunk: planks, carries, rotations you knowCheung; our view | Short and familiar only: every stroke turns the trunk. | Fine if familiar. | Fine. |
| Light legs: a few familiar sets, well short of failureMorán-Navarro; our view on timing | Possible if short, with as many hours between as you can. | The safe default for the day before: short, light, familiar. | Fine. |
| Heavy legs with sets to failureMorán-Navarro | No: the drop in jump height straight after was biggest with failure. | No: recovery took up to 24 to 48 hours. | At the edge of the 24 to 48 hours measured. Stop short of failure, or go earlier. |
| New or eccentric work: an exercise you have not done lately, or sets built on loweringCheung | No. | No. | Only a small first dose. Bring it in over one or two weeks. |
- Stop well short of failure on leg days in a playing week. Sets of five, with a weight that allowed ten, recovered faster than sets taken to failure.
- Keep new exercises away from matches. Start them with a small dose on a week with room in it, and build over one or two weeks.
Do tennis warm-up programmes prevent injuries in club players?
Two have been studied in adult recreational players. Neither clearly cut injuries overall.
The first was a randomised trial. Pas and colleagues gave adult players of all levels TennisReady, which its developers describe as two warm-up programmes of about 10 minutes, one on court and one off it, built from cardiovascular, neuromuscular and tennis-specific exercises and done twice a week for 12 weeks through an app, with nobody supervising. Among the 579 players in the main analysis, the average injury prevalence was 37% with the programme and 38% without it. Only 8% of the TennisReady group stuck to it closely, and their lower figure was not a significant difference. The authors concluded that providing the programme unsupervised did not reduce injury rates.
The second was a year-long cohort study, not a trial. Render and colleagues followed 317 league and competitive players aged 18 to 75 who were given Tennis 10+: six dynamic warm-up exercises before play and four static cool-down stretches after it, about 10 minutes in all. Compliance rose over the year. High compliance was not associated with lower overall injury rates across the year; only at the 12-month check did it go with fewer injuries: fewer overuse injuries, but more acute ones. Fewer than half the players answered at 12 months, and everything was self-reported. The routine is free as a handout from Emory Healthcare's Tennis Medicine Program, whose team created the routine and ran the study.
Read both for what they tested: short routines, done by adults without supervision. Neither tested a gym strength programme, so neither tells you whether lifting cuts tennis injuries. Neither shows that warming up before you play is pointless, either.
Where do adult club players get hurt?
In a hospital series of 449 patients treated for a sudden tennis injury, mean age 43.6 (the youngest was 8), 59% of injuries were in the lower limbs, and ankle sprains were the most common serious injury. It counted only sudden injuries, not the overuse kind that builds up in an elbow or shoulder. If an ankle, knee or shoulder hurts, see a physio or a doctor rather than playing or lifting through it.
What does strength training do for a tennis player?
The clearest tennis study is of college players, not club players. Kraemer and colleagues followed 30 women college tennis players, aged about 19, for nine months: one group lifted with a programme that varied over the nine months, one lifted the same way throughout, and one did not lift. Both lifting groups got stronger, jumped higher, and hit the ball faster on the serve, the forehand and the backhand. Serve velocity rose 29% in the varied group and 16% in the other. These were young, coached athletes, so treat the size of the gains with care.
Before you copy the varied programme, a wider view is worth having. The 2026 position stand of the American College of Sports Medicine, an overview of 137 systematic reviews in healthy adults, found that varying a programme in that way did not consistently change outcomes. What it did find:
- Heavy loads build strength. Gains in maximal strength were linked to loads of 80% of your one-repetition maximum or more.
- Moderate loads lifted fast build power. Power improved with loads of 30 to 70% of your maximum, lifted with a fast upward phase.
- Failure is not needed. Training to momentary fatigue did not consistently improve outcomes, and it is the part that cost Morán-Navarro's lifters a day or two of recovery.
What to lift, in our view: the legs and hips that run, brake and push off, with a squat or split squat and a hip hinge; the upper back, with rows and pulls; the trunk; and the shoulder, with light, controlled work for the arm you hit with.
And injuries?
Across sports, strength training has the strongest general evidence for fewer sports injuries. A 2014 meta-analysis by Lauersen and colleagues pooled 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants in mixed sports, some of the trials in adolescents: strength training reduced sports injuries to less than a third, and stretching showed no effect. We found no trial of a gym strength programme in tennis players with injuries as the outcome, so that is general evidence, not a tennis result.
How do you keep lifting through a season?
With less than you might think, if one study in another sport is a guide. Rønnestad and colleagues followed 14 professional footballers who had lifted twice a week through a 10-week preseason. In season, seven did one strength session a week and seven did one every second week, with the same exercises and the same football.
Over the first 12 weeks of the season, the weekly group kept its gains in strength and 40-metre sprint. The fortnightly group lost leg strength and sprint speed. That is seven professionals per group in a different sport, with full-time coaching behind them. It shows that a little regular lifting can hold what an off-season built; it does not tell a club player how much to do.
Two things carry over directly. If you stop for a few weeks, come back the way Cheung's review suggests, over a week or two, so the soreness does not land on a match. And keep the sets short of failure in weeks with matches, so the gym costs you less on court. How often to play is its own question, answered in playing tennis every day.
Fitting the gym around league nights
Start from the tennis you will not move, then fit the gym around it using the table above. For the whole sport, see the tennis hub; for a race block on top of your tennis, see HYROX and tennis; and for other pairings, the crossovers.
Add tennis under You, SPORTS STACK, + ADD, then open its settings. Fixed days suits a league or club night: pick the weekdays you play, and each day you pick is one session a week, with a usual length you set. Choose Flexible instead and the app picks the days. With Pro or during your trial, your coach plans your training around them, and saving a change to your tennis days rebuilds your plan around the new shape of your week. More in Sport settings.
Match moved to Sunday? Move the session and it stays where you put it; one move does not reshuffle the rest of your week. If you want the week rebalanced around it, ask your coach in chat, with Pro or during your trial. It already knows your week, the change arrives on a card, and nothing reaches your plan until you tap Confirm. More in Move, copy or delete a session, What you can ask your coach and Apply a change from chat.
Sore ankle or shoulder? Report it from LIMITATIONS on Home, with a slider from Cleared to Serious. With Pro or during your trial, your plan is rebuilt around what you report. Your coach is a training tool, not a medical service: it will not tell you what is wrong, and it tells you to see a physio or a doctor. More in Report an injury.