Iva Jovic's Workout Is Pure Tennis Machinery
The 18-year-old American is not training for gym content. She is training for three-hour matches, violent directional changes, and the privilege of making everyone else late to the ball.
Iva Jovic does not play tennis like someone asking for permission.
At 18, the Torrance, California native is already a top-15 WTA player, an Australian Open quarterfinalist, and the kind of US Open storyline that makes everyone suddenly remember they have always cared deeply about tennis. Convenient timing. We accept.
Her win over Alexandra Eala at the 2026 US Open gave the internet the drama it wanted and the fitness story we actually wanted. The US Open reported that Jovic beat Eala 7-5, 3-6, 7-5 in a match that lasted more than three hours, hitting 44 winners against 27 unforced errors. Andy Roddick called it the match of the tournament so far. Tennis people are not known for understatement, but in this case, fine.
The real story is the Iva Jovic workout: a deeply practical mix of plyometrics, coordination drills, shoulder stability, posterior-chain strength, daily core work, conditioning under fatigue, recovery, and mental discipline. Not cute gym theater. Actual machinery.
The Iva Jovic Workout Is Built for Tennis, Not Instagram
A lot of fitness content treats athleticism like an outfit: add abs, add sweat, add one dramatic battle rope clip, call it elite. Tennis refuses to be that cooperative.
Tennis asks for everything at once. Speed, balance, rotation, shoulder endurance, reaction time, footwork, trunk stability, braking power, patience, and the emotional maturity to keep playing after missing a shot you will mentally revisit while brushing your teeth later.
In a Red Bull training interview, Jovic described her daily work as being built around strength, coordination, endurance, and injury prevention. That phrase sounds neat until you realize it is basically the opposite of a flashy celebrity workout. No single secret move. No miracle split. Just repeated, unglamorous competence. Cruel, but usually effective.
For more context on why practical training beats decorative fitness, see our celebrity workout routines hub and the same durability logic in Travis Kelce's workout breakdown.
The Footwork: Plyometrics, Ladders, Reaction Drills
Jovic's favorite movement work is exactly what you would expect from someone whose job is to split-step, explode, stop, redirect, and hit cleanly while a ball arrives with bad intentions.
She points to plyometrics: jumping, bounding, box jumps, and ladder drills. She also uses reaction drills with tennis balls or BlazePods, those little light-up pods that make serious athletes look both very focused and faintly ridiculous, which is often how good training works.
The point is not simply to jump more. The point is to build a body that can receive information and respond immediately. Tennis footwork is not just fast feet. It is fast decision-making with consequences.
The useful version looks like short reactive bursts, clean landings, lateral movement, and a return to balance before the next rep. If the drill makes you faster but also makes your knees feel like they have started a group chat, the programming has lost the plot.
The Strength Work Is Posterior Chain and Shoulders
Here is where the Iva Jovic workout gets very grown-up.
For shoulder strength, Jovic mentions weekly work like shoulder rotators, swimmers, Y-raises, and T-raises. Not sexy. Extremely necessary. The tennis serve is a high-speed negotiation between mobility, stability, timing, and whether your shoulder feels like participating today.
Then there is the lower body. Jovic calls out squats, hip hinges, Romanian deadlifts, calf work, and single-leg exercises. That is the good stuff: glutes, hamstrings, calves, hips, feet. The whole lower-body system that starts the chain before the racquet ever gets involved.
Single-leg work matters because tennis is basically a long argument with asymmetry. Open-stance shots, lunges, wide recoveries, late adjustments, awkward decelerations. You are rarely perfectly square, perfectly fresh, or perfectly balanced. Lovely sport. Deeply unreasonable.
The Core Work Nobody Wants to Film
Jovic says she trains core every day, including planks, breathing exercises, dead bugs, bird dogs, and toe taps.
That is not the kind of core routine that gets a breathless TikTok caption, which is how you know it might actually be useful. Tennis core work is not just about visible abs. It is about resisting rotation, transferring force, protecting the spine, and keeping the body organized while the limbs are busy doing something dramatic.
