Train Like a Pro (Part 2) with Jeff Salzenstein
by Yuri in Train Like a Pro
Hope you enjoyed PART 1 of my interview with tennis pro, Jeff Salzenstein.
Here’s the continuation of the interview…
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Yuri: So, that’d be for the warm-up. Now, for a typical workout that you might put a player through nowadays, what would that look like?
Jeff: Yeah, certainly, I like to look at, you know, can an athlete do a basic single-leg squat. There’re certain form requirements but, literally, I’ll have a tennis player sit on a bench and perform a single-leg squat.
And most of the kids that I work with can do that, but if they can and they have good form, then we can increase the loads either using resistance bands or some type of a weight. We put them in deep-lunge position—we call it an iso-extreme lunge—and see how long they can hold that position.
So, I’m a big believer, again, in the body weight being able to hold plank-type positions, using resistance bands to challenge your core, and most of the time people ask me—you know, I had one of the bigger serves on the tour when I played, and, certainly, technique plays a huge role, but I can serve faster than a junior tennis player because I’m a lot stronger in my legs, in my core, and so we also focus a lot on corrective exercises.
We wanna make sure that the glute muscles are activated, we wanna make sure the feet are really strong, so we do different exercises for the feet. I mean, there’s a whole host of things we can do that might be considered somewhat out-of-the-box, but that’s the way that sport and athletic performance is moving.
You’ve gotta have strong feet, you’ve gotta have a strong core, your hips have to be aligned; so, there’s a whole series of exercises that you can do that seem very basic, but instead of going out and, you know, putting two hundred pounds on your back and doing a squat or doing a leg-extension machine, if you master these core-type corrective exercises, not only are you gonna prevent injuries, but your body’s gonna be more aligned, and you’re gonna feel more efficient on the tennis court.
Yuri: Totally. And what about some tips for recovery or regeneration?
Jeff: Well, certainly, a lot of the American athletes, actually—Andy Roddick is somewhat known for this—when they have these tough matches, they actually jump in the ice bath, so for those of you who are brave out there, try an ice bath after a tough match.
I mean, you get the soreness out of your body, and you can recover the next day a lot faster when you just shock your system with that cold temperature, the ice bath. A hot-cold contrast shower or you go thirty seconds on, thirty seconds off with a really hot shower and then as cold as you can handle it, again, you’re getting, you know, the old blood, stagnant blood out of the body, and you’re getting new blood in there.
Certainly, diet is huge. I mean, in the first thirty minutes after you finish competing or you finish practicing, you wanna get great nutrition into your body, and that would be a high-quality protein source, that would be fruit and vegetables. You wanna look for healthy food bars.
As far as the protein goes, sometimes you can’t eat—if you are a meat eater—you can’t eat chicken or beef right after you play, but if you get a protein shake—it could be a rice protein or a whey protein, that sorta stuff. It’s just that first thirty-minute window is just so crucial for incredible recovery, and a lot of times, I’ll see athletes, you know, they’re either drinking the soda pop or they’ll have Doritos.
Literally, I’ll see them bringing it for after practice, and I look at ’em and I’ll just say, ‘Okay, well, there’s not a lot of preparation going on there,’ and they really need to take a hard look. They might be able to get away with it when they’re young, but when you’re older you’re not gonna get away with that. And I think with tennis, a lot of the pro tennis players out there, I think that they are stepping up their nutrition plan.
I think there’s still a long ways they could go, and I know, Yuri, you’re an expert with this, so, certainly, your tips could help a lot of the pro tennis players out there. But just that preparation of knowing that in thirty minutes, you need to have something handy so that you don’t go an hour or two hours after a tough practice or a match.
Yuri: Yeah, and I think that’s probably one of the bigger things that we see a lot of, especially with younger athletes. And, actually, with the, even the ice baths, we just started preseason, as I mentioned yesterday, and it’s boiling hot up here.
It’s about forty degrees in the humidity—Celsius—and so we’ve implemented ice baths, like, right after training, and the guys have been just loving it and they’re recovering so much faster. So, that’s a really good tip. The hot-cold contrast showers are awesome too.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure.
Yuri: Well, nutrition, I mean, nutrition, I find, as you mentioned, I think it’s a big crutch for a lot of athletes, and it’s something I’ve always been interested in, especially among tennis stars, ’cause it’s always interesting to see if there’s a lot of difference between players.
