On Episode 235 of The Tennis Files Podcast, world renowned sports science and fitness expert Dr. Mark Kovacs will reveal how to create a fitness plan to level up your game.
Mark is a performance physiologist, researcher, professor, author, speaker and coach with an extensive background in training and researching elite athletes. He is the founder of The International Tennis Performance Association (ITPA) of which I am a proud member, and the Kovacs Institute which is based in Atlanta, GA. Mark has trained numerous top professional tennis players, including John Isner, Sloane Stephens, Sam Querrey, Donald Young and Melanie Oudin. He recently served as the Senior Director of Sports Science for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Mark also co-hosts The Doc and Pro Show, together with professional golfer Jason Bohn where they talk about tennis, golf, sports, and life, and how you can improve your sports performance.
On the show, you’ll learn how busy competitive tennis players can create a consistent training plan, the key to maintaining intense footwork in an entire match, the top health and fitness changes over the past decade, equipment and apps that can help tennis players improve their game, and much more!
I hope you enjoy my interview with Mark! Let us know what you think about this episode in the comments below!
And be sure to subscribe to Tennis Files to receive the latest tennis content to improve your game straight to your inbox!
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On episode 235 of the tennis Falls podcast you’ll learn how to create a fitness plan to level up your tennis game with special guest Dr Mark Kovac hey there and welcome to another episode of the podcast thanks so much for listening to today’s episode and today I have a great interview with Dr
Mark kov if you are a listener of the podcast for at least the past few months I would say then you know about Dr Kovac and he has been on the podcast several times as well as my tennis Summits he is a performance physiologist researcher Professor author speaker and Coach with
An extensive background training and researching Elite athletes Dr Kovac is the founder of the international tennis performance Association of which I am a member of and the Kovac Institute and the itpa has members in over 38 countries and is the leading tennis Fitness performance and injury prevention Association in the world and
I highly encourage you to check out the itpa at www.pa tennis.org and I’ll have the links in the show notes page Dr Kovac has trained numerous top professional tennis players including John nner Sloan Stevens Sam query Donald Young and Melanie oudin and very cool thing that has happened recently is Dr Kovac has
Created and now Co co-hosts a show a podcast called the doc and Pro Show featuring Dr Kovac and professional golfer Jason bone where they talk about tennis golf Sports and life and how you can improve your sports performance Jason I hope I pronounced your last name
Correctly um but in any case very cool show that you should check out as well uh and again check out the show notes for all the links to Today’s Show um so with that today we’re going to talk with Dr Kovac about how you can create a simple and effective fitness
Plan the equipment that you need to pull this off properly and you’ll be surprised at how little you need to uh have a great Fitness uh workout and how to structure your workouts and how you can do so even with a limited amount of time as I know we’re busy adults who
Want to play in leagues um but we have a family and and other things going on so that’ll be really really helpful and as well as the ins and outs of you know what specific areas of the body we should work on and how to determine what
We need uh how to improve our endurance how to lose weight um what types of different um exercise classes out there there are and and which ones may help more than others and a lot of other great things as well so I really hope that you enjoy this interview with Dr
Kovac I certainly did and this is definitely one of the ones that I’m going to go back through multiple times jot notes and Implement to improve my performance on the court and I hope you will too so with that here is my interview with the legendary Dr Mark
KX hey everybody welcome to another episode of the tennis Falls podcast and it’s always a pleasure to have on uh my friend Dr Mark Kovac uh Dr kovax has been a returned guest I featured him several times on the podcast and on my tennis Summits uh because he’s fantastic
Uh you know he studies and and you know preaches what he is researched um and so really excited to have you back on your fan favorite as well Mark so thanks so much for coming back on to the podcast thank you so much for having me always
Enjoy getting on with you talking tennis and really excited to be here oh definitely thanks Mark and I I do just want to shout out um your new podcast you know I was uh checking out my emails from the Kovac Institute and then I found out that you uh you’re a co-host
Of the the dock and Pro Show which is really cool um with your co-host uh Jason bone is am I pronouncing that right yeah so this was a fun project so myself and uh Jason Jason’s actually a professional golfer been on the pigga tour for many many years uh won a a
Couple pigga titles played every course in in the country the you know he’s played all the major slams um it’s just a great guy really a fun guy that gives us a perspective on uh being a professional athlete but in a different sport so we talk a lot about tennis and
Golf and similarities differences and uh then we have on a lot of really interesting guest from the coaching World from the training world and it’s really trying to talk a little bit about human performance and being being the best you can and learning from athletes
But trying to do it in a way that’s a little bit lighter um he’s much more humorous than I I am so it’s good to have a co-host that can can tell jokes and keep it light I try to bring a little bit more of the science and you
Know discuss you know some of these topics in certain areas in depth uh and it’s it’s it’s been a lot of fun so we’re excited so yeah if people want to check it out it’s called The Dock and pro show it’s available where all all podcasts are uh or go to the KAC
Institute site and and look up for more information as well yeah awesome Mark and yeah I actually was listening to some episodes on my way to tennis today fortunately we had a day off and I got to play and I uh heard a interview with
The Jose higares as well as um both of you just talking about um you know the changes in in Fitness over the years and everything so it’s really really fun to hear about that I do want to try and focus today’s episode on adult competitive players and how they can
Improve their Fitness training and I was wondering you know we have this common prototype of um adult players who really want to improve improve their Fitness but they’re constrained by time and so I was curious you know if we could just give um if I could give you just like a
Common scenario of of an adult player who has maybe like five to six hours per week and they want to figure out you know how much time to partition you know in between like actually train like playing tennis and you know your mobility and flexibility and you know
