This article about fitness in the world of pro tennis, appeared in the NY Times in May 2012. It is an excellent take on what players are doing to prepare for hours of high level match play: SPECIAL REPORT: FRENCH OPEN The Strong Survive Match Point By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY Published: May 25, 2012 PARIS — The last time anyone played a Grand Slam tennis match, Novak Djokovic required nearly six hours to finish off Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final. Just what extremes might be required of the leading men on the gritty, rally-extending red clay at the French Open, which begins Sunday? “I think a big Roland Garros is in front of us,” said Ivan Ljubicic, a recently retired Croatian player. “I mean, it’s clay. At the end of the day, how short can the matches be?” Nearly four months since the Australian Open, the memory of that exhausting, record-setting 5-hour-53-minute mini-series of a final remains vivid: for Djokovic and Nadal and for many who watched, increasingly flabbergasted as it extended — grinding rallies and clenched fists — well past midnight in Melbourne. “To see what Nadal and Djokovic were doing late in that match, running each other, pounding the ball, I also was sitting there going, ‘I don’t know how these guys are doing it,’ “ said Doug Spreen, a veteran trainer who has been on tour since 1995 and has worked with Andy Roddick exclusively since 2004. Djokovic, who had needed almost five hours to win his semifinal against Andy Murray, showed signs of physical breakdown. But no one surrendered, at least not until the victory ceremony, as Djokovic and Nadal were relieved to break protocol and sit instead of stand. Clearly the bar is now at a new height when it comes to the homestretch of a Grand Slam tournament. But the Melbourne final was only the latest and most meaningful expression of a trend in which fitness has assumed ever more importance on the men’s tour. It is no coincidence that Roger Federer, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Murray have sometimes traveled without coaches but not without trainers. It is telling that the longest-serving member of Federer’s core support staff is the fitness trainer Pierre Paganini, who formally joined his team in 2000 and first helped him in the mid-1990s. When Djokovic celebrated his Wimbledon victory and rise to No. 1 with a huge crowd in Belgrade last July, his two physical trainers — Gebhard Phil-Gritsch and Miljan Amanovic — were on stage with him, just as they are with him on the road: fine-tuning him, massaging him and stretching him again and again to make sure the elastic Djokovic remains limber and resistant to injury. “I certainly think these guys at the top, they have very large teams they work with,” said Jim Courier, the United States Davis Cup captain and former world No. 1, who was one of the fittest players in the 1990s. “They have become very scientific about their sweat loss and replacing the minerals very specifically with what’s coming out of their bodies. And I think they’ve really taken the science on the legal side up to the next level, which is interesting. I think they also have gotten much better at recovery.” One reason the Australian Open final was the longest in modern Grand Slam tennis history was that Djokovic and Nadal play so deliberately. But their time-wasting quirks should not overshadow the intensity required to compete for the major trophies. The sport, because of new equipment, is more power driven and concussive than ever and it is played in increasingly uniform and comparatively slow conditions that encourage longer exchanges. “The simple question when you play the great players is, ‘O.K., how can I finish the point?’ “ said Paul Annacone, Federer’s co-coach. “There are not many guys who can figure out how to do that against Rafa or Andy Murray. They defend so well, and in most of these conditions, it’s very difficult. Some guys can do it for some points. Very few can do it for a whole match, and even less can do it for a three-out-of-five-set match. I think that’s why we’re seeing less upsets in the Slams. The guys are just too good athletically.” Details of how the top men prepare can be tough to come by. With much of the base physical work taking place away from tournaments, players have the means and the incentive to maintain secrecy. “If you have an advantage, you don’t want to give it away,” Courier said. The stars, who earn tens of millions of dollars a year, can build a professional support team that the rank and file cannot match. “There are so many guys who would love to do it, but it just doesn’t make sense,” Ljubicic said. “If you are ranked 25 or 30, you cannot afford to have three guys traveling with you all the time.” The ATP Tour makes trainers available to all players at tournaments. Tennis