Do you have an idea, like, maybe what was a typical day like for you in terms of, you know, your daily diet when you were playing? Do you have any idea of what some of the other players are eating throughout the day? Just to give people a sense of, you know, what the things that they’re doing are.
Jeff: Yes, well, again, nutrition and health and training has been my passion probably intensely for about the last eight years because when I was twenty-four—I actually had a lot of injuries; I had two surgeries by the time I was twenty-four, and I actually was playing better tennis at thirty than I was when I was twenty-four.
I broke the top hundred for the first time then, and I was kind of becoming known on the tour as the organic, holistic-type pro tennis player, and I certainly wasn’t extreme in that I was, you know, vegetarian or eating raw. I didn’t go that route, but people on the tour, players on the tour kinda looked at me. I was drinking my green-powder drinks and I was going to Whole Foods.
Now I think, again, about five years later, a lot more athletes are doing those sort of things. You know, they’ve got the right supplements, they’ve got the green drinks, they’re eating more vegetables, but I’ve definitely seen, again, even some of the top players really not eating as clean as they can, and what I wonder about is, certainly, nutrition is not gonna help a top player hit a better forehand, so they can get away with competing at a high level without having a great diet, especially when they’re younger.
But I do see it catch up to athletes, whether they know it or not, maybe in their late twenties, certainly into their thirties. So, you see Mardy Fish actually dropped thirty pounds this year and really made a commitment. I think he hired a chef and cleaned up his—he got the pizzas and the sugars out of his diet. He’s playing the best tennis of his life at twenty-eight just because he dropped the weight and he looks great.
Andy Roddick did the same thing last year; he dropped fifteen pounds. There was this notion for a while that you need to get big and bulky just to be strong, but, really, what you wanna do is get as strong as humanly possible, carrying as little weight as possible, you know?
It’s more the relative maximal strength, the relative strength rather than getting big and bulky. So, definitely a movement in that direction. I really think the next frontier with athletes is—especially the guys like Federer, who can afford it—actually traveling with a chef.
I mean, they travel with a coach, they travel with a physio, but if they had a chef that was preparing all their meals, I mean, these guys could play until they were forty or forty-five. I just think the body starts to break down at twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty if you’re not putting clean fuel in your body.
Yuri: Yeah, that’s some great advice, and I couldn’t agree more. One of the, again, one of the biggest issues that I’ve seen personally is a lot athletes thinking that, ‘Hey, it’s okay, I’m gonna burn the calories.’ So, they think that because they’re exercising a lot—whether it’s tennis or any other sport—they can afford to eat whatever they want.
I mean, look at Michael Phelps, right? A guy who’s eating so many calories of garbage, that’s bound to catch up with you. And I think that one of the biggest benefits to eating organic and a lot more of a vegetarian-based diet, you know, like you had mentioned, is that it definitely helps the recovery, and I think that’s a really important, you know, component that you touched upon earlier, is that recovery is so huge, especially at that top level, where you’re playing so often and training so much.
Even if it’s for the, you know, the person who’s working out at the gym five, six, seven days a week; being able to recover is so important to your ability to continue, you know, at the top of your game, whatever that game might be.
Jeff: Yeah. Actually, you know, up in your neck of the woods, in Canada, I played the Canadian Open several years ago, and one American player, who has retired several years ago, he either finaled or won it, but he was telling me that the entire week of the Canadian Open, he actually at McDonald’s every single day, and he won that tournament.
And that just kinda proves the point that hey, you know, for one week you could probably get away with it, but this guy was outta the game by the time he was twenty-eight. I mean, he would wake up in the morning, and he would say, ‘Jeff, do you ever get sore?’ I’m like, ‘No, I never get sore.’
This guy was sore every single day; he had shin splints and he was a mess by the time he was twenty-eight. So, he had that success at twenty-three and he ate the McDonald’s every day, but it caught up to him. His livelihood was affected because he didn’t put good fuel in his body.
You know, that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to become a nutritional therapy practitioner as well as a high-performance tennis coach, is I wanted to be able to share this information with people that they could go out and actually live their best life possible and perform at optimal levels on the tennis court or on the field.
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Stay tuned for PART 3 coming tomorrow.
In the meantime, you can start training like a pro here.
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