McCaw's Method? Better Tennis through Better Grinding

By Chris Oddo

(July 24, 2012) -- They've all been there, even the great ones. That point in a tennis match where they can feel themselves slipping. Sweat drips off the brow, the legs feel like rubber, and the feet stick to the hard-court like flies stick to Vaseline.

And even if they get through that moment of truth and hundreds of others like it, they’re all eventually going to end up here: that point in a tennis career when they can feel themselves slipping.

That's where men like Allistair McCaw come in. In an era where the emphasis on strength and conditioning is greater than it ever has been in tennis, a player's success is more dependent on men like Mccaw and his colleagues than ever before.

A record 37 men aged thirty or greater entered this year’s French Open draw, and at Wimbledon for the first time ever, both the men’s and women’s singles champions were older than 30.

Age is no longer the curse that it used to be in professional tennis, and today’s advanced strength and conditioning techniques are allowing older, more dedicated players to gain the edge over their younger counterparts.

With an emphasis on movement-based strength training, proper recovery and flexibility, McCaw is hoping to help guide his current stable of clients (he just finished a stint with two-time Grand Slam winner Svetlana Kuznetsova, and currently he works with the likes of Xavier Malisse, Kveta Peschke and Mirjana Lucic) to their peak performance.

Tennis Now invited him to share his views on tennis and fitness. Naturally, the 15-year veteran of the sports performance field had a lot to say.

McCaw on Training a 30-something like Xavier Malisse:

Xavier Malisse, he turned 30 and many had written him off after having two years out due to injury. His goal was to stay healthy and fit and this involved me monitoring his training every single day and assessing each practice. Some days we would push and some days we couldn’t. There was more emphasis on things like prehab, injury prevention exercises for his shoulders, hips and core.

Xavier had a full year with me injury free from March 2010 until April 2011. I believe that you can catch symptoms early and stay one step ahead, and enjoy an injury free season like he did. But when you reach that age, there’s going to be more aches and pains.

On weight training for tennis:

"To be honest with you I believe that weight training can do more harm than good. It all depends on the type of weight training. Anyone who has trained with me will tell you that I'm not a big fan of weight training. As a matter of fact I don't think I've had a player sit down on a weight machine for over five years.”

"Getting stronger is important for the players but more important is being fast, strong and athletic.”

On his preferred type of strength training:

“Instead of slow, isolated movements like you would train on a machine in a gym, I would have my players doing more plyometric-type training for explosiveness, jumping, that type of stuff. My strength training involves a lot of resistance band work, a lot of resistance tubes, it’s not just keeping the muscles strong, but it’s keeping them what I call strong and long. It needs to be explosive it needs to be loose.”

On combining movement and strength:

“From a strength point of view I not only want my athletes to do strength training but strength training that involves movement. For example, having a player doing a tennis-specific movement drill incorporating a medicine ball or bands or cables. That would be my form of strength training for a player these days – it’s about movement.”

On Why Weight Machines aren't his thing:

“If I do weight training with a player, it would only be with free weights – which gives them a free range of movement – and it would be functional type of training. You know when I see players working on machines in gyms it’s just non-beneficial. You’re not sitting [in tennis], you’re not doing a straight movement. The body is 80 percent rotational, so train your body rotationally.”

On movement:

“It’s about training movements and not necessarily muscles. Every aspect has got to have a collaboration with movement. Flexibility, dynamic flexibility, strength. Strength is movement.”

On flexibility:

“We have a strength element in the movement, now we have a flexibility element in the movement. So it’s all attached to movement. And that stretching would be dynamic flexibility. So it’s movement in tennis – lunging, side-lunging, open stance, closed stance, rotation stretching – where you’re going beyond the range of motion.”

On assessing strengths and weaknesses of a player:

“My basis is around injury prevention and movement. I would watch a player in a match, having the camera on them specifically, seeing where their areas of weaknesses are. For example: Are they slower out of the backhand corner of the forehand corner? Are they taking one too many steps unnecessarily? Are they getting enough load on their legs to push off explosively? Is their split step wide enough?”

On abs

“Abdominal injuries are due to, in my opinion, the nature of incorrect training. I don’t have my athletes doing conventional crunches because the game is about opposite sides. We call that transverse abs which is running diagonally across your stomach. You are rotating the whole time in tennis so your abs have to be strong in a rotational, transverse sort of way.”

“I find that a lot of the abdominal injuries come from incorrect training where the player is doing too much work straight instead of doing more rotational exercises with a medicine ball where you are going across the body just like you would in tennis.”

On motivation:

“It's a huge factor. In my job you have to bring energy every day. A player is not hiring you to hear your problems, your issues. You’re trying to create a positive atmosphere, bring energy, and get the best out of the player, the team, and the environment.

Also I’ve never been one that’s afraid to go the distance, running with them, doing the exercises that they’re doing, challenging them. It’s not just by work, it’s by actions. Definitely being a motivator is a huge, huge, huge part of my job.”

Allistair McCaw is a sports performance specialist based in Bradenton, Florida. Read more about McCaw's methods on his Facebook page.

(Photo Credit: Allistair McCaw)