Wheelchair Tennis Exercises Names 101

Backhand, forehand, lob, slice, stroke – as a tennis player you may have mastered all these moves. But can you also spin like a butterfly or crawl like a spider?

In wheelchair tennis, these are the movements that players practice as they move back and forth on the court.

“We have the ‘butterfly’ exercise, we have the ‘fan’ exercise, we have ‘dead insects’which is a core exercise. It’s lying on your back and moving your arms and legs at the same time so that you look like a dead insect on its back,” Gordon Reidthe Rio 2016 told Olympics.com that he was the British singles champion.

“The ‘butterfly’that’s a movement exercise on the court. So it’s to simulate the movement of the forehand and backhand because of the way we move across the court with figure eight movements. It’s kind of a butterfly shape that you move in.”

A “spider” is an exercise in which wheelchair tennis players make small figure eights around cones placed in the corners of the court. For the “fan” In this exercise the athlete starts on the line in the middle of the field, goes to the right corner, back to the center, then to the left corner and back to the center again.

There are also exercises that are a bit more powerful.

“You start on the doubles line, then you go to the singles line and back to the middle line and back to the other singles line and back, and the doubles line and back,” Vink said. “And then you start over, and you do it twice. You have to do the bigger round each time. We call it the ‘suicide’.”

Whatever you call them, these are exercises that Reid believes are essential to staying at the top of wheelchair tennis.

“From a mobility standpoint, for quickness in the chair, we obviously do a lot of strength training to be as powerful as possible, but also agility and reactivity, to be sharp and move well,” Reid said. “And then for ball speed, from that standpoint, we try to be as free as possible in the shoulder and everything else. And that obviously involves a lot of stretching, physical therapy and exercises.”