Tennis fitness after 40: the weekly schedule, day by day

In the last article, I gave you the seven principles behind tennis fitness after forty. Principles matter, but at some point you need an actual week to follow. So here it is: the schedule I give my own players, day by day, with the sets and reps written out.

Treat this as a base level. For everything in fitness, you can make it harder or you can make it easier, and it is still building the same skill. If a day is too much, regress it. If it is too little, add sets, add weight, or add speed. The point is not to copy the plan exactly. It is to have a structure you can adjust to where you actually are.

Monday: strength, one leg at a time

First, Bulgarian split squats, using what I call the dense method, a method I learned from coach Keegan Smith. Instead of the usual set-and-rest structure, you do a fixed number of repetitions every minute. Here, five repetitions every minute, for five minutes. Written out, that is 5D5.

Next, toe presses, two sets of twenty. I have talked about this before: build your toes. They matter for accelerating and decelerating, and modern life does not give them enough work, because we are not barefoot enough. Do them seated or standing, holding onto something for balance.

Then box jumps, five sets of five, to a height you find comfortable. This is where the leg strength you just built turns into explosive power.

Finish with two minutes of skipping rope, steady or broken into sets depending on your level, breathing in for two counts and out for two.

Done back to back, that is fourteen minutes. Add your daily mobility and release work beforehand if you have not already done it that morning, non-negotiable past forty, and your tennis session after. Around forty five minutes, all in.

Tuesday: core, plus optional upper body

Cable rotation, or a band if you do not have a cable machine, the Pallof press works the same way, two sets of eight, on the minute. Then back extension, on a simple machine. Between the two, you have covered your core, front and back.

After that, pull-ups and military press are both optional, five sets each of whatever you can manage. If you can do two pull-ups, that is five sets of two. Three to five repetitions is generally the range that builds strength best.

Again, around fourteen minutes, plus your tennis and your mobility.

Wednesday: a jog, ideally barefoot

Wednesday breaks the week in half. Go for a light jog, barefoot if you can find somewhere suitable, like grass. It sounds like a small thing, but it is genuinely good for your feet and for your health generally. Barefoot shoes work too if barefoot is not practical where you are.

Thursday: off

A full day off. One rest day in the week, and it is deliberate, not a gap you fill with something else.

Friday: Monday again, with more volume

Friday repeats Monday, but heavier. Bulgarian squats become ten sets of five instead of five. Toe presses become five sets of twenty instead of two. Box jumps become ten sets of five. Skipping becomes five minutes total instead of two.

All together, that is around thirty minutes, plus your mobility.

Saturday: deceleration, the day to get right

Saturday needs more care than the other days, because two principles decide whether it helps you or hurts you.

The first is the warm-up. Anything explosive needs twenty minutes of warm-up, not five. I heard this explained well at a Strong Endurance seminar with Parisi: your body needs to progressively prepare before it is ready for real power output. For deceleration work, that means starting easy and building. Jog barefoot. Add lunges, holding your posture through the bottom, on every side. Add running drills: straight-leg touches to the toes, keeping your posture, then a little more explosive, then high knees, slow at first and building on both sides.

The second principle is the work-to-rest ratio. Explosive work should be ten seconds or less, followed by six to ten times that much rest. If you work for ten seconds, you rest for sixty to a hundred. It will feel like you are doing nothing most of the time, and that is correct. I remember watching an Olympic hurdle world record holder training at the University of Bath years ago: two hurdles, an explosive sprint that barely looked like it slowed him down, then fifteen minutes of stretching and talking to his coach before the next one. Fifteen minutes for one sprint. It is the same principle, just at a level we do not need to match.

Once you are warmed up, here are four exercises to choose from. Lateral bounds: jump as far sideways as you can while keeping your balance, land, hold, then jump back the other way. Sprint and stick: sprint, then stop dead on one leg without losing your balance. Depth jumps: step off something, land in an athletic, upright posture with no rounding in your back, then progress to one leg and to a lower landing position. Bench deceleration: find a bench you can press up from, and lower yourself back down under control.

Ten seconds of work, then sixty to a hundred seconds of rest, whichever exercise you choose. Twenty of these efforts in total across the session. This is what used to be called shock training, before the West renamed it plyometric, and the shock part matters as much as the bounce: landing and absorbing, not only jumping. Once you have done your twenty, you will still feel fresh. That is the moment to play tennis, or to rest and play later.

