Upper body TABATA workout on a tennis court

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

In today's video I've prepared a tabata tennis workout for you. It's a 4-minute sequence of 8 different exercises that we work for 20 seconds followed by 10 seconds of rest. So it's very high intensity. It’s good for tennis players. Why? Because on a tennis court when you play a match it’s also high-intensity interval training so we also play a point for a very short time, very intense and then have a little rest. So it's very similar to tabata training, that's why we are doing it today.

Remember that before you start this high-intensity training you warm up properly, so do at least 10-15 minutes of jogging and just warming up your muscles, getting your heart rate up so you're ready to do this. I'll show you the sequence once but I will also demonstrate some variations that you can use every time you do the sequence. It’s 4 minutes but you should repeat it at least 7 to 8 times. That's a proper tabata workout.

All right, so these are the variations that you can use in different cycles of 4 minutes just to keep things interesting and work on different sides, make it more difficult or easy depending on how you want to adjust your training.

Here are some variations for how we can do the elastic band exercise. So we can do like this, working out our internal rotators. We can do that way, which is also for internal rotators for backhand for left arm and left shoulder. This part. We can do external rotators for the left and we can do the external rotators for the right. One other variation is doing the serve movement and pronation.

For the exercise when you hit the ball without bounce you can do it either on the forehand side or on the backhand side. So this is the variation. For push-ups we can have variations for more difficulty and less difficulty. The one that I did with modification for an easy push-up is with your knees on the ground. The other one, not so difficult, is with your legs spread. And then of course, with your legs together or crossed, or on one leg. For this exercise, hitting the ball with the bounce we can do it either on backhand or forehand. Tricep dips, we can do a couple of variations. One is that we work only on one leg. And the other one with more difficulty, is when you go down and lift your leg up. Go down, leg up.

For kettlebell we have a couple of variations too. One is that we start low and each time, gradually, we bring the kettlebell up high and higher and then again we go down. That's a little bit easier. And then, one more variation is to do it from side to side. So we do one to the right, to the left, to the right. For the slice hitting we are also going to do forehead, so this is another variation. To do the medicine ball a little bit differently, instead of doing it on both sides, you can just focus on one. And we can also do the overhead throw.

So that's it! This is the tabata tennis workout that you should definitely try next time you come on court for your tennis training. It's a lot of fun, you will sweat a lot, you will hit some balls. So as you could see today we did upper body and shoulders workout and in the next video I will cover lower body, legs, and footwork. So stay tuned and see you next time!