Spring into tennis: fitness tips, junior coaching and inspiring tales
by Ruth Jarvis
SELT Team
Welcome to the March edition of our monthly blog, where we share the latest fitness facts and stats along with tips and tricks to help you play your best game, whatever your age and stage.
We hope you enjoy it – please let us know what you think, and tell us if there are any subjects you’d like us to cover, at ruth@southeastlondontennis.com.
Our 2025 junior coaching programme kicks off this month for 4 to 18-year-olds so we thought we’d take a look at why playing tennis is so beneficial for children (it goes far beyond just learning a skill for life).
By definition, children are learning, growing and developing, physically, mentally and emotionally. The skills they learn and the experience that they gain will help build, according to the USTA, healthy, resilient, creative and adaptive brains and bodies.
In terms of physical development, racket sports provide a training ground for both gross and fine motor skills. ‘Gross’ refers to larger, whole-body movements such as running, jumping and stroke-making, which encompass strength, balance and agility; ‘fine’ to the smaller, more precise movements such as changing grip, applying spin and placing shots. Tennis is unique in making this range of muscular demands, as well as being a free-flowing, reactive sport, which requires complex, split-second calculations to deliver the right response fast, training the brain as well as the body. In addition it helps develop a healthy heart and hand-eye co-ordination. And there are huge mental, emotional and social gains, which we’ll examine later in the year.
Our junior coaching follows the LTA Youth programme, designed to build skills gradually in age-banded groups, all with a focus on fun (info here and bookings here).
A high-five and much respect to This Girl Can, which has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Back in 2015, the campaign group recognised that low confidence, poor body image, lack of time and enjoyment and safety concerns were holding huge numbers of women back from sport and exercise, and set about levelling the playing field by media-bombing the country with radical and body-confident images of women doing it for themselves. As marketing director Kate Dale puts it: ‘This Girl Can marked the end of the accepted wisdom that getting sweaty in the gym, jumping into a pool without fear of judgement or playing football with your friends wasn’t for women’.
Three million more women are active now than then, most crediting TGC as motivation. It’s a fantastic achievement, but that’s still half a million fewer than men, so the good fight goes on.
We hope we’re doing our bit – 55% of people who come to SELT’s sessions and classes are women or girls, and 45% men or boys (though they tend to come more often).
It’s the spring equinox on 20th March, and the clocks go forward on the 30th, so there’s going to be a lot more daylight to enjoy. Rather wonderfully, the mere fact of being outdoors boosts health and exercise outcomes before you’ve even swung a racket. Here are three quick wins.
• Heart rate and diastolic blood pressure are significantly reduced – improving your cardio capacity
• Salivary cortisol shows a marked decrease, which means stress levels are down
• From late March through to September, the body can make all the vitamin D it needs for healthy bones, teeth and muscles from 10-15 minutes a day of sunlight, no supplements needed
Every month one of our LTA-accredited coaches will be sharing their training secrets for getting in winning shape, injury-free. This month, Laurence Garton-Adams demonstrates three pre-game stretches designed to optimise your play, with three more coming next month to complete the set. To learn more about Laurence and book a private class, click here.
London has around 3,000 parks so it really means something that the 2024 Good Parks for London report ranked Lewisham’s as top of the tree, and one of the biggest improvers since 2022.
The 25 London boroughs are ranked on ten criteria, including public satisfaction, sustainability and health, fitness and wellbeing (so maybe the 19 refurbished tennis courts since 2017 helped us clinch the top spot). In second and third place were Hackney and Lambeth, with Barnet, Croydon and Enfield trailing at the bottom of the table.
There was a special mention for Glendale, Lewisham’s park management contractor, for its skills development policy, which includes providing work placements for students at Lewisham schools. In 2024, Glendale was awarded a long-term contract to manage the borough’s 53 parks and green spaces until 2040, including the tennis courts.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s news as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. SELT will be 14 years old in May and, as we grow, we’re bringing a few more voices into the team from within our tennis community.
This blog comes to you from Ruth Jarvis, a writer and former cycling magazine editor (favourite session: over 50s), Charlie Giles, the woman behind marketing agency Studio Luxmore (favourite session: cardio) and SELT co-founder Chris Howard (favourite session: everything).
See you on court!
Website by Dan Stevens