By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Sunday, July 30, 2023
Andy Murray trained for the sticky swelter of the US Open Series spinning in steam.
Former world No. 1 Murray met the media in Washington, DC today ahead of next week's Mubadala DC Citi Open.
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The 2012 US Open champion shared how he acclimated from much cooler temperatures at home in London earlier this month to high heat and humidity of Washington, DC and later the US Open.
Murray uses pedal power and his home steam room to replicate scorching swelter of Northeastern August conditions.
"In preparation before I left to come here, I was doing a lot of bike sessions basically I can do it at home, but I have a room where I can basically use like heaters and I have like a steam room next to it," Murray said. "It wasn't put in there for that purpose, but I put the bike in there and we can, like, open the steam room a little bit to increase the humidity, obviously the heaters to get the heat in the room up.
"Set it to like 35 degrees Celsius and, like, 70% humidity, and then I would do my bike sessions in there."
When Murray wasn't busy pursuing pedal power, he used the sauna to help his body adapt to harsher conditions.
"We'd also spend 20 to 30 minutes in the sauna, as well. So just to try and help with the heat adaptation," Murray said. "Then, yeah, just getting here early enough to give your body time to get used to it, really. Obviously, stay on top of all of the hydration and all those sorts of things as well. Yeah, definitely made sure I did enough preparation before getting here."
The two-time Olympic gold-medal champion will face either American Brandon Nakashima or Aleksandar Vukic in his Washington, DC opener. Murray watched a riveting Wimbledon final that saw world No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz dethrone defending champion Novak Djokovic.
From a prime Centre Court seat, Murray said he learned from that match and studied video of the final to better understand Alcaraz's ability to attack.
"I learned a lot from watching, and I think, yeah, probably something like looking back, wish I had maybe done a little bit more of," Murray said.
"I ended up like taking videos and stuff of the guys and just focusing a little bit more on one side of the net," Murray added. "Looking at their like return positions and their movement between shots.
"Also looking at the the times when particularly Alcaraz looking to play, you know, aggressive and offensive tennis and how he was going about doing that."
Photo credit: Andy Murray Instagram