Just like in life, remaining balanced is one of the biggest challenges in your tennis and fitness training.
In life, you need to balance your family, work or school, chores, studies, cooking, health and other responsibilities.
In your training, you need to find the right balance and give equal attention to building strength, power, flexibility, quickness, your sport-specific skills, mental toughness and injury prevention. If you neglect any element for too long, it will create problems.
Your body needs to be properly balanced as well or problems will begin to crop up.
Playing tennis and then sitting a lot when you're off the court creates a chain reaction of imbalances in your body. Too much sitting shortens the hip flexors and causes a dysfunction in your gluteus, which prevents you from an optimal running or walking gait. Playing tennis creates more imbalances due to compensations, and will lead to more problems down the road.
The Importance of Feet and Hips
Your goal as an athlete is to keep your body as balanced as possible. Your feet and hips are the foundation for optimal movement and functionality.
For a lot of people, feet training is boring. I can't stress this enough: You need to pay attention to your feet. It's not that difficult. You can do it anytime, anywhere, and every little foot session will make a significant difference in the long term.
More: 7 Exercises for Fitter Feet
The hips are your powerhouse. All athletic movement initiates in the hips, and any hip dysfunction spreads around your body just like the circles on the water when you throw in a pebble.
You might not feel any compensations now, but soon it will show up in your body with tightness, pain, shortened muscles, weak muscles, tendon inflammations and even worse problems. Rather than reacting to your issues when they show up, a much better approach is to pay attention to your body now, so you never need to get to the stage of discomfort and pain, and possibly laying off your training.
When the kinetic chain gets off balance, it will affect many other joints and muscles in your body.
