Tennis Nutrition: Fuelling Matches of Unpredictable Length
- Shrey Aggarwal
- Aug 6
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 7
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played 11 hours and 5 minutes at Wimbledon in 2010, spread across three days. Two weeks earlier, on the same tour, plenty of first-round matches were done in 68 minutes. No other sport asks an athlete to prepare for both of those outcomes with the same breakfast.
That's the problem I get asked about most by the tennis players I work with, whether they're playing AITA nationals in Delhi in May heat, ITF juniors in Europe, US college dual matches, or Saturday club league in Manchester. They don't know if today is 70 minutes or four hours. They find out somewhere in the second set, by which point the fuelling decisions that matter have already been made or missed.
Quick Overview
Why match length changes the plan
Tennis is intermittent work with a low duty cycle. Actual ball-in-play time sits at roughly 20 to 30 percent of total match time on hard courts, less on grass, more on clay (Fernandez-Fernandez et al., Strength Cond J, 2009). Rally durations are short, recovery between points is short, and the whole thing repeats for an unknown number of hours.
The low duty cycle is why a lot of players get away with poor fuelling for a while. Blood glucose holds reasonably steady through a match under 90 minutes. Push past that and the downward drift becomes real, and it shows up in the parts of the game that are easiest to lose without noticing: second serve percentage, depth on the backhand, willingness to construct a point rather than end it (Ranchordas et al., JSSM, 2013).
Carbohydrate feeding during play improves stroke quality and repeated-sprint measures in longer matches, with weaker effects in short ones (Gomes et al., JISSN, 2013). So the honest answer to "how much do I need during a match" is that it depends on a variable nobody can see in advance. That argues for building the plan around the long version and accepting you’ll sometimes carry an unopened gel off court.
What to eat before you know how long you’re playing
Start the day at 6 to 10g of carbohydrate per kg of bodyweight across the full day during tournament blocks, closer to 5 to 7g/kg in ordinary training weeks (Thomas et al., MSSE, 2016). For a 70kg (154lb) player that’s roughly 420 to 700g on a tournament day, which is more than most club players eat and considerably more than most junior players eat when they’re nervous.
The pre-match meal lands two to three hours out and should be carbohydrate-led, low in fibre and low in fat. What that looks like depends on where you live and what you’ll actually finish. Poha with a little peanut, upma, idli with a small portion of potato sabzi, white rice with dal and a mild curry, oats with honey and banana, toast with jam, a bagel, pasta with a light tomato sauce, congee. All of these work. A heavy paratha, a fry-up or a creamy pasta will not.
Then top up 30 to 45 minutes before you walk on with something small: a banana, two dates, a slice of white bread with honey, or a sports drink. This is the part juniors skip because warm-up and check-in eat the time. Build it into the routine at the same point every day so it stops being a decision.
Caffeine is worth using here if you already tolerate it, and the timing matters more than the dose for most players. I’ve written about how much caffeine and when here separately.
Fuelling on changeovers
You get 90 seconds on changeovers and 120 seconds between sets. That’s the whole eating window, and there are only so many of them.
For a match you expect to run beyond 90 minutes, aim for 30 to 60g of carbohydrate per hour from the start, and push toward 90g/h in long or hot matches using a glucose-plus-fructose mix so absorption isn’t limited by a single transporter. Practically, that means alternating a sports drink with solid food across changeovers rather than trying to take everything at once. A banana, a few dates, a gel, half a jam sandwich, an energy chew, a handful of raisins. Nothing you haven’t used in practice.
The mistake I see most often is waiting until the third set to start eating. By then you’re fuelling a deficit rather than preventing one, and the gut is less willing to cooperate under sympathetic drive. If you get nausea or heaviness when you eat mid-match, the answer is usually training the gut to handle the load rather than eating less (Jeukendrup, Sports Med, 2017). Training the gut takes a few weeks of deliberate practice, not a single session.
Sweat, sodium and the cramp in the fifth
Sweat rates in tennis vary more than in almost any sport I work with. Indoor match play in temperate conditions produces around 1.1 L/h (Lott & Galloway, IJSNEM, 2011). Professional women playing tournament tennis in the heat averaged 2.0 L/h, and lost body mass despite drinking 1.5 L/h (Tippet et al., J Athl Train, 2011). Individual players in hot, humid conditions have been recorded above 3 L/h.