Maybe some agility and then you’ve got you know resistance training and other things uh recovery so I was curious if you could kind of give us some guidance or these players some guidance into how they can best kind of allocate that and any other factors that they should think
About when allocating that time towards different activities yeah that’s a great question it’s actually something we spend quite a bit of time on um we’ve got a fellowship program at the Institute and one of our fellows this uh year is actually uh spending their entire time on the uh adult recreational
Player and the fitness programming around that so there’s a few things that you need to keep in mind one is what are your deficiencies because you want to personalize it a little bit to yourself if you’ve got say good endurance and you were maybe a former athlete that ran a
Lot and you’ve got good um cardiovascular endurance and that’s not an area that really needs a lot of your time then you can pull that off the off the training list a little bit or make it lower down on the priority list um which is good or you may have really
Good strength in general and you’re a strength athlete that you you like to lift weights you lift weights all the time that’s something you enjoy so that’s going to sort of be in your program uh but you don’t have to overemphasize it because you already have a good level of it and that’s
Usually what I first recommend is do a needs analysis on yourself understand what are the areas that you need to get better in go to a resource a coach a trainer someone that has experience and ask them what are the areas that I’m sort of lacking or that could help my
Tennis more could be ability it could be strength it could be endurance it could be power um and then prioritize your list of training that’s first and foremost because you can’t do everything at the max level uh most people don’t have time to do that so that’s the first
Step then based on that you want to make sure when you do do strength training traditional kind of strength exercises lunges you know things like that you want to hit that at least twice a week at a bare minimum ideally you want to try to get three sessions in there’s a
Lot of very good research showing that two sessions a week let’s say a total body strength training workout provides a lot more benefit than one session a week but three sessions a week is even better obviously than two but the difference between two and three isn’t as high as the difference between two
And one so at a bare minimum two sessions a week needs to be on the SK schedule um that’s really really important then as you age you know know that you lose power you lose muscle mass after you know after mid to late 30s it starts to drop pretty significantly if
You don’t train so you need to put in the training but power is one of those areas that most older players don’t spend enough time doing power training you know then that’s something that you get a lot of really good benefit the only challenge is you got to be a bit
Careful because you’ve got to build up to those movements and make sure that you’re doing them with good technique so typically if you’re going to do it based on hours and I don’t love giving recommendations Always by hours because it doesn’t take into account quality uh
Or even quantity of what the work is but in general most people think in time so if you’re trying to strength train at least three hours a week if you can get you know strength training and that includes warmup for the strength training that includes a little bit of
Cool down uh that may even include say a lot of your injury prevention work as well so when I say three hours um your whole session may be let’s say an hour at a time but you do 20 minutes of heav strength work you know 20 minutes of
Speed and power type work um and then you’ve got 20 minutes of warm up cool down and some injury prevention stuff so that’s sort of a bare bones minimum level of three hours on that then definitely want to do some mobility and stability training and the older you are
The more of that you need to do so uh usually recommend at least you know three s sessions a week of about 20 to 30 minutes so you know then you’re at four and a half hours uh and then if you’re trying to if you’ve got a couple
Extra hours a week then you can put in around that maybe some more encc movement stuff or if you need a bit more endurance work you can do more endurance work but four and a half hours a week you can get a really really great program in uh into your training program
And then anything above that you can you know really focus in on areas that you’re trying to you know take to another level uh awesome stuff Mark really appreciate that I jotted down some follow-up questions first off I was just curious um from a physiological standpoint I guess if that’s even the
Right word the the one session a week versus two sessions I was wondering why uh what is the reason that there’s such a huge jump between one to two it’s a great question and a lot of this was strength training specific research so I was looking at muscle fiber recruitment
It’s looking at the ability to hit a certain area of the body on multiple occasions to get the adaptation so it’s got a lot to do with the physiological response to stress and you know physical training is stress and we have to understand the the difference between anabolic and catabolic processes and
Simply put when you’re working out when you’re training you’re actually putting your body into a catabolic state or a breakdown you’re breaking down your body every every time you train physically but you give it time to recover which Spurs the anabolic process and that’s the muscle growth muscle repair and the
Adaptation to an imposed demand so the more times you can get an imposed Demand on those areas the more adaptation you get the better results you have that’s why training two times a week is better than training one training three is better than two but then you also get a
Uh diminishing returns as you train more times per week you actually actually push your body if you’re doing the same workout let’s say if you’re doing the exact same total body routine if you do it four or five or six times a week you actually can one injure yourself
Potentially and overtrain but two you don’t get the same response the body doesn’t adapt as well if you do too many sessions a week on the same thing so that’s the real reason why and some of the you know research behind why two times a week is sort of that minimum
Sweet Spot um and definitely a lot better than one one time per week thanks Mark and is there any advantage besides um you know time constraints to doing a full body workout versus uh breaking it out into certain um body areas or parts yeah so no there’s a lot of ways you can
Split up programs and you know with the athletes I work with we change the routines based on their time abilities the areas of focus the needs analysis so the most common is a total body workout because a lot of it is time people want
To go in and get a full session done at once uh you can do the same exercises let’s say a Monday Wednesday Friday or a Monday Thursday or a Monday Thursday Saturday so you give a day or two in between um and it’s simple that’s why
