Andy Murray: I've been to the gym a couple of times in two months - I need to work harder
Now, however, his career has come full circle. On Monday night, as Murray slumped on a bench in the player lounge, he wasn’t interested in talking about forehands and backhands. Instead he described the debilitating cramps that had just cost him the match against Gilles Simon, another long-serving Frenchman.
Unlike the Nalbandian encounter, this was hardly an epic. To his alarm, Murray had begun experiencing the cramps as early as 2-2 in the second set. “Yes, there were a lot of long points and everything,” he said, “but having that happen after a set and a half on an indoor court where it’s not particularly hot is really not acceptable.”
Looking utterly crestfallen, Murray went on to admit that he had only put in a couple of strength and conditioning sessions in the gym since the US Open in early September. The fault, he insisted, was all his own, and nothing to do with his team or his fitness trainer Matt Little. When it came to his endurance training, he had simply dropped the ball.
Lacklustre effort at odds with quest to conquer cramps
You can see why the message came as a surprise. Apart from being furiously committed, Murray is usually fiendishly organised. When these cramping issues first surfaced four months ago, in the heat of the American summer, he spoke to his team and stepped up his hydration levels – which he usually optimises through the use of colour-coded bottles containing different levels of salts and minerals.
The process seemed to work when he moved into the third round of the US Open with no reported niggles. But it has resurfaced in recent weeks. “I'm not saying I'm going to win all of those matches,” he said, after reeling off nine or ten different incidents of cramping since the summer. “There’s no guarantee. But I’m gonna put myself in a much better position.”
So how have we got here? Well, Murray is clearly limited to some degree in what he can do in the gym, because of the metal hip that he had installed during his “resurfacing” operation in early 2019. But if he can move around the court well enough to defeat the likes of world No5 Stefanos Tsitsipas, he should be able to sweat his way through a Versaclimber session without too much fuss.
One unfamiliar issue, which comes with his new status as a fringe player, has been a relative shortage of match time. “For the bulk of my career I would have played close to 80 matches a year,” Murray said. “This year it would have been 40-something. I'm only averaging like one match a week. So the work that I do on the tennis court and on the practice court needs to be of a high enough intensity to make up for that. If I go a three-week period where I'm not playing many matches, I'll then probably need to do more on-court work as well.”
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