Trials and Tribulations

Hi all,

…and greetings from my spiritual home, Delray Beach,Florida. Its great to be here with our team as it’s a place I have spent a lot of time in the last few years and an area of the world that is incredibly tennis rich and a fantastic environment for top class players to improve. The facilities and culture here are set up for athletes with long, hot days, plentiful gyms and a positive atmosphere.

With my role within the MCTA as Physical Conditioner I will mainly be talking about the trials and tribulations of training high potential players… (And believe me I do mean THEIR trials and tribulations not mine!), the types of training we are doing and how their development is going. Talking of such trials we had an incident today where two officials of the tournament rushed to help Chris Llewelyn when he pretty much fell out of the gym after a session and after asking if he was ok got a breathless response from the crumpled heap on the floor stating one word…”fitness”. Good answer I thought!

My aim in the ten weeks out here is to use the heat to really work on the endurance component of the players conditioning and the next two weeks the coaches have very kindly “donated” the players to me to prioritise this. The good news is that as this block of training is the toughest block there should be some interesting moments to report on and some great work done. Next week I will train the players twice a day and they will just maintain their tennis for one hour in the evening so all their energies can be focussed on endurance.

Alongside this we have players who need to gradually increase their body weight so via daily trips to the gym and sensible nutrition this should also be achieved. On this front, congratulations to Anna and Ilija to have already put on 2 kilos of muscle since October 1st.

So expect updates from the track and the gym on our progress and also expect blogs from possibly the most unpopular man in Florida right now…well at least for the next two weeks anyway!

See you on the track,

Jez