How 'tennis abs' struck down Andy Murray and Emma Raducanu

That Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray, Britain’s only two currently active grand-slam singles champions, are seemingly destined to be below their best at Wimbledon due to strikingly similar abdominal problems is not quite the freak occurrence it might initially appear.

For one player at the start of their elite career and one close to the end, susceptibility to such core injuries are an everyday hazard of the gruelling demands tennis places on the body, according to those in the know.

“It’s a load issue,” said Machar Reid, head of innovation at Tennis Australia. “The abs - or trunk - are rotated in all three planes, at high speeds, and repeatedly in forehands, backhands and when serving.

“Cricket bowlers might bowl 20 overs in a six-hour day, but tennis players can hit that same number of serves, and then double the number of forehands and backhands, in matches that last half as long. That density and violence of rotation is just brutal.”

Although such overuse is largely unavoidable, the British pair are suffering from the demands of their respective unique situations.

Faced with her first full year on the WTA Tour, US Open champion Raducanu, 19, had already retired from matches with hip and back injuries prior to her latest mid-match withdrawal in Nottingham earlier this month as her body struggles to cope with the step up in competition from the junior ranks.

Two-time Wimbledon champion Murray, 35, sustained his abdominal injury after a rare run to the Stuttgart Open final, which tested his fragile body with a higher frequency of matches over a short period than at any point over the previous half-dozen years.

“Without knowing the injury details, that seems a viable conclusion because he’s trained quite similarly over the