Andy Murray’s Australian Open preparation these days means avoiding running and weights

The three-times grand-slam champion is in better spirits now. After taking some time to adjust to the metal implant in his hip, a three-week training block with coach Ivan Lendl in Florida has him feeling in his best shape since he underwent resurfacing surgery.

Understandably there have had to be compromises in his fitness regime. Gone are the days when Murray would push himself to the absolute limit with a punishing set of drills and circuits. After all he has been through he cannot take the risk of running himself into the ground at the age of 35.

“My training has definitely changed,” Murray said. “I am not spending as much time on the court and having more days off. In a training week I will train for five days and take two days off, whereas before it was five and a half or six days. My days are also slightly shorter.

“I don’t do any running or impact work away from the court, which in my early and mid-20s I did a lot of on the running track. I do some bike [riding] and use the vertical climber a lot. I do no squatting with weights on my shoulders anymore.

“You have to adjust. For the last seven to eight months I have had no pain. Because it’s a metal joint, I don’t get any pain from the hip itself but obviously the rest of the body has to compensate for that metal joint. My left lower back sometimes gets sore and my left groin. The biomechanics around my own pelvis changed when I had the operation. When I started playing more, other things started creeping up.

“Now I feel like my body is used to the new movement and conditioned to play tennis. I am hoping it stays like that for a period of time and I can play top tennis.”

Murray still has high expectations of himself despite being a chiselled veteran. Towards the end of last season he expressed frustration about a repeated cramping issue and even admitted that he was not working as hard as he should off the court. He has attempted to resolve this by reviewing his training arrangements.

“If I watch Rafa [Nadal, 36] and Novak [Djokovic, 35] moving around the court, they don’t look much slower to me based on their age,” Murray said. “Obviously there are restrictions that I have because of the nature of the surgery. Sometimes that can be frustrating and sometimes I have to remember that that is the case.

“I think if you spoke to my team, always after matches I’m trying to find out how can I make that better, rather than seeing it as being a lost cause or being like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be able to move quite as quickly there or I’m not going to be able to do this because of the hip.’ I’m like, ‘Is there a solution? Is there another way to make my movement more efficient? Can I get my flexibility better? Can I improve these other things that might help?’

“I’m not getting so many aches and pains now, which is interesting because if you talk about the ageing process, when I was 33 I was getting way more issues with my body than I’m getting now at 35 and a half just because my body is used to the new hip.”

While Murray arrives at the first grand-slam event of 2023 in good condition, he is still the underdog for his first-round match on Tuesday. The draw pitted him against Matteo Berrettini, the big-serving world No.14 from Italy who has won their past three encounters, most recently in the third round of the US Open last September. Presently ranked No.49, Murray’s failure to push inside the top-32 by the end of last season cost him the chance to earn seeded protection in the first two rounds.

“The seeding does matter,” Murray said. “If you want to have good runs in these events you have to beat the best players at some stage but obviously in the past few years some of the early draws have been very tricky.

“I was quite clear that it was something I wanted to do last year to try and get into the seeded spots. It didn’t quite happen. Obviously I want to move my ranking up and see just how high I can go with everything that has gone on.”

Murray has no plans to watch the new Netflix tennis series, Break Point, in the build-up to a match with one of its featured players – Berrettini. He looked on with bemusement last year at the large camera crews rushing around the locker room after his own Amazon Prime 2019 documentary, Resurfacing, was largely filmed by only one person.

“It’s not something that I’m desperate to get back to the hotel room and stick on,” Murray said. “Would I be involved in it? Maybe some people don’t have a problem with it but for me if you stick 10 cameras around me I don’t feel like I’m going to be completely natural in that situation. But I would be up for doing something like that again if it felt a little bit more private.”

– The Times

Originally published as Andy Murray’s Australian Open preparation these days means avoiding running and weights