Sports supplements are, and should be, used by all professional athletes; the purpose of sports supplements is to enhance performance. Sometimes it’s too difficult to get all your essential nutrients from food so that’s why it’s necessary now for athletes to use supplements , there is nothing wrong about them, many old school trainers are afraid of using them. I tried them and I wish I did that earlier in my career, it really helps. Competition is too high now and being physically fit is crucial in all sports, u need extra help in order to train harder and longer. Athletes train all the time, their bodies need to be ready and fuelled always in order to work, fast recovery from intense training and matches are crucial. Sports supplements are the best to insure all that.
Here are some of the sports supplements that could help any serious athlete: antioxidants, multivitamins, protein supplements, creatine, and caffeine.
Yesterday’s match between the best two players in the world was exciting but not only from the tennis point of view, I was watching how Federer will be able to face his huge mental barrier Nadal. I wasn’t surprised that he won; I think that he used the conditions around him pretty well, Nadal didn’t play so well in this tournament especially in the final, but that doesn’t take anything away from Federer. He played very well to win and Nadal wasn’t at his best, there is a reason for that, Federer knows more than anybody how to beat Nadal but it’s not easy to do it and we all know that; so I think that the help that Federer had was the high altitude and it’s effect on the game. When u play in high altitude, the ball tends to fly more and makes it harder to control; these little differences can affect the big players. Someone like Nadal who depends on wearing out his opponents with his high topspins could be more affected by high altitude than someone like Federer who loves to play fast and aggressive; and yesterday Nadal couldn’t control Federer’s aggressive play as he managed to do for the past two years. Nadal was making too many unforced errors that he usually would never make; this showed a lot in his rallies and in the return of serve. Anyway, we’ll see if Federer will be able to regain his number one spot and overcome his rivalry or will Nadal continue dominating him again…
I’ve been wondering why do we play only on clay in Egypt? There is another option, and that’s hard-court. Who decided that tennis in Egypt should be played on clay? Is it because of our beautiful sunny weather? We can play on hard courts outdoors as well, like in the States. In Spain tennis is really big on clay; everybody plays on clay, but not exclusively! And there are excellent clay court players over there but that’s also because there are excellent clay courts! The courts we play on over here are really bad..
What I am trying to say is that either we start playing on hard courts or we start making good clay courts! Or, why not, do both! The clay courts that we have in Egypt are slippery, full of bad bounces, the lines are painted and they don’t have enough clay on them. As a professional player who traveled a lot and played on different surfaces I suggest that either we start making good clay courts, ones we can actually improve on, or just stick to hard courts that are anyway cheaper to maintain. Constructing clay courts is like building anything else, it’s a science, it can’t go wrong, there is step 1, step 2, step 3…. So why is it so difficult to do them? Why is it so difficult to do plastic lines? They say it’s because of the heat.. well there are lots of countries that have hot weather and still use the plastic lines, like Morocco and Tunisia. They got several good clay courts, why can’t we have one good court? Playing on good courts will improve tennis in general in Egypt and it will prevent injuries as well. I got injured because of extremely slippery courts, so I urge the new clubs that are being built everywhere to focus more on the quality of clay courts; and if those are expensive to maintain, then they should just stick to hard courts. At least this way we will start having hard court players instead of not having any of them: the clay court players can’t improve because the courts are similar to the hard ones but with some clay spread on them, and the hard court players can’t develop because they don’t have any hard courts to practice on. 
It just hit me today that we have no men playing in our tournaments, that’s really disappointing. I am playing Shorouk touranament and only juniors are playing in the men’s tournament. That’s not because our seniors are not participating, it’s because there are no seniors anymore. We have two or three players above 20 who can play good tennis in Egypt and one or two of them play competitive tennis. How can we have top players and no one wants to continue or has the will to compete ?
Of course I can’t throw the blame only on the players, I’ve been around for a long time and I’ve seen several federations, our current federation surprised me this year with the amount of Futures that they planned on doing, I find this as a big step for our tennis players to compete and to improve, so all our juniors and few seniors should really benefit from all these tournaments and try to remember that what really counts is winning in Futures and Challengers not winning in some local tournaments under 16 or 18!