People like it but a lot of what we do is we try to get in the the weight room or the gym more than two or three times a week so we may be in there five six days a week but doing different things so we may do some people like doing an
Upper and lower body split I don’t often do that with tennis players I do that with other sport athletes and um individuals but with tennis because it’s so uh important to hit the the lower body so frequently because it’s a movement sport we usually have a lower
Body emphasis on every workout with an upper body component um but then we sometimes you can do a front and back side of the body split as well that’s a relatively common way of doing it for certain Sports again not so much on tennis because we need to do a lot of
Posterior chain work backside of the body work so doing front side of the body and back side of the body is a traditional bodybuilding split model which I don’t personally utilize very much for athletes but it’s something that you may hear about the other areas
That I do split it what how we do it a lot is we actually have a power focused Day meaning that a lot of what we work on that day is power focused so you know lighter weight more explosive movements uh then we have a heavier strength day
Where we actually go heavier less reps heavier weight and that’s a focus then we have another day where for most athletes we’ll do a uh tennis specific endurance circuit this is looking at more uh endurance work but with a strength component so can you do say 20 lunges with lightweight in different
Directions without fatiguing that builds up a little leg endurance work so that’s usually how we set up our weeks it’s an undulated periodized model and the reason we do it is we can increase and decrease the volume and intensity if an athlete has a tournament that week or if
They don’t because a lot of the athletes that we work with may play 15 to 25 tournaments a year some even a bit higher than that and we need to continue building throughout the year so we’ll do weeks where it’ll be very heavy on the uh on the volume and the intens
And then there’ll be weeks where our volume will be a lot less still relatively high intensity but if if their normal total volume for that week I’ll give you like an arbitrary number um is 800 on our scale a tournament week and it’s an important tournament their
Volume may be 150 so it’s significantly less but they’re still doing something but their real goal that week is to be fresh for the tournament focus on recovery focus on getting the body to play at the High level possible got it Mark so you know in the USA League World
I guess you know we have certain really important uh tournaments if you will I guess like um regionals and sectionals and Nationals so can we similarly then use this undulating periodization model to like you know ramp you know ramp down like during like around that time of the tournaments basically yeah exactly
That’s the beauty of it is you can ramp up or down um from week to week which is what tennis needs to do we don’t have the luxury always of you know with leagues it’s a little bit easier than say a traditional you know Junior tournament or professional tournament
Schedule because you sort of know when those events are you know a season out you know sort of majority of the time when your matches are and unless you’re in a flex league if you’re in a flex League it’s a little more challenging but a traditional League you sort of
Know you may have a match on Saturday or you have a match on Tuesday and you know that’s your day for matches so you could build your training around those match days which is awesome it’s similar to college tennis in that respect you sort of know when your matches are you sort
Of know the teams that you’re playing and if you know your level and you’ve played in a certain league for a few years you sort of know which teams are better which teams aren’t as good um most of the time so you can actually even prioritize and this is what we do
With our college teams that we work with uh we prioritize matches so if we’re playing a certain club and they’re always really good they always recruit fruit well they always have good players you know they’re going to be a priority One meaning that we got to be playing at
Our best we may not train as hard that week off court because we want to be as fresh as possible for that match but we know we’re going to play another match the following week that they’re not always as good and we should be able to
Win pretty well there so we’re going to train through in a way that week and we’re not going to adjust our our workload down to be fresher for that match because we we know we’ve got bigger matches coming up and we treat it more as a training week so you can do
The exact same kind of professional or Collegiate schedule for an adult league player and team as you know some of the best players in the world do and that’s the beauty about tennis is just because you’re level of tennis and the type of tennis you’re playing maybe isn’t on TV
Doesn’t mean you can’t train like the pros right right yeah I appreciate you know experts like you bringing that knowledge to us um how we can use the Pros training in our uh routines regarding U posterior chainwork I just wanted to highlight that and Ju Just For
You know the viewers and listeners that don’t quite know exactly what that is could you kind of explain that and then maybe like what types of exercises would constitute posterior chain workor it’s yeah that’s that’s a great great great comment to make because posterior chains really just describing the backside of
The body um so when you’re thinking about posterior chain it’s really the uh a little bit of the lower back uh the glutes the hamstrings the calves and it’s usually the need to improve the strength in those muscle groups because most athletes and especially in tennis because of how the sports played our
Body weight is always shifted forward we’re always in that ready position our coaches always tell us get in the ready position be in that athletic stance the return position on the return of serve uh the volley position Get Low Lean Forward all those things that we are
Taught on the tennis court shift the weight forward into the front side of our body or the anterior chain muscles uh which are the quads the hip flexors things like that and those are very strong typically just by playing tennis you strengthen those uh our back side of the body the posterior chain
Unfortunately doesn’t get a lot of extra work when we play so there’s becomes this discrepancy between the front side of our body and the back side of our body and if you increase that discrepancy over time you start getting major imbalances and you get a lot of knee related pain hip related pain
Because of this strength differential so why we say we do a lot of posterior chain work is we’re trying to limit that difference between what the Sport’s forcing us to do in being in those good ready positions but it’s also needing us to strengthen the backside of our body
Or the posterior chain so we usually recommend a minimum of two times as many posterior chain movements as anterior and for many of our athletes we’ll actually do three times so when we say three times for what we’re talking about is we’re going to do three times as many
