How much does a tournament weekend take?
A lot, and for longer than the weekend. The main study is small. Ojala and Häkkinen followed eight national-level male tennis players, about 23 years old, six of whom had held a professional ranking, through a three-day indoor tournament: one two-hour match a day, then two days of rest. Their maximal leg force was 8% lower before the second match and 16% lower before the third than before the first. Their rate of force development, how fast the legs produce force, was down before both and still reduced two days after the last match. Leg soreness was still up on both rest days. It seems, the authors write, that two days of rest were not enough for the explosive qualities of the legs to recover.
Not everything dropped. Jump height and a 5 m sprint did not change significantly between matches, and the authors note that testing during each match made it a little harder than a normal one. A second study points the same way. Gescheit and colleagues had seven well-trained men play four-hour matches on four days in a row. From the second day, the players moved less and their jump before the match and sprint after it were down. Serve accuracy after matches fell, and soreness and fatigue rose every day. Yet the effort they reported did not change: they were doing less for the same felt effort.
Your matches are probably shorter. In 52 male amateur padel players, matches averaged about 57 minutes, and jump height and grip strength held up across a single match. What the tennis studies add is the stacking: match after match, with no full recovery between. BJJ stacks harder still: a review of the sport's research puts it at four to six matches in a day, and says aerobic fitness can be relevant to recovering between them.
Fifteen well-trained men in two studies, playing long matches, is a thin base. Read it as the direction: legs lose force across a tournament, it takes more than a night to come back, and the drop may not show in how hard a match feels.
Where does the gym go in tournament week?
Early, and familiar. Keep your usual gym session at the start of the week, using exercises you already do. Stop every set well short of failure: in ten resistance-trained men, Morán-Navarro and colleagues found that squat and bench press sets taken to failure slowed recovery for up to 24 to 48 hours, against sets stopped at half the possible reps.
Then let the week get lighter, and keep all of it familiar: add nothing new at all. Cheung, Hume and Maxwell's review of muscle soreness found it common when athletes first meet certain kinds of activity, and worse after eccentric work, where the muscle lengthens under load as it does when you land or lunge. Soreness reduces range of motion, shock absorption and peak torque. The review advises bringing new or eccentric exercise in over one or two weeks, so tournament week is the wrong week to start a new programme.
Ojala's players had been told to lighten their training for the three days before, a set-up the study did not test. The day before your first match has its own page, the gym the day before a match: a short, light, familiar session or a rest day are both fine.
| Day | What to do | Why, and the source |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Your usual gym session, with exercises you already do, every set stopped well short of failure. | Sets to failure slowed recovery for up to 24 to 48 hours in ten trained men (Morán-Navarro). |
| Tuesday | Normal practice or club session, the last at your usual intensity. | Leaves several days between the hardest work and the first match (our view). |
| Wednesday | Shorter, lighter practice: timing, serves, movement you know. | New or eccentric work brings soreness that cuts range of motion and peak torque (Cheung). |
| Thursday | Light hitting, or rest. Still nothing new: no new exercise, drill or class. | Cheung's review advises bringing new exercise in over one or two weeks; this week is too short. |
| Friday | Rest, or a short, light, familiar session. Pack a warm layer for between matches. | Keeps the day before light (our view). |
| Saturday | A full warm-up before the first match. Between matches, keep warm and moving gently, then warm up again. | Footballers who sat through half-time were 2.4% slower in a sprint; those who re-warmed were not (Mohr, one small study). |
| Sunday | The same routine. Expect Saturday in your legs, even if you feel fine. | Leg force was 8% down before the second match and 16% before the third (Ojala); players moved less on later days while rating their effort the same (Gescheit). |
| Monday after | Easy day: a walk, easy cycling, mobility. If your legs are sore, upper-body work only. | Cut intensity and duration for one or two days after exercise that causes intense soreness, or train less affected parts (Cheung). |
| Tuesday after | A second easy day; normal training once the soreness has gone. | Explosive leg force was still down two days after the last match (Ojala). |
What should you do between matches?
Stay warm, then warm up again. The evidence comes from football's half-time. Mohr and colleagues studied 25 competitive footballers. In one match, the thigh muscle temperature of nine players was 39.4 °C before kick-off and fell to 37.4 °C over half-time. In another, eight players spent half-time doing light activity while eight rested. Those who rested were 2.4% slower in a sprint at the start of the second half; those who kept moving were not, and the fall in muscle temperature was correlated with the fall in sprint speed.
