Lower body TABATA workout on a tennis court

Hi there! It's Gaby from fitintennis.com. I'm a tennis head pro and fitness instructor for tennis players here in Barcelona.

This video today is the second part of tabata tennis workout that I've prepared for tennis players to get in a good physical shape. This time around it's focused on your lower body so mainly the legs. We are aiming at speeding up your footwork, becoming more agile, developing more explosiveness and endurance on a tennis court.

So what is tabata? Tabata is a Japanese style workout. It's a 4-minute sequence of eight different high intensity drills that are performed during 20 seconds and then between each of them there is a 10-second rest. It's an interval training so very similar to what we do on court when we play a match, meaning we need short bursts of energy to play a point and then we need a short break to quickly cool down. In this video, I will show you the sequence only once but I will also demonstrate some variations that you can use to make it more complicated or easier. So remember, this one sequence is 4 minutes and in order to do it properly you should do it at least seven or eight times. Remember that before doing any tabata workout you need a proper warm-up. You should do some light jogging, maybe some butt kicks or knees high. Also some dynamic stretches, so you properly warm up your quads, hamstrings, calves and hips.

All right guys so let's get started!

Now, let's see the variations, how to make it easier or more complicated for you. So first, in order to make it easier you can just simply separate the hurdles a little bit. You can also use lower hurdles so of course that would be easier but if you separate them and jump forward instead of sideways that should make it easier. So it would look like this. And if you want to make it more difficult then you can just jump with two feet together so that would be like bunny hops. So in the next exercise I was sprinting to the net and hitting a drop shot. So in order to make this exercise easier you don't have to use the racket. You simply sprint to the net and grab the ball with your hand and return it to your coach. And another variation for this one is that you can put the cones on the other side of the court and run towards your backhand so you can actually slide and hit the backhand drop shot.

For the hoop if you want to make it simpler then you can just reduce it to one type of jump. You can for example go in and out all the time instead of variating or you can go in front with one leg and then in the next round when you repeat the whole tabata you can do the other leg. To make it complicated you can just do one leg so jumps on your right in and out and when you repeat the whole tabata then you can do the other leg. All right, for the next exercise when I was hitting the balls from side to side instead of hitting you can just simply use the balls and you can run from side to side putting them on the lines. It would look like this.

In the exercise with the ladder I actually did the one that was quite difficult which is lunging forward and switching your legs so to make it easier, there are so many ways you can use the ladder to work on your agility in an easy way. You can just simply go from side to side with both feet you can go forward, both feet very fast. And to make it complicated you can go from side to side coordinating your legs and going a little bit faster. It would look like this. For the jump forward and explosiveness of your legs to make it easier you can just remove the hurdle, draw a simple line and use it to jump forward. And to make it more complicated you can, for example, I have this stool so I put it there and I first jump on it and then jump off of it from higher.

Next one! For the squad and jump up you can use a medicine ball to give it a little bit more weight. It would look like this. Go down, up, down, up, down and up with a medicine ball that is about three kilograms heavy. The last one! You have the cones and zigzagging between the cones. You can leave this loop elastic band next to the first cone, so very quickly put it around your ankles or around your calf here. And you can do the same exercise just with the resistance between your legs.

So this is a tabata tennis workout for today you should definitely try it next time you do a fitness training on a tennis court. Today we've focused on lower body so on the footwork, agility, speeding up your legs, jumps. We did a lot of explosive training. It was a lot of fun, a lot of sweating. There is another video where you can check out the upper body tennis tabata workout. Stay tuned for more videos like this and see you in the next one!