In my experience you should focus on the following things:
- Strengthen your shoulder. You need a certain amount of muscle mass / general strength in your shoulder to be able to play (intense) Tennis without hurting. Your body needs to rebuild that strength you lost over the period of 15 years. One way would be to take it very(!!!) slow, building up the necessary strength in all of the relevant muscle groups over an extended training period, which would probably take years of training with regular breaks and regeneration phases so your body can adapt to the „new“ stress of Tennis in a healthy way.
If you aren‘t able to wait years for your body to adapt, you have to support your body with targeted exercise, strengthening especially the shoulder / rotator cuff. Use Google and Youtube and research for workouts, find the exercise that works for you, there are several ways you can achieve a stronger shoulder. I currently have the most success with Kettlebells, but you can use bodyweight, elastic bands, etc.
But being aware that pain in your shoulder is most of the times not only related to racquets and strings is the first important step to take in my experience. And that your shoulder needs enough rest between hitting or strengthening sessions, as well.
- Work on your technique, record yourself, be as objective about your technique as possible. Work with a coach, analyze every stroke. „Rusted“ technique often is bad technique, hitting the ball too late, hitting with a (too) bent arm, not using your complete kinetic chain but „arming“ strokes and thereby hurting your shoulder over time.
- About racquets and strings in general: look for racquets and strings with low stiffness. Try hybrid stringing (poly and multifilament for example) or go down the 100% multifilament route for as long as your technique is „rusted“ and hurting your arm. One inexpensive, well known multi to try would be Head Velocity MLT for example.
- Go lower in string tension, as low as possible without loosing too much control. A looser stringbed is a softer stringbed is a less hurting stringbed. Experiment with tension. If you‘re really serious about playing tennis, get your own stringing machine and a few reels of strings and experiment with different string combinations and string tensions.
- Experiment with your grip size, you can do that by using more or less overgrips. I remove the base grip and then only use an overgrip, for example. Finding the proper grip thickness is key to holding the racquet loosely which is essential for not hurting your arm and shoulder over time. The grip shape is also regularly an issue, every manufacturer has a different grip shape.
If you have a racquet that feels good to hit with, as it sounds with your current Ezone, do the other steps first before switching racquets. Don‘t fall too deep into the rabbit hole of gear-madness. Switching equipment too often can also hurt your shoulder, because there‘s always an adaption period when changing the parameters of your equipment.
