Andy Murray had a lot of issues with cramping last year in North America, and he did some special preparation this year to avoid that from happening again.
This North American stretch largely happens as the summer heat is still present in the United States. Cities like Washington and New York become very hot in the summer and have plenty of humidity as well. They are not the most ideal conditions for tennis, and they're tough to handle, especially if a player is not used to it.
The United Kingdom has been steadily getting warmer over the years, but it's not as warm as some of the temperatures Murray is likely to see in New York and Washington particularly. In order to get used to it, he travelled early, arriving on Thursday for the ATP 500 event in Washington, the 2023 Citi Open.
I mean, I got here pretty early. We arrived on Tuesday night, so, yeah, try and get used to the humidity. Obviously had quite a lot of issues last year during American summer with like cramping and stuff like that. Wanted to make sure I got here early to give myself enough time to adjust to that. It's been good.
Arriving early isn't the only thing he did to better prepare for this event as he hopes to do better than he did at Wimbledon. He employed a very specific training regiment to get used to both the heat and humidity that awaits him.
So like in preparation I was doing a lot of bike sessions, you know, basically I put the bike in there and we can, like, open the steam room a little bit to increase the humidity, obviously the heaters to get the heat in the room up. Set it to like 35 degrees Celsius and, like, 70% humidity and then I would do my bike sessions in there.
That's a lot of dedication from Murray, but he's had some good showings at the US Open over the years, so there are reasons to be optimistic. When it comes to the draw, he'll play either Brandon Nakashima or Aleksandar Vukic.
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