That range is why blanket hydration advice fails tennis players. A player in Pune in April and the same player indoors in Prague in January need different plans, and the only way to know your own numbers is to weigh yourself before and after a match in each condition and do the arithmetic. Drink to replace roughly 80 percent of what you lose during play, and finish the rest afterwards.
Sodium follows the same logic. Whole-body sweat sodium in indoor tennis averaged 38 mmol/L, with total losses of about 1.1g per match (Lott & Galloway, IJSNEM, 2011). Long hot matches multiply that several times over, and heavy salty sweaters sit well above the average. Adding sodium to fluids improved groundstroke performance in a controlled trial in nationally ranked players (Munson et al., Front Nutr, 2020), and in my experience it’s the single change that helps chronic late-match crampers most. Electrolyte tablets, an oral rehydration sachet, or salt added to a drink all do the job.
Cramp is rarely one thing. Fatigue and neuromuscular load contribute alongside fluid and sodium status, and a player cramping in week one of a hard-court block may simply be underprepared for the surface. Treat sodium as one lever, not the fix. If cramp comes with pain that persists after the match, get it assessed rather than managed with more salt.
Tennis nutrition across a tournament week
Singles at 9 AM and doubles at 2 PM is a normal tournament day, and it’s where most players fall apart. The gap between matches is where the next match is won or lost.
Get carbohydrates in within the first half hour off court, alongside 20 to 30g of protein, then eat a proper meal if the gap allows. For a 70kg player that’s roughly 70 to 100g of carbohydrate in the first feed: a large banana with a glass of milk and some rice, or a chicken sandwich and a sports drink, or curd rice with a fruit. Replace fluid to 150 percent of what you lost, which for a 1kg (2.2lb) drop means 1.5 litres (about 2.6 pints) spread across the gap rather than drunk at once.
Across a full week, the failure mode is cumulative rather than acute. Appetite drops in heat, hotel food is repetitive, matches move, and players eat less each day while the physical load stays constant.
Weigh yourself every morning in the same conditions. A drift downward across a week means you’re under-eating, not "leaning out".
Fueletics Perspective
Tennis players fuel for the match they hope to play. Two comfortable sets, done by lunch. The plan needs to work for the match they might have to play instead, because the cost of carrying an extra gel is nothing and the cost of running out in a third set is the match.
Build the day around three numbers: your carbohydrate target for the day, your carbohydrate rate per hour on court, and your sweat rate in the conditions you’re actually playing in. Those three sit differently for a 55kg junior playing indoors in Europe and a 90kg club player in Chennai in April, and guessing them is how a fifth set falls apart. If you want yours measured rather than estimated, start with a Fueletics assessment.
Then rehearse it in practice sets until eating on a changeover feels like part of the routine rather than an interruption to it.
Research References
Fernandez-Fernandez J, Sanz-Rivas D, Mendez-Villanueva A. A review of the activity profile and physiological demands of tennis match play. Strength Cond J. 2009;31(4):15–26. doi:10.1519/SSC.0b013e3181ada1cb
Ranchordas MK, Rogerson D, Ruddock A, Killer SC, Winter EM. Nutrition for tennis: practical recommendations. J Sports Sci Med. 2013;12(2):211–224. PMID:24149731 (no DOI assigned)
Gomes RV, Capitani CD, Ugrinowitsch C, et al. Does carbohydrate supplementation enhance tennis match play performance? J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2013;10:46. doi:10.1186/1550-2783-10-46
Tippet ML, Stofan JR, Lacambra M, Horswill CA. Core temperature and sweat responses in professional women’s tennis players during tournament play in the heat. J Athl Train. 2011;46(1):55–60. doi:10.4085/1062-6050-46.1.55
Lott MJE, Galloway SDR. Fluid balance and sodium losses during indoor tennis match play. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2011;21(6):492–500. doi:10.1123/ijsnem.21.6.492
Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Nutrition and athletic performance. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2016;48(3):543–568. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000000852
Jeukendrup AE. Training the gut for athletes. Sports Med. 2017;47(Suppl 1):101–110. doi:10.1007/s40279-017-0690-6
Munson EH, Orange ST, Bray JW, Thurlow S, Marshall P, Vince RV. Sodium ingestion improves groundstroke performance in nationally-ranked tennis players: a randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial. Front Nutr. 2020;7:549413. doi:10.3389/fnut.2020.549413
