Monitoring and Managing Inflammation in Professional Tennis: A Biomarker-based Review of Recovery Interventions

Inflammation is a necessary biological response to physical exertion, initiating muscle repair at the cellular level. However, in professional tennis, the compressed tournament calendar and back-to-back match schedules repeatedly trigger the inflammatory cycle before it has fully resolved, shifting the response from adaptive to potentially degenerative. This review examines exercise-induced inflammation in elite tennis players by reviewing 11 blood-based biomarkers across four major phases: pro-inflammatory, transitional, anti-inflammatory, and stress markers. Biomarker fluctuation patterns are analyzed across tennis and adjacent sports literature and compared against aerobic and team sports contexts to identify shared and sport-specific inflammatory trends. Findings indicate that while the general sequence of the inflammatory response is consistent across sports, tennis players exhibit specific unique trends. Elite tennis athletes exhibit a cortisol response driven by psychological stress unique to individual-sport competition, chronically elevated IL-6 levels throughout full competitive seasons, and progressive CK accumulation across matches and tournaments. Among the recovery interventions reviewed, whole-body cryostimulation was the only method that produced meaningful changes in cytokines, whereas mixed-methods recovery protocols provided no additional benefit compared to passive rest. These findings suggest that the timing of intervention relative to the inflammatory phase, rather than the type of intervention alone, is a critical determinant of effective recovery for professional tennis players.