In this article, I would like to showcase why strength and power should be part of your tennis lessons.

Strength and power play a major role in tennis. Strength is the ability of the muscle to generate force, while power is the ability of generating force as quickly as possible, so power has the element of speed in it.

Increased strength and power help with a number of things in tennis: it allows to hit the ball faster, generate heavier spin, hit the ball from difficult positions when balance is compromised, protect the player from injuries thanks to increased muscle and tendon resistance, etc.

With that being said, how can a tennis player improve strength and power. First, it is important to know that strength must go hand in hand with speed in tennis, i.e, building big bulky muscles is going to be counter-productive. Big muscles require more energy to work and fatigue very quickly! This is not what we are after. But then, how can we get stronger while staying lean and fast?

Let's have a quick look at the anatomy of our muscles:
Muscles are made of three main types of fibers: slow oxidative (Type 1), fast oxidative (Type 2a) and fast glycolytic (Type 2b). Without getting to much into this, let's just say that type 1 fibers produce low intensity force but can sustain it over an extended period of time (eg. marathon runners) as opposed to type 2b, which produces high intensity force but only in very shorts bursts (eg. Olympic throwers).
Type 2a is a happy middle, i.e, capable of outputting moderate amount of force while being able to sustain it over time.
Type 2b (fast oxidative fibers) seems to be used the most in tennis since we produce intermittent quick bursts of energy every time we strike the ball while at the same time sustain several rallies over the course of a match or a training session.

Specific training can help build more type 2b muscle fibers, capable of producing explosive movement while being resistant to fatigue.

There is a bunch of workouts that can be done in a fully fledged gym but for practical reasons, I'm going to limit this article to on-court drills only, i.e, exercises that can be done right before or after a tennis lesson using little to no equipment, namely:

Here a few curated examples of all 3 methods, which you can include during your tennis classes.

Video below depicts simple yet effective drills to strengthen the arms, legs and core using your body weight only. Best to be done on-court after your tennis lesson.

Resistance bands works quite well for tennis as we can reproduce movements that are very close to the ones we use for stroke production. Resistance bands can also be used to perform general strength development drills as if we were at the gym lifting weights.

Throwing and slamming a medicine/slam ball will make a tennis racket feel much lighter after a while simply because a medicine ball outweighs a tennis racket by a large margin. It's a proven way of improving power and explosiveness.