Shuffle Up Your Tennis Training

Summary

Gemma Coles, creator of Shuffle Up Games and a former gymnastics club owner from Bournemouth, England, joins Lisa Stone to discuss her card-based fitness game adapted for tennis. Originally developed as a gymnastics strength and conditioning product (because a conditioning book felt too boring), the game was converted to tennis with expert input from former British tennis player and coach Marcus Willis. The 72-card game with 14 built-in activities makes fitness training fun, usable on or off court, and accessible to all ages and ability levels.

Guest Background

Gemma Coles ran a recreational gymnastics club in Bournemouth, UK for 20 years. She authored a series of instructional gymnastics books for parents before creating the Shuffle Up Games concept — a card-based conditioning game designed to make strength and conditioning enjoyable for young athletes. The tennis version was developed in partnership with Marcus Willis, a former professional tennis player known for his 2016 Wimbledon run and current coaching career. The product launched in the US approximately 5 weeks before this episode.

Key Topics

• Making fitness fun through gamification: The core insight is that children (and adults) will not voluntarily pick up a conditioning book, but they will enthusiastically play a game that achieves the same physical outcomes. The 72 cards are color-coded (green = easy, amber = medium, red = hard) to allow mixed-ability play.
• Cross-sport transfer from gymnastics: The four gymnastics fundamentals — flexibility, strength, coordination, and balance — transfer directly to tennis performance. Floor exercises (dish shape, arch shape while holding a racket) build core stability in ways tennis-specific training often overlooks.
• Family engagement: The game is designed so parents can compete alongside children using different difficulty levels. This transforms passive “watching from the sideline” into active shared experience.
• Injury prevention and rehabilitation: Using both sides of the body evenly addresses tennis’s overuse injury problem. Cards can also be used for physical therapy-style rehabilitation after injury.
• Reigniting love for sport: For older athletes experiencing burnout or falling out of love with their sport, the game provides a way to reconnect with the joy of movement and play without competitive pressure.
• Minimal equipment required: Most activities can be done at home without equipment. A tennis racket and ball enhance some exercises but are not mandatory. Usable indoors on rainy days, during tournament warmups, in PE classes, or at recess.
• Developing competitive skills: Playing the games teaches winning, losing, self-improvement tracking, and competing against personal bests — competitive muscles developed through play rather than match pressure.

Actionable Advice for Families

1. Integrate strength and conditioning into family time through games rather than treating it as a separate obligation.
2. Use both sides of the body evenly during conditioning to counter tennis’s inherent asymmetry and reduce overuse injury risk.
3. When a child is losing motivation, inject play-based activities rather than more structured training — sometimes athletes need permission to play again.
4. Travel with portable fitness tools (like these cards) for pre-match warmups at tournaments when court time is limited.
5. Consider gymnastics-derived exercises (floor holds, balance work) as supplements to tennis-specific training for core stability development.

INTENNSE Relevance

• Product innovation signal: The gamification of athletic conditioning represents a category of training product that addresses a genuine market gap — making the “boring but necessary” work engaging. INTENNSE could track this product space for partnership or content opportunities.
• Cross-sport knowledge transfer: Coles’s story validates the thesis that tennis development benefits from borrowing methodologies from other sports (gymnastics for core strength, in this case). This supports INTENNSE’s holistic development positioning.
• Burnout prevention: The “permission to play again” insight is a potent framing for families dealing with athlete burnout — a persistent challenge in junior tennis that INTENNSE addresses.
• Low relevance to core strategy: While interesting as a product story and training philosophy touchpoint, this episode has less direct strategic intelligence value than recruiting, technology, or market structure episodes.

Notable Quotes

“Children sometimes, especially as they get older, need permission to play again. The benefits for their social and emotional needs, for their mental wellbeing, to play again — that’s really, really nice to see.”

“If you can inject some of this fun, I think it can be the best support you could maybe give your children.”

“One great benefit of gymnastics is the foundations — flexibility, strength, coordination, and balance. Those transfer really well to the tennis court.”