Hamstring focused exercises as quad focused exercises so that’s a way to try to offset all the extra work that we’re getting on court moving and also the historical adaptations that we’ve had over many years of playing so when we say posterior chain typically what we mean is H string related strengthening
Exercises glute related strengthening exercises so think of things like if you’re familiar with strength training um you know various Romanian deadlifts or deadlift variations that put a lot more um emphasis on the hamstring glute strengthening work such as hip Bridges uh things like that various things hip thrusters there’s all sorts of
Variations of exercises you can do to Target that back side or posterior side of the body thanks Mark and are there any tests or any ways to figure out I don’t know how much of a ratio we need I know you mentioned minimum is a two to
One for a posterior to anterior chain but um any any sorts of tests or ways to to figure that out so we we have some you know equipment and Technology we utilize to actually test hamstring strength quad strength things like that uh it’s not so easy to do on your own
From a pure strength test standpoint um so you you you want to do a few different things first off what for most people what I say is do a wallit and everyone can do a wall set I think most people are familiar with that make sure
That your knee angle though is at 90 degrees when you’re sitting there meaning that your the angle is like this if this is if this is your backside your backs side’s not high like that it’s actually at that 90 degrees and that’s the position and if you can hold that
For 60 seconds usually means your quads are pretty strong um and you may have some reasonably good stability on your glutes so that’s step one if you you can do that then you do have to somewhat be concerned about your hamstring um strength because most of the time people
That are really good at that means that they quad you know strength and development is reasonably good the next thing that you want to sometimes do is perform a you know a hamstring hip lift and it’s hard to sort of demo it here but basically you’re trying to put your
Foot on the ground on one leg heel on the ground uh and then the other leg points straight in the sky and you want to lift yourself up using your hamstring and if you can do 10 of those without shaking usually means you’ve got reasonably good base hamstring strength
Uh above and beyond that then you have to start adding resistance to test things out and to see how comparable you are the one thing is if you were going to do let’s say a a squat compared to a RDL which is you know pretty much an opposing movement in some respects on
The body parts that they’re focused on they’re not going to have a onetoone strength relationship it’s not going to be like if you can do 100 pounds on one you should be able to do 100 pounds on the other doesn’t really work that way based on uh the levers of the body and
How your body especially your hips hinge so you can’t do a direct comparison from that standpoint very easily what we do is we have some technology that measures strength in certain movements and you can do some comparisons that way but this kind of gives you a sense of you
Want to do more hamstring and posterior chain work and that’s why we usually use some rules of thumb based on what we know about tennis athletes most tennis athletes are sort of similar creatures especially if they’ve played a lot they have similar limitations similar restrictions similar areas where they’re
Strong similar areas where they’re weak the challenge becomes if players pick up tennis late you don’t always know what they look like or if they’ve played multiple other sports at a relatively high level that may have developed certain muscle groups in a very different way thanks it’s brilliant
Stuff Mark appreciate it is there any correlation between tightness in in an area and and strength I just kind of a random question I thought of you know like say if you have chronically tight hamstrings it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re weaker in it or strong in a
Certain area or anything like that yeah so there isn’t a correlation between strength and and flexibility so it’s a great point you made because they’re two variables that are very different some of the strongest people in the world are very tight and that’s one of the reases
Why they’re so strong um because they don’t have a lot of range to go through but the range they have they can load it very very well so as long as they stay in that limited range it’s relatively safe and they can lift a lot of weight but the problem for individuals like
That is you’re strong in that narrow range the moment you get outside that range or you get stretched to your end range bad stuff can happen so from a tennis standpoint having a lack of Mobility or range of motion is in most parts of the body is a real limitation
Because on the tennis court you’re always being pushed to your end range on a wide ball on a short ball when you’re lunging when you’re having to stop rapidly in change direction so you don’t have the luxury of only playing in a really short range like let’s say if I
Was doing the bench press in the weight room you know your range it doesn’t increase or decrease you have a a finite range and you don’t have to be any more flexible than that range and all you have to do is increase how strong you
Can be in that range and you’re going to be very safe you’re going to be safe because that’s the range that you’re training for on tennis because it’s a reactive sport we respond to emergency situations every Point nearly we’re running we’re jumping we’re Landing we’re changing directions we’re you know
Pivoting we’re doing all these things so the more functional range we have and I use the term functional range because there’s plenty of people that can stretch and get a certain range but they can’t load that range meaning that they’re not strong in that end range and
Your functional range is the range that you can actually load into you can actually put weight into and be use uh so it’s really really important to make sure that you train both not just strength because it doesn’t correlate to flexibility or range of motion and just training range of motion and Mobility
Doesn’t automatically cause you to be stronger in those areas so you have to do both and you have to understand how they work together so Mark what’s the process for gradually increasing our functional range so that’s great so there’s a lot lot of work over the last probably 10
Years talking about the difference between mobility and stability because Mobility easiest way to think about it is increasing range trying to increase your range but you have to be stable in those ranges so you have to do a combination of increasing your range like I think most people historically
Have understood stretching you know static stretching or even Dynamic stretching and uh is the ability to increase your range through a certain distance and the there’s multiple ways to do that um there’s assisted stretching where someone stretches you you can stretch yourself uh you can do a bunch of different movements to increase
That range of motion but then you also want to develop stability which many times can be correlated with strength up to a point uh meaning that you want to be stable typically on one leg in one arm and in a certain range that you’ve developed so single leg squats single
