Mental Challenges of Changing Technique in Tennis

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Do you ever go through a period where you're going to rededicate yourself to your game? You take more lessons, you start practicing more, but your game goes in the tank. It goes the other way that you want it to. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I answer a question from a player who recently started taking more lessons to improve her technique, but instead of getting better, she got worse.

Dr. Cohn, Cami, a tennis player has the following question. I've been playing tennis for 10 years. I, I'm a decent player with a lot of upper level competition. I started taking more lessons recently to improve my technique and get better, but it seems like I'm getting worse. I'm not trusting my shots, I'm not following through and playing with messy footwork. How can I get over this syndrome and play like my old self?

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Hi Cammy. Obviously I want to commend you on this rededication and this motivation to improve your game. Taking more lessons, maybe practicing more to get your game to the next level, that's certainly a great goal and it, it's certainly disheartening and also can cause motivational issues. When you put in this extra time, you put in the extra lessons and your game actually gets worse instead of getting better. Here's what typically happens when you make some changes, especially if you go to a new coach who has a different philosophy about strokes and how the game is supposed to be played. The moment you start taking lessons and changing a well learned stroke with a new stroke, well, you're certainly going to introduce a lot of mental, we can say ambivalence. In other words, players will often get stuck between two motor patterns, the old and the new. And that's exactly what I think is happening with you because you said you're not trusting your shots. It's difficult to trust your shots until you've had a certain number of repetitions with the new pattern. The new stroke, for example. And that's why I say you get caught in between strokes, is now under pressure. The old one wants to creep up. You want to do what's more natural, but yet the new one is still there and you're working on the new one. So really the key is to be patient for changes to take place, be patient for your new patterns to develop, and be and be patient for your game to turn around. I subscribe to the old adage, you got to take one step back initially to take two steps forward. Right now you've taken one step back and you haven't taken two steps forward yet. What's going to facilitate that process is for you to try and play with a little bit more of a simplistic mind or a clear mind when you get on the court. In other words, make sure you spend the time each week working on your technique, working on your mechanics, the working on the material that you're learning from your instructor in the lessons. However, when you go play practice sets or practice points or you play matches, you have to be able to simplify it because you're probably overthinking the technique, the mechanics, which is kind of a natural thing for a player to do when they start taking more lessons. So simplify it, try and trust it more, but at the same time continue to get the reps in so that you can make your new strokes, the new moves, more automatic. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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