The version worth borrowing: planks for stiffness, dead bugs for control, bird dogs for cross-body stability, toe taps for pelvic control, and breathing so your ribs and hips stop behaving like strangers at a bad dinner party.
A Tennis Training Session Worth Stealing
This is not Jovic's private program. It is the reader-relevant translation of the training categories she has publicly discussed: reaction, footwork, lower-body power, shoulder stability, core control, and endurance under fatigue.
1. Movement prep, 8 minutes: lateral shuffles, carioca steps, ankle pogos, hip openers, and band shoulder external rotations.
2. Reaction block, 10 minutes: ladder drill, split-step reaction, lateral hop-and-stick, tennis-ball drop catches, or BlazePod taps. Work in 15- to 25-second bursts. Rest enough to stay sharp.
3. Strength block, 30 minutes: goblet squat 3 x 8, Romanian deadlift 3 x 8, lateral lunge 3 x 8 each side, single-leg RDL 3 x 6 each side, calf raises 3 x 12.
4. Shoulder and core, 12 minutes: band external rotations 2 x 12, Y-raises 2 x 10, T-raises 2 x 10, dead bugs 2 x 8 each side, bird dogs 2 x 8 each side, plank 3 x 30 seconds.
5. Fatigue finisher, 8 minutes: 30 seconds hard conditioning, then 60 seconds controlled footwork or shadow swings. Repeat five rounds.
It is not glamorous. It is also not pretending a body becomes athletic because someone filmed it next to a kettlebell.
The Gear That Actually Makes Sense
Jovic's WTA profile lists her racquet as Yonex VCORE, and Yonex lists the Yonex VCORE 100 and Yonex Super Grap overgrip in her athlete kit. Those are the real receipts.
For the training side, the BlazePod Starter Kit makes sense for the reaction-drill work she mentions, especially if you like your coordination training with a side of humiliation. A SKLZ Elevation Ladder covers the ladder-drill piece without turning your living room into a sports-performance facility. For the shoulder and hip activation work, Rogue Monster Bands are the practical, packable option.
None of this equipment makes you Iva Jovic. Tragic but true. It does, however, support the same training categories: reaction, footwork, shoulder stability, posterior-chain strength, and durability.
The Real Secret Is Fatigue
The most interesting training detail from Jovic is that she prepares for endurance by doing hard conditioning circuits, then going back on court to hit while fatigued.
That is the sentence. That is the whole uncomfortable truth.
Most people train technique fresh and wonder why it disappears when the match gets ugly. Jovic's method teaches the body to keep producing decisions and strokes when the system is tired. Which is, unfortunately, where sport tends to happen.
It also explains why her US Open win over Eala mattered beyond the scoreline. More than three hours, late-match pressure, and still 44 winners. That is not only talent. That is conditioning with manners.
FAQ
What is Iva Jovic's workout routine?
Jovic's training focuses on plyometrics, ladder drills, reaction work, shoulder stability, posterior-chain strength, single-leg exercises, daily core work, conditioning, hydration, recovery, and mental preparation.
What exercises does Iva Jovic do?
Her publicly discussed training includes box jumps, bounding, ladder drills, reaction drills with tennis balls or BlazePods, shoulder rotators, swimmers, Y-raises, T-raises, squats, hip hinges, Romanian deadlifts, single-leg work, planks, dead bugs, bird dogs, toe taps, and breathing exercises.
What racquet does Iva Jovic use?
WTA lists Jovic's racquet as Yonex VCORE, and Yonex lists the VCORE 100 in her athlete kit.
Can a normal person train like Iva Jovic?
Yes, if train like means borrow the categories, not copy the volume. Reaction drills, single-leg strength, core control, and shoulder stability are useful. Trying to train like an 18-year-old top-15 professional athlete while also answering emails is how people meet their physical therapist.
Sources
Red Bull: Iva Jovic's tennis training for coordination, strength, and endurance
US Open: After beating Eala, Iva Jovic is ready for Gauff
US Open: Iva Jovic edges Alexandra Eala in third-round thriller