It does not seem like rocket science, but in order to play professional sport at the very top level, it helps to be very fit. For tennis players, however, this is not always as easy as it seems.
The season is long and exhausting; the tournaments come thick and fast. There are ranking points to gather, more ranking points to defend, and in between the daily grind, there are flights to catch (and lost luggage to trace), jet lag to recover from and injuries to deal with. And no matter how hard you train and how fit you get, a couple of weeks spent recovering from a pulled muscle can undo a month's graft on the practice courts.
With this in mind, Jelena Jankovic decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. Her Christmas break was not spent chomping her way through a turkey with all the trimmings, nor lying on a sun-kissed beach - it was spent at 2250m above sea level in Mexico, and running until she dropped.
The world No. 1 has always looked sleek and svelte, but she has never really had the opportunity to get her teeth into a serious training program. No matter how hard she worked, she was always plagued by breathing problems, which left her running out of steam during her matches. That, in turn, led to other niggling injuries - all due to the fact that she was not training properly.
At the end of the 2007 season, Jankovic wanted to put in the hard yards, but the few weeks of the off-season had to be devoted to sorting out her sinus problem. She was forced to have surgery, and then spent three weeks waiting for the doctors to tell her she was fit to play again. By the time she was signed off the sick list, the new season was about to start, and she was undercooked as she headed to Australia.
"I was so soft," she said. "Naturally I'm very weak. I melt so quickly. My muscles melted, and I think in maybe one more month, if I wouldn't have done anything, I think I would never look like I play any sports before. That's just how I am."
This past Christmas, then, was the time to make her move. Jankovic had already started working with Pat Etcheberry, the fitness guru who turned Justine Henin into the Mighty Atom, and then, with a clear run to formulate a gruelling regime - some might call it masochistic - she began her preparations for the Australian Open.
Jankovic has achieved almost everything possible in her sport, but there is one glaring omission from her CV - she has never won a Grand Slam title. She got to the final of the US Open last year - her first trip to the sharp end of a major event - but she was defeated by Serena Williams. It was then that she realised that she needed to change her preparations in order to have enough fuel in the tank for a full-out attack on the second week of the big four tournaments.
"My focus was on avoiding the injuries I've had in the past and boosting my overall fitness and endurance so I can perform at my highest level," Jankovic wrote in The Age newspaper as the Open started. "I know that all sounds like a great idea in theory - in reality I almost fainted a few times - especially at high altitude.
"In the past, I never really knew my training limits or how far I could push myself, but the more I pushed myself in the off-season, the more my confidence grew for the year ahead. I've never been as fit as now, but the extra training means I've put some extra mass on my body and there's muscles that weren't there before, so I'm still getting used to my new body."
There was little sign of her struggling with her new muscles against Japanese veteran Ai Sugiyama on Friday - Jankovic made her way through to the fourth round with a 6-4 6-4 win. Next, she faces Marion Bartoli - and now the competition gets tougher as the second week of the tournament beckons. But as the super-fit Jankovic is beginning to discover, when the going gets tough, the tough thank their fitness trainers.
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