Milos 'Baby Sampras' Raonic: houthakken voor gevorderden

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Australian Open: Here’s the Skinny
Why Thin Is In With Milos Raonic, Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Other Top Players

After his 2014 season ended with a leg injury, Milos Raonic, a 6-foot-5 Canadian tennis star who serves thunderbolts, made a few resolutions. At the top of his list: Stop eating fatty macadamia nuts.

To win Grand Slam titles, Raonic decided that he needed to join the ranks of the ultra-lean. Like Novak Djokovic, who shed 11 pounds from his already slim frame a few years ago as he became the game’s best player. Like Andy Murray, who has spent more time running sprints in the sand to increase his speed. And like the always-trim Roger Federer , who has tweaked his training to become even quicker around the net.

Raonic dropped 12 pounds. (He weighs about 207.) The benefits have been immediate. “I just started feeling better, I was sleeping better, I was able to go to bed earlier because I didn’t feel like I was filling myself up with food,” said Raonic, the world’s No. 8-ranked player. He reached the final in the Brisbane tuneup tournament—losing in three sets to Federer—before the Australian Open, where he is currently in the second round.

Tennis has never been big on bulk. The classic body type for a tennis star is long and lean, which benefits movement and covering the entire court.

In the late 1980s and ’90s, though, things went a little sideways. More players trained for mass and strength to add power to their shots. This was when the power baseline game was born and forehands started to fly at the speed of rockets.

Tournaments have since made courts grittier and slower, and defense has become more important. Matches have become grueling and it is difficult to hit winners. Players have adapted.

“Movement has always been important, but now it’s like, if you can’t move, you might as well not even get on the court,” said Michael Russell, a 36-year-old American who qualified for the Australian Open and lost in the first round. “To be able to hit the ball that hard and move that well, you can’t have a lot of mass on you. That’s why you see those wire-strong frames.”

Larry Stefanki, a former pro and coach of John McEnroe and Andy Roddick, welcomes the change, which he sees as a return to the body types of a golden era that included Bjorn Borg, McEnroe and Jimmy Connors.

“I look at clips all the time of the Borg years and the guys look like [greyhounds],” said Stefanki, who asked Roddick to lose 15 pounds when they started working together. “Then all of a sudden there were guys with mass. Look: This is a running game. And when you run, you don’t want that much mass.”

Raonic, a lanky 24-year-old with broad shoulders, took an aggressive approach to getting thin. Last fall, he went on a body-cleansing binge of juices. When out at dinner, he used to order an array of appetizers so he could sample the full range of a restaurant’s cuisine. He now opts for a main course and maybe a side dish.

“Rather than eating until I feel full, I eat to eat, to get the nutrients in me,” Raonic said. “I’ve also avoided having stomach aches and these kind of little things that sort of just add up.”

Raonic said he had the best off-season of his career, with more intense and more productive workouts. Dalibor Sirola, Raonic’s trainer since the summer of 2013, said that Raonic improved all of his fitness metrics—high jumps, long jumps and sprints—by 20-25% from his most recent tests last summer.

“The top guys are leaner and incredible movers,” Sirola said. “If you want to compete with them, you have to follow this trend.”

Being lean doesn’t necessarily mean losing weight. Jez Green, Murray’s former trainer who now works with up-and-coming 17-year-old Alexander Zverev, said players could maintain the same weight but change their body shape by emphasizing different muscles, as well as flexibility and elasticity. Younger players, he said, often need to gain weight while reducing body fat. Marin Cilic, who won last year’s U.S. Open, has done this, and Grigor Dimitrov, another top young star, still has more weight to gain, according to his coach, Roger Rasheed.

“You can be strong, lean and flexible, and very powerful at the same time,” Green said. “A lot of players are doing yoga now. No one in the ‘70s or ’80s would have done yoga. No one would have done Pilates.”

Explosiveness and bursts of speed are becoming more important for players in the latter stages of their careers. Past the age of 30, a top pro can’t expect to outlast a player in his 20s in a battle of long rallies, or at least not for seven straight matches at a Grand Slam. That’s part of the reason Federer hired serve-and-volleying legend Stefan Edberg as his coach, so he could refine his attacking game and shorten points.

He has gotten quicker,” Edberg said. “If he’s lost any weight, I really don’t know, but he’s moving well and that has a lot to do with fitness and confidence, I believe. You need to be quicker when you play offensive.”

As for Raonic, who won his first-round match over Illya Marchenko in straight sets on Tuesday, he could struggle to keep the weight off now that he is away from home and eating mostly at restaurants.

“For the whole off-season,” he said, “I ate out once.”

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Op donderdag 5 maart 2015 13:38 schreef TennispeRFect het volgende:
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