federations from some countries, including France and the United States, sometimes provide trainers that their players can use on the road. Some lower-ranked players split the cost of a full-time trainer or fitness coach. But the benefits of personalized round-the-calendar care and handling are clear. “Rafa is going to train totally different than Roger, and Roger will train totally different than Tsonga,” Annacone said. What is clear is that all the stars are spending more time on fitness work or injury prevention, sometimes at the expense of hitting balls. Ljubicic, who retired at 33 in April, said he was playing less than two hours a day in his final years on tour and spending up to six hours a day on off-court work. Nadal, still just 25 but in his 12th year as a pro, said he had cut back significantly on his court time. “When I was 14 or 15, I’d practice six hours sometimes,” he said. “But today is different. When I was 19 and started on the tour, and I was not playing for two weeks. I’d come back back and felt I was completely out of rhythm. That’s because your technique is not fantastic. Today, I can be away from tennis for 12 days, 14 days. I come back and I don’t have a bad feeling.” Communication is critical. Paganini said Federer could sometimes sense a potential injury before he had pain. “Novak’s very sensitive; he can give you incredible feedback,” Phil-Gritsch said. “If there is something not perfect with his body, he immediately gives you feedback: ‘This and this in that match. I feel this way, that way. We have to adjust.’ He’s like a Formula One car.” They experiment. Djokovic, who cut gluten from his diet last year to combat allergies, has made occasional use of a device called the CVAC pod: a chamber that, according to its manufacturers, simulates altitude changes and can aid in recovery and increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. Nadal has used platelet-rich plasma therapy in the last three years to help resolve chronic knee pain. The injections are painful enough to have brought him to tears. The Spanish Davis Cup team also sometimes travels with a portable oxygen tent that Nadal, David Ferrer and others have used to try to improve recovery. “We’re up to speed on all this stuff except for this oxygen tent, which we now need to get the U.S.T.A. to purchase for us,” said Courier, whose team will face Spain in September’s Davis Cup semifinals. But the quest for an edge and the increased physicality also raise the specter of other shortcuts. Courier said he understood the doubts but rejected them in this instance. “I want to be crystal clear,” Courier said. “There’s not a part of me that thinks these guys are doing anything illegal.” Tennis, an Olympic sport, conforms to the World Anti-Doping Agency code, and none of the current top men have been found guilty of a doping offense. Courier, who expressed concerns in 1999 that tennis had a problem with the banned endurance booster EPO, said he now believed in the testing program and that the top players had too much to lose to risk sanction.If so, the question remains: how else do the men handle the new physical challenges? The fitness game has clearly changed for everyone, even if Federer, Annacone said, is still no proponent of the postworkout ice bath, now all the rage for recovery. Spreen said Roddick recently built an ice bath in his new home. Paganini and Spreen said progress had come from optimization and attention to detail across the board. Tennis pros as a group are more systematic about recovery: including cool-down, prompt postmatch nutrition and rehydration, massage and ice massage. Off-court work has also become much more tennis specific, with elements like the long training run and heavy weights eclipsed by core strength training and drills that emphasize the short bursts that tennis demands. “They are doing more explosive stuff,” Spreen said. “Guys are not just doing running to stay in shape. They are running to try and increase their quickness, make their first step a little bit better.” Navigating the calendar and adjusting practice schedules for tournament success are all done at the top level in concert with fitness specialists. Djokovic’s breakout year in 2011 came in part from building breaks into his season. Roger Rasheed, a former coach of Lleyton Hewitt and Gaël Monfils, said there was still room for fitness improvement beyond the elites. But he had no doubt about the requirements to challenge them. “At the Grand Slams today, the question to ask is, ‘How well is my body going to operate in the fifth hour?’ “ Rasheed said. “If you think it’s really going to be a battle and you won’t be able to handle the load, you better do something about it.”
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 16:59:05 +0000
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