Tennis and injuries, Bertolucci: “There is no time to train in the winter break”

In my day, the tennis season ran on a regular basis: it was played from February to the end of November-beginning of December, and then there were six canonical weeks to dedicate to winter preparation. During the year, then, on a couple of occasions, each one had the opportunity to make a couple of athletic calls. Today, with a compressed calendar that gives you just a week off at the beginning of December, and at Christmas it already forces you to move to Australia, the time to dedicate to training outside the competition has drastically reduced, and therefore it is not surprising that already at March the circuit has such a high number of injuries. After all, for some time the players have been asking insistently for a reshaping of the commitments and only the superstars, now free from ranking hassles and with a chest full of treasures, can afford to carefully choose the appointments to be honored so as not to further strain the physique worn out by very long careers. The other substantial difference from my time undoubtedly involves the playing surfaces: from the earth and grass that dominated the scene until the 70s, the tour has increasingly skewed towards concrete, which will be democratic because it makes them very homogeneous. the technical values, but it is the most harmful surface for the joints. Among other things, the whole start of the season is now planned precisely on the hard court, thus tying itself to the initial consideration of the short time available for winter preparation: in short, it is necessary to manage physical stress from the first matches. Even the summer transition from grass, or from the last European tournaments on clay, to the American Masters 1000 on hard is particularly demanding from an athletic point of view, and is combined with environmental conditions that are often at the limit. But if a rationalization could be reached on the calendar, the technology cannot be stopped: the new rackets, but also the new shoes, allow for greater control of the shots and greater aggressiveness, allowing a more powerful and thrusting game that solicits the players. muscles to exasperation, in addition to having changed the morphology of the player-type, now over the meter and 90.
I, with the wooden racket, performed the same movement in the service of today’s players, but I could not keep their speed of execution for long. The shadows of progress.