That is one small study in footballers, so treat it as a pointer. A 2023 meta-analysis of three re-warm-up trials, all in adult male footballers, found a moderate benefit for jump height but only a trivial, non-significant one for sprint time. Even so, staying warm costs you almost nothing. In our view, between matches:
- Straight after a match, put a warm layer on and keep moving gently for a few minutes before you sit down.
- During a short gap, keep the layer on and move now and then; with hours to wait, rest off your feet.
- About ten to fifteen minutes before you play, warm up again: easy movement until you feel warm, then a few fast movements from your sport, such as split steps and short accelerations. After a long gap, do your full warm-up again.
- Leave the gym out of the day. The matches are the training.
How do you recover after?
With two easy days. In Ojala's players, how fast the legs produced force had still not recovered two days after the last match, and leg soreness was still up on both rest days, while Gescheit's players were still getting more sore each day they played. Cheung's review advises athletes who train daily to cut the intensity and duration for one or two days after exercise that leaves them very sore, or train the least affected parts of the body. In our view, that looks like this:
- The first day after: a walk, easy cycling or a swim, and some mobility. If your legs are sore, upper-body work is fine; if your hitting shoulder is sore too, leave it.
- The second day after: the same, or an easy hit if you feel like it.
- Then: back to normal training once the soreness has gone, with no big session to make up for the weekend.
Pain in a joint, or pain that does not ease after a few days, is a reason to see a physio or a doctor.
Five tournament days, sport by sport
General examples from the sources above, not how Smash Coach plans your week.
A padel or tennis club event
Group matches on Saturday, knockouts on Sunday. Padel matches in the study averaged about 57 minutes, so three in a day is close to three hours on court, and the tennis studies suggest those hours carry into Sunday: warm up properly before the first knockout, even if your legs feel fine. More on each sport in padel and tennis.
A badminton county event
Entering singles, doubles and mixed can mean three events in one day, with gaps you do not choose. Badminton is full of lunges, the eccentric work Cheung's review links to soreness, so keep a new lunge or jump programme well away from this week. Between events, keep the layer on and re-warm with footwork to each corner. More in badminton.
A pickleball doubles day
A round robin can mean several short games with long waits between them: Mohr's half-time problem, repeated all day. Stay warm, move now and then, and take a few minutes of dinks, split steps and quick first steps before each game. More in pickleball.
A five-a-side or field hockey day
Short games with gaps between them are the closest match here to Mohr's half-time study, so treat every gap as one: a layer, gentle movement, then a few sprints and changes of direction before the next game. More in five-a-side football and field hockey.
A BJJ open
Four to six matches, more with the open class, and waits you cannot plan. Keep the gym early in the week, stay warm while you wait, and re-warm with a few minutes of drilling before each call to the mat. What to train in the gym is in martial arts, and when to lift around rolling in BJJ and lifting.
Putting a tournament in your plan
A tournament goes into the app as a set of match days. Every other sport is in Sports.
There is no tournament event: HYROX is the competition you can pick under Add event today, with ATHX, DEKA, GYMRACE and running races from 5K to the marathon coming soon. See races and events.
Add your matches instead. Tap the plus at the top of Home or Agenda and choose Add upcoming session, which adds one session on one day. A card underneath tells you what the addition does to your week before you commit, and warns you if it would land on a day already carrying a hard session. With Pro or during your trial, your coach checks whether the rest of your week needs to change around it, and rebuilds the days around it only when it does. See adding something that is coming.
Draw changed and your match moved? Reschedule it and it stays where you put it, and nothing else in your week changes. See move, copy or delete a session.
Want the week rebalanced around the new day, or the days after easier? Ask your coach in chat, with Pro or during your trial. The change arrives on a card headed COACH RECOMMENDS, and nothing reaches your plan until you tap Confirm. See apply a change from chat.
After each match day, tap Mark done and rate how hard it felt from one to ten, with a note if you like. The effort rating is the single strongest signal your coach has about how the plan is landing. See mark a workout done.
Legs still heavy, or something tweaked? Report it under LIMITATIONS on Home as an injury or a fatigue flag, from Cleared to Serious. With Pro or during your trial, your plan is rebuilt around what you report. Your coach is not a medical service and will point you to a physio or a doctor. See report an injury.