Leg movements things like that uh is talking a lot about how stable you are the more stable your core region is you know your abdominals your lower back that entire core region the better you are in a lot of those single leg movements so you may have hip a lot of
The time you’ll hear about hip instability your hips unstable or you don’t have good stability in your hip that may may not be true meaning that it may show up in the hip and there’s some structural limitations in the hip that may cause that instability but a lot of
The time it may be ankle instability that’s causing the hip to give out it may be core instability that’s causing your hip to give out so we we talk a lot about there’s certain joints in the body that want to be stable and there’s certain joints in the body that want to
Be mobile so we have to understand how to train the entire chain to make sure that you’re training it the right way this is brilliant stuff Mark in terms of um the let’s say um a player wants to lose uh lose weight so they can get you know quicker and obviously more healthy
As well uh what is a literature say in terms of what they should be doing you know in terms of obviously you know um high intensity versus low intensity uh resistance training Etc what would you I mean of course you know diets a huge part what training would you suggest for these
Individuals yeah no it’s it’s a it’s a really important area of all movement based the lighter you are typically the faster you will be if you don’t change anything else meaning that no other part of your training has changed why because you’re just carrying less weight and we’re talking body fat predominantly
Muscles a little bit different because muscles are Force generator but fat doesn’t produce force it just takes up energy and and easil you know simply put you add a 30b weight vest to someone and ask them to run around the tennis court it’s really really hard you take that 30
PB weight vest off it feels a lot easier it’s the same as if you’re carrying 30 extra pounds of weight so you’ve got to understand the value of appropriate body composition it makes you a better tennis player and it also protects your joints which a lot of people understand in
Theory but don’t really understand the impact of that you know having an extra 10 20 30 pounds of excess body weight sometimes it muscle itself may not be valuable but most of the time we’re talking about body fat here and the the quick the quicker you can lose that you
Know excess weight the better it is not only for performance but also for injury prevention from a joint specific standpoint so that’s sort of number one uh the nutrition side you do have to touch on because it’s really really hard for most recreational players without focusing on nutrition to lose a
Significant amount of of of body fat you have to understand the basic you know the structure of how people you know lose lose body fat we know fats approximately 3500 calories per pound um so you have to have a calorie deficit of around 3500 uh calories to lose a pound um it’s
Not much more complicated than that this different ways to go about it but in a general sense you got to find ways to create that deficit and it can be through exercise alone meaning you’ve got to find if you want to lose a pound a week you want to find at least 3500
Calories extra in your exercise routine and that’s not only the time you exercise but if you do heavy strength training you get this effect this knock on effect of increase in core temperature increase in adaptation that occurs after do you stop working out throughout the day that increases your
Metabolic rate which burns more calories throughout the day like a strength training session for most people at most is maybe 500 calories they’re going to burn in a strength training session if you go play a a a really great set of singles tennis you may burn 700 800 at
Most you know you’ve got to really book really really play something you know like a a cardio tennis session where it’s non-stop no rest you wouldn’t be playing a match you would do be doing drills for an hour without any rest you may be able to push to a th000 calories
In an hour but it’s really hard to do and you probably couldn’t do that for two hours that you would be completely spent if you did it for an hour so you’ve got to understand how difficult it is to just lose a lot of body fat just by exercise alone you have to
Combine improving your nutrition cutting back on certain things in an appropriate way you know most of the time we talking about you know excess fluids that are calorie based that’s relatively easy to change um it’s sources it’s dress salad dressings things like that making smart choices it’s removing you know a lot of
The fried foods from the diet things that aren’t necessarily a huge change but make a significant difference over the course of a week or a month so the biggest thing you want to do is you want to have heavier strength training because it helps with your metabolic
Rate throughout the day and you want to try to do calorie um your Rich exercise routines that burn a lot of calories in a relatively short amount of time if you are looking at a Time Saver if time is not an issue you can you know do low
Impact walking hiking things like that because most people don’t realize you know you know if if you walk a mile and run a mile you actually burn the same amount of calories during that that time period it just takes you a lot longer to walk so you burn a few extra calories
After you stop when you run because of your core temperatures raised the sweating response things like that but the actual you know amount of calories you burn burn walking and running is the same for the distance that you cover um give or take a few nominal extra
Calories uh because of the the followup uh core temperature side of things so most people don’t realize that and they think okay running is always better uh no I’d rather you walk five miles than Run 2 miles you’ll get a better benefit doing that yeah and uh with a less U
Joint impact I I would think so that’s great stuff yeah for me you know uh diet-wise I actually managed to lose a significant amount of weight by just cutting out unnecessary sugars and and also uh cutting down my alcohol consumption so uh that’s definitely helped a lot um and we actually had Tera
Collingwood uh on last episode uh she’s a dietitian for and a nutrition consultant for USDA so if you need want to learn more about that definitely check that episode out Mark just back to the scheduling a little bit for um training and Tennis I mean is there any
Problem because I I would imagine some some tennis players you know they they heard you mention I think maybe a total of four to five hours of training is it okay to to be training more off the court than on the court like is there any do you have any thoughts about that
Or anything no I mean you know with a lot of our athletes especially in certain times of the year will’ll train significantly more offc Court than on court like certain times in pre-season for example or a training block uh where we’re working on something specific we may do
