Playing Cautiously is Never a Good Option in 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 72. I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session, I help a player who's caught in a vicious cycle between going out, playing freely, swinging out on the ball, making some errors, and then playing cautiously. Learn why playing cautiously or carefully is never a good option in tennis.

When I allow myself to let go and swing freely, my shots have no control sometimes. So I go back to being careful, which doesn't work either. So how do I avoid this vicious cycle? Improve your mental game quickly by visiting sportspsychologytennis.com today and claim a free tennis psychology report titled Six Unforced Mental Game Errors Tennis Players make between points.

You have to keep in mind that you're not a machine, you're not a robot, and that some shots are not going to go to your target and some shots are not going to be in the center of the racket or not feel good to you for whatever reason. I mean, sometimes you just wake up and the shots don't feel good. And that's just part of being human. That's just part of playing the game of tennis. So you have to keep that in mind, because I'm hinting a little bit here of, well, when I free it up and I let it go and I'm free with my shots, then sometimes it just doesn't work for me. Well, guess what? It's not going to work 100% of the time. And if it's not working for you 50% of the time, I say you have to go back to the drawing board and you have to go back and work on mechanics. But first you have to get to the point where you're completely free. You got on autopilot, you're reacting to the ball, and you're swinging through the ball freely, then you can decide, okay, am I doing that 100%. If I'm doing that 100% and the shots aren't good, then there must be something going on mechanically that is not right in my game, or I just haven't taken enough repetitions in practice to get it to the point where it's going to be consistent. So there's a lot of factors that go into it. It's just not about being free, right? You got to have the proper mechanics, and then also you have to practice those proper mechanics enough so that it starts to become repetitious, gets to the point, what we call over learning. Once you get to overlearning, then you can go back to trust. So it's a constant process of working on your technique and practice, making it repetitive enough so that when you go out and play in competition or play with some friends, it's now automatic, or it's repetitive. So repetitive or the ability to repeat the stroke is really critical. So let's keep that in mind. Now, being careful is never a good option. It's not going to help you. I don't care if you're down in the match, you're up in the match, you're tied in the match. Being careful just leads to tentativeness, afraid to make mistakes, afraid to missed shots. And that's not going to work for you. So you've got to get to the point where you convince yourself, I have to continue to swing out of the ball. I got to be free with my stroke. I got to let it happen. If it's not happening, I got to go back to the drawing board and continue to work on my repetition in practice so that I can hit 7 out of 10 times to my target, 8 out of 10 times to my target,. 9 out of 10 times to my target. And then you'll have the confidence and then the trust to be able to have that freedom of movement. So that's the cycle that you have to go through. You have to train your body to do what you want. You have to make it repetitive. And then finally you, you got to have trust that it's good enough for you to swing freely in competition. Thanks for your question and good luck with your game.

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