Strength Training for Tennis Players: The Match After Leg Day

Lokh, founder of Forma. 31 July 2026.

Thursday's squats felt good. Saturday's match was a disaster, and not in an obvious way.

You were not sore exactly. You just could not get to the wide forehand you normally reach, the first step was late, and by the third set your legs had nothing to give on the change of direction. You lost to someone you usually beat and spent the drive home deciding whether the gym is worth it.

This is the specific problem tennis creates and other sports do not, so it needs its own answer.

Why tennis is harder to schedule around than running

A runner knows what Tuesday costs. Six by a mile at threshold is roughly the same demand every time it appears on the plan.

You do not have that. A match is somewhere between 50 minutes and three hours, decided by an opponent you did not choose, on a surface that changes how much your legs absorb, with a load that is invisible until it is over. You cannot plan the week around a session whose size you learn afterward.

And the demand itself is unusually hostile to gym fatigue. Tennis is not an endurance sport with some sprinting in it. It is a few hundred repeated accelerations, emergency decelerations and changes of direction, most of them off one leg, with recovery gaps too short to clear anything. Deceleration is eccentric, and eccentric work is exactly what leaves you sore and what heavy lifting also produces. The two stack.

That is why the match after leg day feels the way it does. Not weak, exactly. Late.

What tennis actually asks for

Four qualities, in rough order of how much they decide points.

• Deceleration and eccentric strength through the legs. Stopping is more of the game than starting. This is also the quality most protective against the knee and ankle injuries that end amateur seasons.
• Rotational power through the trunk. Your groundstrokes are a sequence that begins at the ground and reaches the racket last. Arms are the end of it, never the source.
• Single-leg strength and stability. Almost nothing in tennis happens with weight evenly on both feet.
• Shoulder durability. Not for power. For staying available. The serving shoulder is the joint most likely to remove you from the sport for a season.

A session that covers it: a squat or split squat, a hinge, a horizontal pull, a loaded carry or anti-rotation hold, and rotational work with a medicine ball or cable. Three to six reps on the strength lifts, two to three reps short of failure. Explosive intent on the rotational work, low reps, full recovery, because it is a power quality and grinding it out builds the wrong thing.

Skip the wobble boards and the endless rotator cuff circuits. Skip the high-rep leg burnout work in particular, since you get enough of that from the sport itself.

Placing it around a match schedule

Two rules, and then the awkward bit.

Nothing heavy in the 48 hours before you play. Soreness peaks 24 to 48 hours after the session that caused it, which puts Thursday's squats directly into Saturday's match. This is the single rule most worth keeping and the one most people break by accident.

The day after a match is the best gym day you get. You are already fatigued, the next match is days away, and you are concentrating the damage rather than spreading it. Hard days hard, easy days easy applies to tennis as much as to running.

Now the awkward bit. That week assumes Sunday's session happens on a body you can predict, and Sunday is the day after a match whose length you did not control. A straight-sets win in 65 minutes and a three-hour third-set tiebreak leave you in completely different states, and both of them show up on the calendar as Saturday, match.

So the plan says heavy legs on Sunday either way. Half the time that is right. The rest of the time you are adding a heavy session to a body that has not finished paying for Saturday, and the cost lands on Wednesday.

Off-season is where this gets built

In season you are maintaining. That is not a failure of ambition, it is what a competitive schedule allows, and pretending otherwise is how people arrive at a tournament flat.

The off-season is different and it is short, so use it deliberately. Three sessions a week, heavier than you would risk in season, and this is the only window where trying an unfamiliar lift makes sense. Add the volume you cannot carry during a match schedule, push the squat and hinge numbers up, and build the eccentric strength that protects your knees when the season starts.

Then in season, halve the sets and keep both sessions on the calendar. Two heavy sets rather than four holds most of what you built at roughly half the recovery cost. A sub-optimal session is better than no session, and the alternative is arriving each spring at the strength level you had two springs ago.

The shoulder deserves its own paragraph

Everything else on this page is about playing better. This part is about still playing at all.

The serve loads your shoulder in a position it has no business being strong in, thousands of times a season, and the surrounding musculature is what decides whether that accumulates into a problem. Two sets of external rotation work and a horizontal pull in every session is enough. It takes four minutes and it is the highest-return four minutes in your program, which is why it is also the first thing people cut when they are running late.

Common questions

How many days a week?

Two in season, three in the off-season. In a week with two matches, one session is the realistic answer and it goes as far from match day as the schedule allows.

Does lifting help your serve?

Yes, less directly than most people hope. Serve speed comes from a chain that starts at the ground and passes through legs and trunk before the arm contributes, so leg drive and rotational power matter more than shoulder work. Train the shoulder for durability instead.

Can you lift on match day?

Afterward, not before, and only if the match was short. Lifting before play means competing with degraded movement quality, which is worse tennis and a real injury risk in a sport built on emergency stopping.

The load you cannot see

Everything above needs one number: how much Saturday actually cost you.

Your watch recorded it. Tennis shows up in your training load the same way a run does, and the three-hour match and the 65-minute one land in that figure as the different events they were. Combined with your overnight HRV and how you slept, it describes the Sunday you are actually walking into rather than the average Sunday the plan assumed.

Forma reads that and decides. Recovery, not effort. After a short straightforward win it gives you the heavy session. After three hours in the sun it gives you something lighter, or tells you today is not a lifting day, and it names the signal that drove the call. Warm-up through cool-down, sets, reps, rest and cues, pushed to your watch.

Your lifting, around your tennis. The same logic for the other sports competing for the same recovery: runners, cyclists, triathletes, or a full hybrid training program. All on the training guides hub.