Three times as much time offc Court than on court but that includes recovery time that includes Mobility strengthening work injury prevention core work things like that conditioning so when you put all those pieces together um it makes sound like a lot compared to how much
Time they spend on court but a lot of these athletes spend a significant amount of their day working on their body uh not only breaking it down through training but also building it back up through recovery and mobility and some other things like that so there’s definitely um value in doing it
But doing it right wouldn’t be good just to go and say run 30 extra miles a week offc court and say that’s your offc court training that by itself could be too much for many people um so you’ve got to be smart with how you use that
Time or if we were saying we’re going to lift weights three hours a day every day six days a week that’s probably not a wise call either because that’s going to put a lot of stress on the joints unnecessarily and the return on your investment is not going to be great
Because the body’s going to break down over time yeah makes a lot of sense Mark so I have a lot of friends who attend you know different Fitness classes and I I did hear you mentioned this a little bit with Jason on on the podcast the doc
And pro show but uh I was wondering if there any of them like I guess I list you know a few that I wrote down are like orange theory and solid core and um some cycling classes and so forth are there any in particular that you think
Are you know more well suited to tennis than the others like I’m just wondering you know in a sense are are some of my friends potentially you know not training as efficiently by going to these classes if if they want to uh Focus their training on tennis if they
Don’t then obviously that’s fine but any thoughts on on these different classes available and their utility yeah it’s is it’s a phenomenal question because there’s so many there’s so many different boot camp variations there’s so many different cycling rowing type classes things like that so the challenge is doing any of those classes
Consistently and that’s the only thing you do is probably not the best strategy for training for tennis alternating some of those classes can be really beneficial um you know every now and then going to a rowing class for conditioning is great um doing that four days a week is
Probably not the best strategy because it’s so limited in the range of motion and the type of movement doesn’t transfer very well outside of cardiovascular and there’s better ways to do it doing a non-specific high-intensity interval type boot camp workout is good for calorie burn um but the challenge is you
May do a lot of say overhead throwing movements or shoulder pressing for you know 100 reps or something like that which many of these programs put in and that can really do a number on your know limitations that many tennis players already have shoulder impingement issues they have limited range of motion
Because of playing tennis for a long period of time they’ve got internal shoulder rotation problems and doing just random exercises and high rep aspects of that can actually injure them and you know we we know that a lot of these boot camp classes you know are very good if they’re taught with good
Instructors but a lot of their programming is designed for how many calories can we burn in the shortest amount of time not about is this going to make me a better athlete is this going to protect my joints in the right way things like that so I always caution
Against doing random sort of group um classes for a tennis player uh you want to make sure that you at least go somewhere that maybe works with athletes so they may offer some of those classes but they also train athletes so the person delivering the class understands
The sport a little bit so they can modify certain movements which is fine then there are things like Pilates and yoga and some of these that do have a lot of valuable uses and unless it’s a super advanced class it’s unlikely to cause major injury um even some of those
Classes though yoga and things like that can put you in compromised positions for a tennis athlete meaning putting your shoulder in a position that is uncomfortable so I always recommend anytime you feel pain or discomfort back off that exercise because just because it’s on the board it’s on the sheet of
Exercises to do everyone else in the room’s doing it doesn’t mean you should be doing it if there’s any pain and that’s a really important selfcheck but again there’s I always say there’s never a bad exercise it’s just a bad exercise for you meaning that that exercise is
Not appropriate for you at your stage the volume may be too high the resistance may be too high the movement pattern may not fit your biomechanics currently so it’s never the exercise’s fault but it’s the program’s fault for you so you have to understand that and
It’s a real tough question to answer for individual athletes because you don’t know what their problems are someone may have a bad hip someone may have a bad shoulder some someone may have torn their ACL twice and they can’t load a certain way so there’s always a program
That’s best for you but again it’s important to to keep that in mind yeah thanks Marcus I think I recall you and Jason talking about how you know somebody can’t just take like a Pros routine and copy it exactly they have to as we talked about earlier in the show
And and just now kind of allocate according to their strengths and weaknesses and what they need so yeah I mean I’ll give you an example right now I work with three uh ladies on the US Women’s national soccer team and they play different positions you know one’s
A goalkeeper you know one one plays you know Center back and On’s a forward and they’re on completely different program I mean they don’t even look similar in what they do um one person has to lift way heavier than someone else because of their position and what they’re trying
To accomplish one has a great training base and can handle certain movements uh one has had a few prior injuries that are limiting certain movve mov ments so just within even a team sport um the workouts are completely different so from a tennis standpoint and with older you know adults and recreational players
That may have a history that is very different than who they’re playing with or against it’s really really important to personalize some of this stuff yeah thanks Mark just curious um what sport is would you say is most similar like I guess when you’re putting out a training
For somebody you know it give uh taking account like the variable variables of different people like what sport would you say is actually like fairly similar in in the way you train the athletes of to to tennis if if there is one it’s it’s hard because every sport is pretty
Different like for example soccer has some valuable footwork things that is useful for tennis but their distances are a lot longer and most soccer players don’t need certain things that tennis players need from an upper body standpoint so you’ve got a completely different training program for the upper
Body uh baseball pitching has a lot of valuable components for the upper body that we utilize with tennis players but everything else about how to train a baseball player especially a pitcher is sort of you know irrelevant because they don’t have to move they pitch and that’s
