Train Like a Pro – Interview with Tennis Pro, Jeff Salzenstein
by Yuri in Train Like a Pro
I’ve got a special treat for you guys over the next few days.
You’re about to learn how to train like a pro and discover the training, diet, and recovery strategies of the world’s top tennis players. Even if you’re not a tennis player, this is golden information that can your workouts and overall diet.
So, this is PART 1 of an interview I did with my good buddy Jeff Salzenstein – who is a former Top 100 pro tennis player. He shares some really great stuff. Enjoy…
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Yuri: Hey, guys, Yuri Elkaim here, and on today’s call I’m really excited because I’ve got a good buddy of mine, who I just recently met a couple months ago.
His name is Jeff Salzenstein and I’m really excited because Jeff is a former professional tennis player and he’s gonna bring us some really, really cool insight into the world of pro tennis, but, you know, obviously, not a lot of us are in that world, but what we’re trying to get out of this call, really, in this interview is that he’s gonna show us how some of the top athletes, how some of the top players are training to keep in such great shape, and then we’re gonna kinda look at how we can and how you can apply a lot of those into your training regime as well. So, Jeff, thanks for joining us, buddy.
Jeff: Hey, awesome to be here. Thanks so much, Yuri, for having me.
Yuri: No problem. And just before we start, you said you were ranked in the top one hundred, right? Is that correct?
Jeff: Yeah, I’ll give you a quick background on my tennis history. I started at a very young age, was a National Junior champion by age twelve. I actually dropped off a bit in the middle of my junior career, but by the time I was eighteen, I was top four in the country in the juniors and went on to Stanford University and played there and was a two-time All-American and won two national team titles there and was able to play with Paul Goldstein, who is another top tennis pro, top fifty in the world, top sixty, top fifty in the world, and just got exposed to a lot of great players at Stanford and decided to try my luck on the pro tour.
It actually wasn’t part of the plan. I just improved a lot in college. I developed a really big serve, and my coaches said, ‘Hey, you should give this pro tour thing a shot.’ I thought I was gonna be a lawyer or doctor someday. It turned out I ended up playing eleven years on the tour. I have a great passion for tennis, a great passion for health and nutrition, and I took those passions on the tour and learned a ton while I was out there.
So, while I was playing and competing with the best in the world and having an opportunity to practice with different generations of players, you know, Sampras and Federer and the likes of those top players—I really studied what it takes to be a pro athlete, what can help you get to the next level, because I had a lot of injuries and I had a lot of challenges breaking through certain barriers, so it was just an awesome experience to play as long as I did, and now I’ve shifted that focus as a player.
I’m now coaching in Denver, Colorado, working with a lot of junior tennis players, but, really, I just wanna help all athletes and all tennis players that wanna get better, that wanna improve, and I believe you can improve every day with the right information if you apply it.
Yuri: That’s awesome, that’s really cool. And I guess we’ll kinda dig deeper into some of that during this interview. I guess getting started, in your eyes, how has tennis changed—I guess, specifically, fitness in tennis changed over the last twenty years?
If you look at guys like, you know, Jimmy Connors and McEnroe way back when, they’re very different physically from, like, a guy like Nadal or González, who are, you know, just monsters on the court.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, it’s been an incredible transformation, and I think you probably see that in all sports but tennis for sure. I mean, thirty, forty years ago, the Aussies and some of the Americans were ruling tennis and they would finish their matches and they’d go grab a beer afterwards and chill out and party a little bit.
Now it’s a twenty-four-seven gig, and that really started with Ivan Lendl, for those tennis fans out there that are familiar with tennis history. Ivan Lendl was probably one of the first guys that took physical fitness and physical training to the next level with tennis.
And then your next guy was Jim Courier; there were commercials of him, you know, dragging sleds and tires in the Florida heat, you know, maybe fifteen years ago. And then you had Agassi, who had this resurgence at age twenty-eight, twenty-nine, you know, running up Magic Mountain in Las Vegas.
So, you just seen this incredible shift to, going from being just kind of a tennis player to being a complete athlete, and Rafa Nadal has taken that to the absolute extreme level. I mean, this guy can just bust out one-arm push-ups like they’re goin’ outta style, and he can go all day. It’s just a physical sport, and they’re animals out there.
I mean, when I came off the tour three years ago or kinda near the end of my career, I thought I was physically a pretty strong guy compared to the rest of the herd, but nowadays if you go out there, everybody’s just an absolute beast.
Yuri: Yeah, and it definitely shows in terms of the power and the way the game has changed as well. You mentioned Andre Agassi, and I think he’s, he’s actually, I believe he’s won the most titles after the age of twenty-nine I think, and a lot of that they kind of attribute to his training and a lot of the stuff that he did.
He had a trainer, Gil Reyes, that he worked with for a number of years. Do you have any insight into some of the stuff that he did as he got older? You mentioned running up Magic Mountain in Vegas. Do you have any insight into maybe some of the training that he did to help him get in such great shape as he got older?
Jeff: Yeah, well, Andre is a mentor and example to most of us pro tennis players to see how he was able to turn his career around. It really started with his mind-set. He decided with his coaches and with his team and his trainers that he was gonna just go for it, and I think when he made that decision, instead of just relying on his talent, he made that conscious decision to go the next level with his training.
