I go to the gym every day. That tends to taper off when I'm at a tournament. During tournaments, I'm not trying to build fitness. I'm simply trying to keep away any kind of tension. I go for long walks to clear my head.
Fitness isn't about being extreme and hard-core. Healthy eating is not about counting calories, weighing food, or finding less tasteful ingredients. Life is about balance.
Fitness is defined differently by everyone, but for me, the most important thing is being healthy. As tennis players, what we do is not the healthiest thing. We almost abuse our bodies.
You can't get rid of it with exercise alone. You can do the most vigorous exercise and only burn up 300 calories in an hour. If you've got fat on your body, the exercise firms and tones the muscles. But when you use that tape measure, what makes it bigger? It's the fat!
My fitness instructor helped me with strength training, muscle building, and toning.
I would say 90 percent of the stuff we do is technical anyway. If you look at a two-hour training day, 12 minutes are probably spent running or gaining fitness.
Even when I was training alone, just me and one of United's fitness coaches, I loved going onto the field, doing sprints, being at the training ground.
I'm still very professional about my fitness. I stay in trim as I always did.
If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.
I've had one very bad ankle injury but otherwise I've been incredibly lucky with my fitness. I've worked hard at it and I've always been fit even compared to other players. That sustains you through various parts of your career, but I am 36.
Flexibility is crucial to my fitness. Incorporating a good warm-up and cool-down into every session decreases my chances of injury. I use both dynamic and static stretching in my training. I've starting doing a few yoga sessions which incorporates muscle strength and flexibility.
I'm 33 now and I seem to have hit a fitness plane. Shifting the wobbly bits isn't as easy as it used to be.
Kids are starting at such a low base rate in terms of fitness that it's taking them years to catch up to where people like me started from. Every little bit is making it more difficult for kids to succeed on a world stage.