Sunday: tennis and mobility, nothing else

Sunday is tennis and your mobility work. No additional strength or conditioning training.

Putting the week together

Here is the whole week at a glance.

You can play tennis three to five times a week around this, and every day, whatever else is on the schedule, your mobility work still happens.

As with the principles behind it, none of this is meant to be copied exactly. Regress a level if you need to, or progress if you are ready. The schedule is the structure. What you actually do inside it is yours to adjust.

Fitness is not the core of what I do. The core is helping you organise your training and your game so that both fit the way your own body moves, which is what I call your natural tennis. We are all different, so the goal was never to copy one correct week any more than one correct forehand. It is to find the version that matches you.

That, and the mental side, so the tennis you play in practice is the tennis you play when the score matters.

Frequently asked questions

What does a full week of tennis fitness training look like for a player over 40?

A base week has two strength days built around single-leg lower-body work, Monday and Friday, with Friday adding volume. One core day with optional upper body sits on Tuesday. Wednesday is an easy jog. Thursday is a full rest day. Saturday is built around deceleration, with a long warm-up and long rest periods. Sunday is tennis and mobility only. Total dedicated strength and core work runs about fourteen minutes on the strength and core days, plus daily mobility work of roughly half an hour. Tennis itself can be played three to five times a week around this schedule, and every exercise can be regressed or progressed depending on where you are starting from.

How many rest days should a tennis player over 40 take each week?

One full day off is built into the week, Thursday in this schedule, separate from Sunday, which is tennis and mobility only rather than additional strength or conditioning work. Daily mobility, releasing tension and opening range of motion, still happens every single day, including the rest day, because past forty that work is what prevents the stiffness that eventually becomes an injury. Volume is rarely the limiting factor at this age. Recovery is. That is also why Saturday's deceleration work uses long rest periods between efforts rather than back to back repetitions, and why the heavier strength day sits two full days after the easy jog rather than immediately after the first one.

What is the dense method in strength training, and how does it work for tennis?

The dense method, learned from coach Keegan Smith, replaces a normal set-and-rest structure with a fixed number of repetitions performed every minute, for a set number of minutes. Written as 5D5, it means five repetitions done at the start of every minute, for five minutes total, with whatever is left of that minute serving as rest. It builds the pace and the rest into the structure automatically, rather than requiring you to time it separately, and it works well for lower-body exercises like the Bulgarian split squat, where consistent effort across several short sets matters more than one long, exhausting set.

How long should a warm-up be before explosive or deceleration training?

Around twenty minutes, not five. Anything power related needs your body temperature and your tissue to progressively prepare for maximal or near-maximal output, which a short warm-up does not achieve. A useful sequence is a barefoot jog, lunges performed with a stable, controlled posture, then running drills such as straight-leg toe touches and high knees, each performed slowly at first and building in intensity on both sides as the warm-up progresses. Skipping this step before deceleration or plyometric work, both of which ask the body for sudden maximal effort, is a common way that older training athletes injure themselves rather than improve.

What is the ideal work-to-rest ratio for deceleration and plyometric training?

Explosive efforts should last ten seconds or less, followed by six to ten times as much rest, so sixty to a hundred seconds of rest for every ten seconds of work. This feels like doing almost nothing for most of the session, which is correct rather than a sign you are undertraining. The goal is training fast-twitch output at genuinely high quality each time, which is only possible with full recovery between efforts, not accumulating fatigue across a session. A useful benchmark is that elite sprinters and hurdlers sometimes rest fifteen minutes between two explosive repetitions. A recreational player training this way should expect around twenty short efforts across a full session, stopping once speed or power visibly drops.

How many days a week can I play tennis on top of this schedule?

Three to five times a week, played around the training days rather than instead of them. The schedule is built so most sessions take well under half an hour of dedicated work: Monday and Tuesday around fourteen minutes each, Wednesday a light jog, Thursday off, Friday around thirty minutes, and Saturday a longer but mostly rest-based deceleration session, leaving plenty of the week for actual tennis. Sunday is tennis and mobility only, with no additional physical training. If you already play two or more hours most days, much of your endurance work is already covered by tennis itself, which is part of why this schedule adds relatively little separate cardio.