Are You Tight and Nervous Before Tennis Matches?

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Today on the Tennis Psychology Podcast I have a guest back. His name is Florian Meyer. He was on a couple weeks ago. He's a high performance tennis coach and he's the founder of onlinetennisinstruction.com one of the top instructional tennis websites on the Internet today. He spent several years in Florida coaching high performance tennis players and now he's back in Germany. So I'm talking to him all the way from Germany, coaching and running his elite camps and his online tennis instruction. Florian, thanks for joining me again today.

Thanks for having me, Patrick.

Today's question that we want to answer comes from Gene. Gene says I'm a tennis player trying to get to level 5.0. I can get really nervous prior to a USTA match and can worry needlessly about one stroke that might have been off a little bit in a prior practice the day of the match. I never know who's going to come to the match. Crazy nervous person or just good anticipation nervous person. Is there a way to handle these days of the jitters so that they don't get in the way for me or make me overly nervous and tight before the match? How would you respond to this player, Florian?

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Well, I think you really have to look at where that comes from and it sounds to me as if Gene is just dependent on his tennis results. If you care that much, you know, you're a recreational player. But if you care that much that you're completely nervous the whole day, I think you don't really have a balance between the importance of your tennis results and putting that into perspective. So I would definitely look at that. Once you're in that situation, I think you can use techniques like breathing techniques, relaxation techniques, but it's more important to really look at where that's coming from and putting your tennis results into perspective.

I'd like to start out by pointing that it's pretty interesting that Gene understands the difference between what I call your normal jitters, your anticipation, your excitement for the match you're feeling up and you're feeling pumped. As you know, all good things for tennis players versus this crazy nervous, which I consider I call Them the negative jitters. But it's more about performance anxiety and being really scared, being fearful. Completely different notion other than your regular pre match jitters. And I try to help players identify and understand the difference between the two. So could you maybe address that a little bit, is how can you get players to be able to understand what's the difference between just garden variety normal pre game jitters and not letting that get out of hand and having this real nervousness or performance anxiety?

Right. Well, I think the player will usually, if they have experience, they will usually feel the difference. It's nice to be a little bit, you know, be a little bit nervous. That just shows that you care and then that gives you the chance to really perform. But once, once you get real anxiety in there, I think the situation becomes very, very difficult. It's tough to get out of that. And I usually just try to make up a game plan for not getting into that kind of a situation. That's my approach with players that are in that situation.

Yeah. And I want players to embrace those pre match jitters and not turn it into anxiety. So, Gene, you want to make sure that certainly you're not turning regular pre match jitters into anxiety because you're feeling like your heart is starting to jump out of your chest. And on the other side, the performance anxiety, you'll know if it doesn't go away. You know, you've played two or three games and it's still there, good chance that there's still some performance anxiety there. And my perspective, Florine, is Gene has to find out what's the ultimate fear behind the nervousness. Is it a fear of embarrassment? Is a fear of playing up to his potential? Is it a fear of, you know, how others might perceive him? Which a lot of. I find a lot of the fear of failure in sports and in tennis is related to other people often. So certainly if, let's just assume, let's just say Gene is worried about playing up to his potential, that he's a real hard worker and he wants to be able to see all that work pay off. In that case, if that's, you know, one of the fears here that's making Gene nervous. What's. What would be the approach?

Well, I think the approach is to think about what the worst thing is that could really happen. You have a, you're on a match day, you have a match that you care about, but at the end of the day, it's one match and one match, really, there's always a next match and 1, 1 match is not going to determine whether or not what you've been working on so, so hard for is going to pay off. So putting that into perspective, knowing that there's always another match, I think really helps in that situation.

How about the idea that no one's going to remember in two days, you know, no one's going to remember the match results. It's going to be already in the books. It's already going to be history.

Right. I always, you know, and that comes down to the fear of looking bad in front of others that I find is very common. And I always tell my students, I'm like, listen, if you play a bad match, if you lose 6060-people are going to remember that for, I don't know, two, three minutes, they'll think about that, oh, he's not playing well today. But literally the next day, they completely forget about that because they have their own things to worry about and that's not going to last. If, on the other hand, you completely lose control on the court and you throw your racket around, that sort of stuff, people will remember that a little bit longer.

Yes, great, great suggestion. I've been talking with Florian Meyer. Florian, we'll have to have you back again on the Tennis Psychology Podcast. I've enjoyed it. For those of you want more information about Florian's work, check out his website at online tennis instruction.com. thanks a lot, Florian.

Thank you.

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