Helping Young Tennis Players Retain Lessons

You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast with mental game of tennis expert Dr. Patrick Cohn. Do you want to improve your mindset for tennis? Then join us on the Tennis Psychology Podcast.

Do you coach a talented tennis player, but that tennis player has trouble retaining the instruction? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, a mental performance coach at Peak Performance Sports Sports. In this video, you're going to learn how to teach your athletes to retain that information longer and also manage your expectations about learning. You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast.

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Here's the question I received from Chris. My nephew and I have been hitting since he was seven. The struggle is I've been trying to get him to attend to the basics like watching the ball and rotating his body as he swings at the ball. He seems to get it in our practice session, but then doesn't retain it in the next time we hit. It's almost like it's Groundhog Day with him. Success comes in waves and then the next time we hit, it quickly fades away and. And we have to start over again. Well, Chris, I want to talk a little bit about motor learning and the psychology of learning. I think a lot of coaches and parents think that if your athlete can do it in one practice session, in other words, you work on him watching the ball and being able to rotate his body through while you're there and you're giving him feedback every single drill. And that feedback, feedback allows him to learn in that session and change his behavior in that session. However, long term, learning is a totally different animal altogether. Well, what do I mean by that? You have to expect or you have to have the assumption that it's going to take 30 to 60 days of 30 to 60 repetitions a day for him to get that new move. That's right. He has to extinguish the old pattern, not rotating in some way, so and replace it with rotating through the ball. And so to extinguish that old habit takes a long time and to replace it with a new habit. So I think what you're seeing is he can get it in the practice session with your feedback as you give him knowledge about his performance. But then when he comes back, it hasn't solidified yet. It's not part of him. It's not part of his makeup yet. It hasn't been automated and that's the key to, to great tennis is when you make those changes. You do repetition after repetition after repetition over 30 or 60 days. And the idea is now your athlete doesn't have to think about that. Your athlete just focuses on the ball and focuses on where he wants to hit the ball. I call it targets and tactics. With my clients, getting them out of the mechanics of rotating, hitting topspin and following through all that has to be baked in when they go and play matches. But this question is really more about motor learning. You can't expect that he's going to get it in one day or one week and maybe even one month. You have to keep coming back to it. My recommendation is spend 10 minutes a day going back over those basics that you want him to do. And so he knows that and he works on that during the practice session. In addition, try to focus on one skill at a time. If it's watching the ball, it's watching the ball. Focus just on that. If it's roach rotating through, whatever you want them to do, technically it's just rotating through. So you want to simplify it for your athletes. Now I think you can combine those because watching the ball obviously is very important in tennis, and tennis players do that very naturally. The key is, is to see the ball early off the opponent's racket. I know when my daughter played, she had trouble with this issue. She would wait until the ball was on her side of the court to really pick up the ball and move. And by that time she was too late. So we worked on some drills where she could see the ball right off the tennis racket and thus have better anticipation for the depth or the direction of the ball, which is absolutely critical in tennis. All right, Hope that was helpful. If you want more information about mental coaching or mental performance coaching for tennis players, jump over to peaksports.com and there you can check out our mental coaching programs. We have 53 certified mental coaches, including myself here at Peak Performance Sports. We have tennis specific content@sportspsychologytennis.com and also check out our new tennis program called Tennis Confidence 2.0. Thanks for listening.

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