Which Muscles Are Important For Tennis?

Whether you hit a forehand, backhand, serve or overhead, your muscle use starts in the feet, travels up your legs, through your hips, core, trunk and shoulders, finishing with your arm and wrist. Coordinating all of these muscles is crucial to generating and maintaining power. Use your legs, hips and trunk to generate power and your arms to control the ball.

Kinetic Chain

German researchers, under the direction of Deutsche Tennis Bund chief coach, Richard Schonborn, discovered that professional tennis players generate about 4,000 watts of power during serves and groundstrokes. They estimated you can generate roughly 100 to 150 watts of power per kilo of body weight. This means your legs, hips and trunk generate most of the power in your shots --- not your arm or the so-called wrist snap. Use your calves, hamstrings and quads to start your swing, and your hip flexors, core and butt to continue it. Your trunk helps finish the stroke, propelling your arms forward.

Forehand

Using a more open stances allows you to generate more core rotation and racket head acceleration on the forehand. The forehand is a more powerful shot than a one-handed backhand or right-hand dominant, two-handed backhand --- if you're right handed --- because you use larger upper-body muscles to hit the ball. These include the biceps, deltoids and pectorals.

Backhand

A one-handed backhand and right-hand dominant, two-handed backhand recruit the triceps, latissimus dorsi and anterior shoulder muscles. At higher levels of play, players with a two-handed backhand use the left arm as the dominant arm, bringing into play the biceps, deltoids and pecs, similar to a left-handed forehand.

Serve

Most of the power on a serve comes from internal shoulder rotation, according to Australian biomechanist Dr. Bruce Elliott. A maximal serve requires reactive, or plyometric, power, generated by a deep knee bend, from which you push upward. The core is important to power generation, so you should rotate your upper body backward enough so that your opponent sees your back as you toss the ball. To generate maximal internal shoulder rotation, lead your forward movement with a hip thrust, recommends Dr. Ben Kibler, U.S. Tennis Association Sport Science committee member, in his article, "The 4,000 Watt Tennis Player." Let your arm follow your shoulder forward, pronating your forearm outward as you near contact with the ball; your thumb should point toward the ground after you make contact with the ball, allowing you to naturally decelerate your arm after your serve.

From the Elliott article:

Work by my team has primarily been responsible for identifying the important role that internal rotation of the upper arm at the shoulder joint plays in the service . . .