The Bottom Line
A broad, almost encyclopedic, reference work. The moderate depth it offers on most topics is sometimes sufficient, sometimes oversimplified.
Pros
- Wide-ranging coverage
- Lots of practical advice
- Lots of illustrations
Cons
- Insufficient depth on many topics
- Occasional unsupported conclusions
- Poor quality on many photos
Description
- Part 1: Principles of Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation: strokes, gear, warmup, stretching, rehab
- Part 2: A Complete Inventory of Tennis Injuries: upper body, lower body, trunk and spine
- Part 3: Medical Issues: tennis-related problems with every part of the body
- Part 4: Special Issues: heat, nutrition, doping and drugs, overtraining, traveling
- Part 5: Special Tennis Groups: juniors, seniors, women, wheelchair
- Part 6: Managing and Delivering Tennis Medicine Programs: sports physician, athletic trainer
- Huge list of references
- Good index
Guide Review - Reference Book: From Breakpoint to Advantage
From Breakpoint to Advantage: A Practical Guide to Optimal Tennis Health and Performance, by Babette Pluim, M.D. Ph.D. and Marc Safran, M.D. covers almost every topic related to tennis injuries and performance, and it gives plenty of specific advice, such as when to eat before a match and which strokes to use when recovering from tennis elbow, but that advice is sometimes too simplistic. Two of many examples: The authors only distinguish between sugars and starches in their discussion of carbohydrate nutrition, omitting any mention of glycemic indexes or whole versus refined grains, and they render advice on racquet balance without offering serious consideration of how it factors into the most common tennis injuries. If you want a fairly quick reference resembling a concise encyclopedia, you'll like this book. Almost every page offers several useful tips. Once you get a good introduction to a given topic here, though, you'll need further research in order to have fully adequate information.
