Measuring your Ranges for Tennis
Measuring your shoulder, breathing and hip ranges will give you an idea of how much flexibility you have lost.
External Arm Rotation
While measuring the service speed of our tennis players, we discovered that for every degree we increased their external arm rotation, they added a mile an hour to their serve. Just by increasing their external arm rotation, our tennis players have added 20-30 mph to their serve.
How to Measure
Lie on your back on a bed and put your serving arm straight out to the side at a 90º angle to your body, with the elbow off the bed. Now bend the elbow 90º and let your arm rotate back, as you see in the photo below. Have someone take a picture of your arm in this position. Draw a horizontal line from your elbow, and a line through the center of your forearm. Now measure the angle between the two lines with a protractor.
For an efficient serve, you need a minimum of 50º of external arm rotation, as you see here.
Minimum External Arm Rotation for Tennis
Breathing
Breathing flexibility is important in all sports. Of course, breathing in itself is important as well. We all breathe 17,000 times a day, or 6,206,000 times a year. The muscles depend on oxygen to function at their best in endurance sports, but your brain actually uses more oxygen than your muscles. It uses four times more oxygen. So the first part of your body to suffer from breathing stiffness is the brain. As we increase breathing ranges, our clients report better grades in school, improved memory, and better performance at work—in addition to their improvement in sports performance, endurance and concentration.
How to measure
Lying on your back with your knees up and feet flat on the floor, have someone measure the circumference of your stomach (belly button), diaphragm (top of the costal arch or inverted V at the front of your chest) and chest (across the nipple line, or, for women, just below the breasts).
At each level, have someone measure your circumference with a cloth tape measure when you are at rest. Write down the measurement on here:
Stomach Circumference _____________________
Diaphragm Circumference_____________________
Chest Circumference________________________
Next, measure how much each area expands when you take a deep breath. Make sure you breathe in both the stomach and the chest when the measurements are being taken. If you just expand the chest, or just expand the stomach, you will get inaccurate measurements.
Stomach Expansion________________________
Diaphragm Expansion______________________
Chest Expansion__________________________
Next, divide the amount of expansion by the circumference to get your range percentage.
Stomach Range____________________________
Diaphragm Range__________________________
Chest Range______________________________
You should have a minimum range of 15%. This means that someone with a 40” chest should be able to expand a minimum of 6”. We have measured athletes who expand as much as 9”. If you do not expand this much, it is because microfibers are binding together the muscles of your trunk.
Hip Extension
You need a large Stride Angle (maximum opening between the front and trailing leg) in order to cover the court efficiently. For every degree you increase your Stride Angle, you increase your stride length 2%. Just a 10º increase in Stride Angle enables you to cover 20% more ground with each stride. This means you will get to the ball more quickly and have more time to set up and control your returns.
How to measure
Lie on your stomach on the floor or other firm surface. Keep your hipbone on the floor and your knee straight as you raise your leg. Have someone get down on the floor and take a picture. Always confirm that you have not lifted your hipbone off the floor. Then repeat with the other leg, again making sure you do not lift your hipbone off the floor.
Draw a horizontal line through the center of your hip and another through the center of your upper leg. Measure the angle between the two lines on both sides with a protractor.
You need a minimum of 50º of Hip Extension in order to efficiently cover the court while running forward, as you see in the photo below.
Hip Abduction
The ability to move sideways on the court is dependent on how much Hip Abduction you have. For every degree you increase your Hip Abduction, you will cover 2% more ground with each stride. Increasing your Hip Abduction angle will enable you to get to your returns more quickly and give you more time to set up and control your shot.
How to Measure
Lie on the floor or other firm surface on your side. Keeping your knees straight, lift your top leg as high as you can, being sure to stay on your side. Have someone get down on the floor and take a photo, as you see below. Then turn over on your other side, lift the top leg as high as you can, and have them take another photo.
Draw a horizontal line through your top hip, and a line through the center of your leg as you see in the photo below. Measure the angle between the two lines. This is your Hip Abduction angle. Do not be surprised if they are quite different from each other. You will find you always have an easier time going in the direction of your larger angle.
Internal Hip Rotation
Internal hip rotation is the key range for tennis. Without good internal hip rotation, you cannot develop full power in your serve or ground strokes. Because of the lever system built in to every tennis player, any increase in hip speed will be multiplied 16X at the center of the racquet. If your hips are stiff, you cannot turn them fast.
In addition, low Internal Hip Rotation is the major cause of low back pain in tennis players.
How to measure
Lie on your stomach on the floor. Bend
Have someone get down on the floor with a camera and take a picture of your legs from ground level. The picture shoulder look like this:
Once you have the photo, draw vertical lines (dashed lines above) through the center of each knee. Then draw lines through the center of each lower leg (solid lines above). With a transparent protractor, measure the number of degrees on each side.
50º degrees, as you see above, is the minimum range you need for tennis.
Do not be surprised if you have less than 50° of internal hip rotation on each side, or if the two sides are different. There are many things that can reduce internal hip rotation. Every time you fell on your hip, microfibers formed to help the sore muscles recover. These microfibers accumulated over time, making your hips stiffer with age. You can also lose internal hip rotation when you have minor leg length differences. Some loss of internal hip rotation can be congenital (you were born this way), and the constant starting, stopping and changing direction in tennis also reduces internal hip rotation. But the loss can be reversed with the Somax Microfiber Reduction Program.
If you are not sure about how to measure, just email us your photos, and we will measure for you. Our email address is bprichard@somaxsports.com
If you have any questions, please call us at 1-800-227-6629.
Somax Performance Institute
4 Tara Hill Road , Tiburon , CA 94920
415-435-9880
www.somaxsports.com