That’s when everything changed for him and got better for him. As far as training goes, basically, Gil Reyes was the mastermind behind that. I had an opportunity to actually observe one of his workouts with Marcos Baghdatis last year in the gym, and they just get after it.
There’s a huge mental component, you know, really pushing through the sets and the reps and really just understanding that you’ve gotta put the work in and the yard work and the road work in and the gym work in to be able to last three out of five sets day after day after day.
As far as running up Magic Mountain, I mean, obviously, interval training and running up hills is an incredible way to get in shape, to burn fat, to increase muscular endurance, but I do think there are some more efficient ways to train. You know, again, running up those hills, there’s some questions on whether that ultimately hurt Agassi’s career with his back problems, you know?
So, I think there are some different ways to train, but the ultimate lesson that we need to be learning from this is that they had a systematic approach, they followed it, and they just got stronger every day, every week, every month, and he was fitter at thirty-three than he was at twenty-five, by a long stretch.
Yuri: Yeah, totally. And you mentioned you observed a workout with Reyes and Baghdatis. Baghdatis won the Australian Open in, what was it, ’07 or ’08? Somewhere around there?
Jeff: Yeah, finals in the Australian Open a few years back and, you know, another guy that’s just an immense talent. He’s had some challenges with injuries the last few years, and that’s something we can maybe touch on a little bit later, but they really focus a lot on the legs and the core and, you know, Gil focuses more on machine-type exercises.
He’s got, actually, some special machines that he’s designed, but I’m a big body-weight guy. If you look at some of the strongest athletes in the world—I mean, you’re gonna look at gymnasts, you’re gonna look at wrestlers—and they’re doing a lot of stuff with body weight.
I see a lot of athletes, a lot of weekend warriors that they can’t even do a basic push-up. I really think that you’ve gotta master simple body-weight exercises, and then you start loading up resistance on top of that; being able to do push-ups, pull-ups, single-leg stuff, holding deep-lunge positions. All those things you take for granted.
You wanna be on the machines, you wanna do all these intricate things, but you gotta be able to handle your body weight and be able to get as strong as you can so that when you can use your body weight in certain ways on the court or on the field, everything just becomes that much easier in your chosen sport, especially with tennis.
And Nadal shows he’s the strongest guy on the tour, and he’s very intimidating because he’s the strongest guy. He can hit the ball harder, he can create more spin, he can reach out and hit shots from all angles, and people marvel at it, but a lot of it is due to just pure physical strength.
Yuri: That’s true and I guess the unfortunate part for most people is that most people are exposed to, I guess, commercial gyms where machines are the latest and greatest, and I think if we have less of those and people are kind of subjected to just using their body weight, they’d be a little bit better off.
Now, in terms of playing at the professional level, what are the, you know, the different elements that are required to, like, physically to play tennis at the top?
Jeff: Yeah, well, as I mentioned earlier, being an athlete, being a pro tennis player, it’s a twenty-four-seven job. These guys and girls are waking up in the morning, they’re having to eat right, they’re having to train correctly on the court, they’re doing lots of great drills on the court but off the court, the preparation that goes into it, the dynamic warm-ups, they usually have a therapist or trainer with them if they’re top fifty, top thirty in the world.
If you don’t have a trainer, which most of us don’t have, you’re gonna have to learn some of the tools to be able to take care of yourself, and, again, that just goes into, you know, getting massages, maybe using a foam roller to help you break up the adhesions that you feel in your body, dynamic warm-up, sprinting, as I alluded to, body-weight exercises, resistance stance.
All of this is incorporated into a program, and you’ll see all these tennis players doing that throughout the day before and after practice, and then there’s a huge emphasis on rest and recovery. I mean, that part is often overlooked, or people don’t really think about it. They’re always thinking about, Well, what do I need to do to train?
Well, Roger Federer, he’s on the massage table two to three hours a day, and there’s a reason why he’s so limber and he looks effortless on the court. It’s because his tissue is just so soft. So, there’s a lot that goes into being a pro athlete and it’s very comprehensive.
And even though most weekend warriors are people that aspire to be pro athletes, they might not have the time to train six hours a day, but they certainly can implement some of the things that they’re doing and create amazing results.
Yuri: Totally. So, along those lines, in terms of the everyday person, what kind of tips would you give from, like, warming up to the actual workout, to cooldown, and maybe some recover strategies to help them out?
Jeff: Yeah, well, all the rage right now is doing some type of dynamic mobility warm-up. I feel that static stretching is a thing of the past; it’s about as outdated as the Aussies drinking beers after their matches. I mean, some type of movement exercise where you’re warming the body up, you’re increasing overall core temperature with the body, and you’re moving into different ranges of motions that are gonna somewhat resemble your chosen sport.
So, a dynamic warm-up is great. I also think that whatever sport you’re playing—and in this case it’s tennis—we often have our athletes do a lot of shadow stroking and practice the specific footwork patterns that they’re gonna be using on a tennis court.
You know, I see a lot of people warm up, and they just jog around the tennis court or, you know, they jog around a soccer field, but I really think that as soon as you’ve kinda done that dynamic warm-up, you should start getting into some drills that incorporate the specific movement pattern that you’re gonna be using, and I think, again, I see too many athletes that get on the treadmill and they just run and run and run, but that’s not really teaching their body to move exactly how it needs to move on a tennis court or a football field or a basketball court. So, those are just a few of the things that I believe strongly in.
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Stay tuned for PART 2 coming tomorrow!
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