Are You Distracted By How Your Stroke Looks?

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When you're in the middle of tennis match, does the shadow of your stroke and how it looks tend to bother you and not look just right and throw you off? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I answer a question from Will who tends to allow the shadow of his forehand mess up his stroke. Here's the question I received from Will. He said, I'm a high level tennis player and I'll be playing Division 1 college tennis next year and have been experiencing the issue for the last year or so. The perception of my forehand and the way it feels is different from the way it looks on video. My particular problem is that when I can see the shadow of my forehand it completely messes up my stroke. I can see the shadow out of the corner of my eye and it makes my forehand look more wristy than it feels. This gets into my head and I am unable to stroke the ball. When there is no shadow, I can hit my forehand completely fine. This has destroyed my play and my confidence and I'm always hoping for clouds to cover the sun. I'd be very happy if you can supply some advice for me to overcome this issue.

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Well, this is not a common issue that I see in tennis. I actually see this more in the golf world. But here's the problem. The problem is that the perception of your stroke and what your stroke should look like, feel like does not match up with the shadow and what you're looking at your forehand in the shadow. Why? Because often what happens is the sun. Depending on how the sun is shining on you, if it's above or it's at 11 o' clock or if it's at 2 o', clock, depending on where the sun is, it's going to distort the look of your forehand. So looking at it on video obviously is going to be a much better representation for you. However, my question is why are you focusing on it? I know it catches the corner of your eye and then your stroke looks more wristy. Once again, that's because how the sun and the shadow are going to distort the look of your stroke you know, I put this under one of those categories of it's really irrelevant. What your shadow is telling you about your stroke is irrelevant. And it tells me that maybe you've got a little bit of perfectionism going on with your strokes, and you want your strokes to look good, you want your strokes to feel good, you want your strokes to produce the right result. I often call that the triple whammy for perfectionist. If one of those is askew, is not right on target, then perfectionists tend to struggle with their game if it doesn't look good, feel good, and they don't get the right result. So the fact that it looks more risky and it's distorted in the shadow tells me that you may be in that mold. But I know that really doesn't help you with your situation. What's going to help you with your situation is to stop paying attention to the shadow and what the shadow is telling you about your stroke. Now, obviously, that's easier said than done because like I said, I've worked with athletes on this particular issue. Once they get tracked onto or once they get absorbed into the shadow, it's really hard for them to get away from the shadow. What's the key? The key is going to be define what you need to focus on for making a good forehand and put all your energy and all your emphasis into that. So, for example, maybe it's taking the ball early, maybe it's visualizing what you want to do with your shot, what I call the trajectory of the shot, the amount of topspin, the amount of clearance over the net, hitting the ball deep, or whatever, the type of shot that you want to see. We call those performance cues. You have to do a really good job at defining what are the specific performance cues that I need to focus on. Good footwork, getting the ball early, early preparation, taking the ball early, trusting your stroke, focusing more on the target. So the key here is, can you focus more on the target, the trajectory of the shot, than allowing your mind to wander to the shadow? Because if you're watching your shadow, then really you're distracting yourself through the stroke because you're trying to get that extra little feedback. So let's get focused on the target. Let's get focused on your tactics. Let's get focused on really anything that's going to help you win that point or execute that forehand, other than assessing how your forehand looks in the shadow. Thanks for the question. Good luck with your game.

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