The Mental Aspect of Tennis

This article will take its departure in tennis, but please keep in mind that many of the psychological tips I present can be applied to any other sport and loads of everyday situations.

There are basically two different phases: 1) Before you get on to the court and 2) when stand head-to-head with your opponent. We will call the first phase "Pregame" and the second phase "During-game".

I personally train 7-17-year-old Danish tennis players and teach them the different psychological tips you are about to read about, with great results. I can also tell from my own experience that I have beaten players with much better precision and techniques than me, only because I master the psychological aspect of the game.

Phase 1:

This phase is all the time you spend outside of the court, and the 60 minutes before an important match. The mind is an incredible tool you can train to improve your tennis performance because you can't overtrain when you are developing your psychological skills. This means you can get one step ahead of your opponents because while they just recover from a hard day of training, you can keep improving your game by training the most important organ in tennis: your brain, and thereby your mind.

The minutes before a match are very important because, as your muscles and joints, your brain has to be "warmed up". There are many different ways of preparing mentally for a match. Some listen to music, others stare into space thinking tactics, but the important issue here is to find the right state of mind. Rugby players have to be pumped up before a match. That's why you see them shout and push each other around to get in the right mood. Golf players, on the other hand, needs to be very calm and must therefore make sure to stay self-possessed and not get overly excited before going on to the golf course.

Phase 2:

The During-game phase is also very important. This is the part where you can lose everything if you can't control the psychological aspect.

You can train your whole life to master the perfect smash, or make the perfect serve, but if you doubt yourself for just a second, the hundreds of hours spend training has been wasted. You know this from your own game; for instance the situations where you have to serve a second serve against a match point. It suddenly becomes much harder to serve because you know that if you make one little mistake you will lose the whole game. This is where you will need certain techniques to keep you calm and control the psychological aspect that, in situations like that, is out of balance.

On the other hand, if you know how to stay focused, even when you're under pressure, you can win a lot of points and even beat opponents that should be able to beat you. As Boris Becker once said "The fifth set is not about tennis, it's about nerves". If your mind is occupied with anything else than how to play the next ball you will easily be distracted and lose focus. The techniques for training this are actually very simple and easy to learn, but represents a huge advantage if you can master it.

Bad days?

Hundreds of hours of practice can become worthless because of one small oversight. It's like pit stops in formula 1: They can spend millions on cutting 0.1 seconds of a lap, but if the pit crew screws up, all that money is lost. "A good tennis player never has a bad day!" - That's what my coach once told me. At first I didn't really pay attention to it and merely thought it was something he said to motivate me, but as I got better I started to understand what he meant and that he wasn't just talking rubbish.

"Bad days" do not exist! Well, think about it. If you play regularly, your technique will not become worse suddenly from one training to another (if so, you badly need a new coach;) ), on the contrary it will only get better every time you train. Your amount of muscles will be approximately the same and you will probably be just as physically fit from one week to the next, so what causes your performance to vary from day to day? Well there are a lot of answers to this question, but the most important one is: Your mind! The more self esteem you play with, the better you play. First time you make a bad serve you think "well, that happens" if it happens again you think "not again!" Third time you are already in the line of thought that says "I'm must really be having a bad day" and when that happens you are for sure going to have one. So what you need to think is: "Bad days do not exist!"

If you want to read more about the mental aspect of tennis, please read my other article on squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/mental-aspect-of-tennis