All they do really so they don’t have the same movement requirements a basketball athlete has to do a lot of changes of Direction stop and start and things like that but you know they jump so much more than tennis players there’s so much more explosive vertically whereas most tennis players are more
Explosively many times laterally multidirectionally um so there isn’t one sport you know that you can easily say volleyball similar in many respects to basketball smallish positions um which is useful for tennis players to train like that but there’s a lot more vertical movements lot more knee related
Pain a lot more Achilles ankle type stuff Cal problems uh we don’t see as much of that in the tennis athlete so typically how I’ve always done it is I’ve taken the best from some of these other sports so we do a lot of stuff that pictures do for tennis players we
Do a lot of stuff that basketball athletes do for the lower body um we do a lot of stuff that soccer players do uh same with football quarterbacks they actually have a lot of similarities to tennis players in what they do they have to move in short distances they have to
React and respond to an oncoming you know in tennis as a ball but in in quarterbacks it’s a person coming at them and they have to react and then they have to throw a lot and they have to use their upper upper body a lot so
There’s a lot of things that we try to utilize from other sports that can make us better at what we do and then discus and shut are two and Javelin are three Real Sports that we’ve also taken a lot of information from over the years that helps us train our tennis players so
It’s a great question and at a young age I’d say play Everything play as many different Sports as you can that are in similar type Footprints to tennis in some respects and make sure that as you age up you’re able to sort of pick and choose um the ones that are most
Appropriate for your body and for your time constraints as well yeah it’s neat how you can kind of take different things from different sports for certain aspects I think I I recall you describing the Ser is a like a shotput um pretty much so um yeah it’s
Closer to a shotput or avin throw than it is to say a baseball pitch um so you know it’s it’s important to understand that just because it’s an overhead motion doesn’t mean it’s identical to all all overhead motions are not the same yeah yeah for sure in terms of um
Players who are training at home I was wondering if there are uh you know maybe like three to five uh or however many you think um pieces of equipment that you think that you know serious tenis players who want to train at home should not should not not have if that makes
Sense yeah no it’s great so we usually talk about this based on budget you know how much money do you want to spend if you’ve got you know thousands of dollars you can put together an awesome awesome gym and never have to leave your spare room
Garage wherever you have it um if you only have $50 you can get banss um you know some band and you can pretty much do a full body work out for tennis with bands for less than $50 um so it all comes down to how much do you want to
Spend the more resources you have the more V variables you can bring in you can bring in Med balls which are really valuable and useful for rotational power um for you know stability for some different things uh but especially in the rotation aspect bands uh are great
Because you can do rotational work you can do pressing you can do pulling you can do lower body upper body uh injury prevention so you can get everything done with bands um if you’ve got you know dumbbells um and you can do a set of dumbbells you know usually for most
Tennis players that we’re talking about you don’t need to go past about 50 pounds for most people you can do pretty much everything with 50 pounds or less and there’s ways to make let’s say You’re really strong and you could probably handle more there’s ways to make those 50 pounds even heavier by
Putting bands on those dum bells to increase the resistance so you know and there’s things called power blocks or um dumbbells that don’t take up much space either so you don’t need a whole rack of dumbbells you can have one handle that has a series of Weights that you click
In or click out based on how much weight you want um so as an at home suggestion those would be my three or four things that could easily get you everything you need for as little as say $30 to $50 um all the way up to say $500 if you
Included the dumbbells and the med balls and you had the whole package and then you can go even higher than that and you can start you know adding things on top of that but in general for most people you can get a phenomenal workout in and
That’s what we do with most of our Pros when we’re on the road we’ll take a small bag of stuff and you know we’ll get a really good workout in it TRX is another one uh you know if most people haven’t seen that is that yellow uh
Device was usually black handles um it looks like a rope really and you can hook it to an attachment and you can do hundreds of various exercises on that um so it’s called a suspension trainer a body weight trainer sometimes people will call it and that allows you to do
Hundreds of exercises on it so it’s not really a major cost limitation to getting yourself in great shape you just sort of have to understand what you like uh what you’re willing to do and get on a really solid program as well yeah thanks Mark um yeah in terms of the
Dumes I I think was it maybe last year or year and a half ago I got these um core was it core Home Fitness D like you said the where you can just click on the different weights and that’s been really great saved a lot of space and
Everything um so things like that in terms of core training Mark I also heard you and Jason talk about this and the importance and how we have to train our cores the proper way you know there’s you doing like a thousand sit-ups and stuff like that may not be the best
Thing so I was wondering what what is the optimal way for us to train our core I mean they could be you know exercises you could let us know about or any other information so that we can properly train our core for tennis so yeah it’s interesting because I’ve been doing this
A reasonable amount of time now nearly two decades and you you go through these phases where certain exercises become frowned upon or certain groups of people say this is a bad exercise to do you should stay away from this exercise and like crunch and situps and things like
That have sort of got a bit of a bad uh rep over the last say five years or so a lot of people are talking about you know all you need to do is planks or plank variations basically isometric exercises so you’re doing variations on a plank or other um it’s called anti-rotation
Training um which is another way to call it is isometrics or variations on isometrics so you’re not crunching um and some of that came about from some research that some really good research that was done on the spine and how many flexions and extensions the spine can do
Over a lifetime and there’s sort of a break point you only have a certain number before you Disc break down and things like that and there’s some truth to that um the challenge is your sport requires you in tennis especially to flex extend laterally Flex laterally extend so you’re moving in all these
