Many in tennis associate shoulder health with resistance band exercises. Listen to coaches and trainers talk about shoulder strength or injury prevention with their players and you’ll surely hear things like “are you using your bands daily?” or “make sure to do ‘x’ or ‘y’ band exercise”. But do band exercises work in the manner that they’re spoken about?
I’d like to offer my take on the matter and suggest 2 other strength training methods – light weight and moderate/heavy strength exercises.
Let’s dissect the 3 categories mentioned to gain further insights:
Resistance Band Exercises – Keep or Ditch Em?
Look into most tennis players’ bags and you’ll find a resistance band of some sort. These bands come in various shapes, sizes and resistance levels. Some have handles, others don’t but irrespective of that, it’s no surprise that players love their bands.
Many even credit the bands for keeping their shoulders ‘injury-free’. Let’s get one thing straight – injuries are multifaceted and extremely complex so I struggle with absolutist views like that. Perhaps a better approach is to to ask – do resistance band exercises help decrease injury risk in the dominant shoulder of tennis players? My answer to that question – maybe.
The thing is, the resistance that many bands offer won’t apply enough force to even come close to what the structures of the shoulder will experience during tennis hitting (like serving, for instance). To combat this, some use heavy duty bands – all this does is decrease the range of motion + the execution quality of the movement at hand.
That being said, perhaps band work is a starting point for players who are coming off an injury. That would make sense as we’d be progressively loading the muscles, tendons and surrounding tissues to further accommodate greater loading as rehab continues.
Similarly, younger players might benefit from bands to help teach certain rowing and pressing motions – they may also receive a strength stimulus from bands as they are untrained + weak.
But for the majority of healthy players out there, resistance bands offer little more than a warm-up benefit. As with any structure, when warming up, we’re opening up ranges of motion, activating muscles, increasing blood flow (+ heat) and so on. Ballistic activities pre-tennis have also shown to increase performance.
It therefore makes sense then to do something to warm-up the tennis shoulder prior to hitting/playing – whether you use bands or other modalities, doesn’t really matter much, as long as it gets done. But to say that a band will reduce the chances of injury is – in my books – farfetched.
Verdict: Personally, if players want/like to use them to warm-up, I don’t discourage it. But I no longer mandate them during warm-ups (and they certainly aren’t a staple of our strength training programs).
Alternative #1 – Light Weight Strength Exercises
Examples of light weight exercises might include lateral raises, front raises and shoulder internal/external rotation movements (see vids below). I would even include bicep/tricep work into this area as both have attachments onto the shoulder itself or surrounding structures (for example, the origin of the long head of the triceps is on part of the scapula – a key piece of the shoulder health puzzle).