Are You Trying To Play Perfect Tennis?

Welcome to the Tennis Psychology Podcast with your host, Dr. Patrick Cohn. Dr. Cohn is a mental Game of Tennis expert. Do you want to improve your mental toughness for tennis? Then join us on the Tennis Psychology Podcast sessions with Doc.

Welcome to session number 100 of the Tennis Psychology Podcast. I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn and today I'm going to talk about why trying to be too perfect with your serve or your strokes is actually going to hurt you in matches. Here's the question I recently received from a tennis player. Her name is Sain. I had a doubles match and I did not feel comfortable with myself, which led to a poor service. I focus too much on throwing the ball perfectly for my toss. I forced it. Therefore the ball ends up too far away from me and not in a good position. Throwing the ball for the serve doesn't come naturally to me anymore. I'm overthinking it and it's even that bad that I think about it. During the entire match when I'm not serving, even when I'm returning serve, I think about the fact that I'm going to have to serve again soon. I just don't get it. Can you help me overcome this? The serve used to be my strongest weapon.

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Well, incidentally, I deal a lot with this phenomenon called the putting yips or chipping yips in golf and I see it less often in the tennis arena. But I have seen it in that it happens more with the service where you start overthinking over controlling and and now you feel as you're yipping at it and you have no control of the toss. And often it's from this concept of trying too hard, overthinking the motion and not trusting your natural ball toss or service motion. It's going to feel jerky. It's going to feel like you're not in sync. It's going to feel like you have no control over your ball toss if you have the yips. Now in Sane's case, I'm not sure that she's all the way to the point where she has the yips. However, it sounds like it's getting close to that point. But the bottom line is she's overthinking a well learned skill. When you start to overthink a well learned skill, then what happens is you're interfering with your natural rhythm, your natural tempo, your natural ability to to make the ball toss. My suggestion in this particular case is you have to stop thinking about it and just see the position of the ball toss and trust your hand eye coordination. So in essence, you have to go backwards. Instead of trying to be more perfect with the ball toss and controlling the release and controlling your arm movement, I simply want you to see where you want the ball for your serve, then to get an image of that and let it go. That means stop thinking so much about how to toss it, which should be a very, you know, natural movement for you after years and years of playing, and instead trust the fact that your arm already knows how to do that and put it in position. Now, this applies to any stroke you know, in a tight match, when you start to tighten up and then you start to guide the stroke, you guide forehand or you guide the backhand. It's the same concept. You're trying to be too precise or too perfect with the stroke. Your attention goes more to how to make a good stroke and maybe how not to make a mistake. And then you're what we call over controlling or guiding and steering the stroke. That's the problem with trying to be too perfect is if it leads to over control, instead of seeing your target and going ahead and hitting out on the ball and just ripping it. So I want you to think more about grip it and rip it rather than how do I hit that shot perfectly? If you're one of the type of players that tends to overthink and over control your service motion or your strokes, thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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