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High Knee Lifts for Muscle Activation Tennis Beyond the Headlines: November 4, 2024 Who Else is On Your Team? Your Team Needs a Coach Teamwork Makes the Dream Work Revisiting a Scary Tennis Story for Halloween What’s New? The 2025 USTA League Regulations

Pulse Oximeter Training

I recently purchased and started using a pulse oximeter as a part of my tennis training. If you have been in a medical setting recently, chances are that you have already had one of these devices slipped onto your finger. However, the availability of pulse oximeters in the consumer market is a fairly recent development. Most people probably don’t have one at home.

USTA Shadow Rankings

Last Wednesday the USTA sent out an email to Adult tournament participants entitled “Upcoming Shadow Rankings: What You Need to Know.” That email contained what is believed to be an error in the first sentence, indicating that the communication was to inform the recipient about “2020 USTA Junior Tournaments Shadow Rankings.” The first paragraph also included verbiage about “players and parents.”

Scoring Points and Senior Tennis Participation

Throughout my musing on the new USTA tournament structure coming in 2021, people keep whispering to me that the changes are going to be really good for driving increased participation in Senior tennis. I have been struggling to understand the logic behind that expectation. Until yesterday. When I started bouncing the new 7 tier National points schedule across various playing scenarios, I had an epiphany. There is a chance the new system will be fabulous for Senior tennis.

Loving the Battle

The fact that I am writing about Loving the Battle by Mark Tjia this week is an unanticipated side effect of the review I posted last week. Last week’s selection remains a mystery, and I continue to decline to name either the book or the author since my comments were less than flattering. That omission triggered a couple of guesses as to the identity of the book. One of the guesses started “Surely you don’t mean Loving the Battle…”

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Training with a Heart Rate Monitor

Last week in “Low-Impact Interval Training” I outlined a training routine that I developed after learning that USTA Player Development regularly uses low-impact cardio machines for interval training. Low-Impact refers to the amount of stress placed on the joints. The workout itself is extremely high intensity and effort. If I am going to work that hard, then I am also going to collect data to know if it is effective.