Different positions to hit a tennis ball a ton of times so you need to find that balance between we do some flexion we do some extension we do some lateral movements and we do a lot of you know anti-rotation isometric work as well so we make sure we hit everything uh
Because that’s kind of what you need on the tennis court you need to be able to be strong in all these different movements uh you also need to have resist movements sometimes meaning that if you’re over rotating let’s say you’re coming out of a forehand rapidly falling
To your left for a right-hander you need to have oblique strength and and anti-rotation strength in that direction otherwise you’d fall over so you need to train a lot of the times in the reverse of what the movement is that you’re training many people when they say hey
I’m training for my forehand they’ll do a med ball throw or they’ll do a kind of like a you know a twisting medball exercise or something like that thinking that they’re training their forehand and then they do the same training their backand what we just spend a lot of time
On is actually training the reverse meaning that they’d have to hold against resistance at the end range of where the medball drill would have finished and the goal there is to make sure that they’re really strong in those end ranges predominately in that rotation situation or that flexion extension
Situation so they’re strong enough to stabilize in those positions and that’s really important from an injury prevention standpoint as well very interesting so uh yeah it just seems like we just need to do a whole different mix of things from crunches to Russian Twists to you know medball work
And that all just will help because we’re doing all those different things when we play that’s assuming you don’t have any significant degeneration so it’s important especially for the population that we’ve been talking about the sort of League player just be careful because if you have had weakness
If you had had issues you do have to be very careful so for a lot of individuals make sure that you get on a program based on your structural limitations your deficiencies prior surgeries things like that because a lot of people don’t want to flex or extend too much because
They’ve had dis problems in the past or there’s issues there so we spend way more time with those athletes in in some of these more controlled environments so it’s just important to make that note but for a healthy individual you need to be strong in all these different areas
You just don’t want to overdo it like you said a thousand crunches is usually is not a good idea for most people normally we’re talking about you know 20 to 50 type range and then we’ll do a different movement so we’re not doing you know hundreds or thousands at a time
Even though it’s a lot of athletes that have been successful doing a thousand crunches a day um you know so it’s one of those situations that there’s certain body types that adapt to that well and can handle it but then there’s also a risk to a lot of people if they try to
Copy uh a program like that just because it worked for a really good athlete doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you yeah 100% Mark Mark uh really have enjoyed chatting with you I know got a bunch of stuff to do today but uh I do
Want to first off ask you uh again I know you mentioned it initially but where can people you know check out your content what is the best place or places to go to uh to learn more about what you do yeah so we have a couple different
Resources available if you go to Kovac institute.com uh or coac Institute on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram um we post quite a bit of stuff on there we have a weekly news newsletter that goes out on Wednesdays a lot of free content there so if you haven’t signed up for
That go to kovax institute.com sign up for the free email uh we send out a bunch of stuff there uh and you know that’s probably the easiest way uh to communicate and to get in touch with us awesome awesome uh and just want to give you the floor if there’s um any other
Final closing thoughts you you might have in regards to um uh tennis Fitness for um competitive adult tennis players yeah for sure the one thing I would suggest is work with a competent and well-trained professional um we’re also involved in the international tennis performance Association uh and there are
Thousands of qualified and competent know tennis specific fitness trainers strength coaches personal trainers athletic trainers physical therapists that work predominantly with tennis athletes and well trained so go to itpa tennis.org uh and you know ask if there’s someone in your area if you’re looking for someone uh and we should be
Able to direct you to a good person in your area who can help you on designing and implementing an effective tennis specific training program awesome yeah itpa is is brilliant another one of your Creations Mark so thank you for that Mark thanks again for coming on to the podcast really appreciate it looking
Forward to chatting with you again it’s always a pleasure and thanks so much for sharing uh your knowledge with uh with our audience so thank you so much no thanks so much for having me and look forward to seeing everyone on the courts soon definitely thanks Mark all right I
Really hope that you enjoyed my interview with Dr Mark Kovac again Dr Kovac thanks so much for your time and for coming on to the podcast and if you’d enjoyed this podcast and got value from it and think it will help your tennis Fitness and I would really
Appreciate it if you would leave a review for the podcast and you can do that at tennis files.com apppp podcasts or in your favorite podcast app choice that you use to listen to the show it would really help the podcast out and help spread it uh and make it more
Visible to more people uh the more reviews and ratings um the higher up the algorithm it goes and so definitely would appreciate a review and also just know what you think of the show I would also like to leave you with a quote as I often do pretty much always do at the
End of the podcast and this one is by Michael eler and Michael said said the bad news is time flies the good news is you’re the pilot love that just reminds us that we need to take control of our path in life and tennis and everything and that we should not be reactionary
Rather we should take command and choose how we use our time and uh make the most out of it you know schedule it schedule things in your calendar your practices and everything like that um your work and so forth and uh execute and prosper live long and prosper as Spock
Said uh as you can tell I like Star Trek all right hope you do too Star Wars versus Star Trek which one is it h you can answer that for yourself uh and you can email me if you want it’s it’s fine just let me know all right that was a
Weird uh tangent that I went on but you know I’m a Sci-Fi fan and so let’s just put that in there for any folks that like it all right with that thanks so much for listening to the end you’re a true warrior if you did and Tennis
Fanatic and I appreciate that so with that I will see you on the next episode of the tennis files podcast this is your host Maron ranad signing Out
