Tennis Players Who Lose Confidence Matches

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When you work on a new stroke in your tennis game or changing your technique, even though your shots feel pretty good and pretty consistent in practice, that you can't use that shot in a match. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session, I answer a question from a table tennis player who is working on a new stroke, a backhand stroke, but he's having trouble actually using the stroke in a match even though he can do it near perfectly with consistency in practice. Here's the question I received from David Currently, I've been developing a new technique in my table tennis reverse backhand stroke. During training, my coach says my shots are near perfect and my consistency is very good. Sometimes I don't even miss a shot. However, when it comes to playing a match, I'm unable to use this stroke. We found out that I keep thinking of the stroke and I'm afraid of missing. I'm a very consistent player and I don't like making errors. Do you have any tips?

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David this is a very common problem for tennis players, table tennis players, any stick and ball sports, you know, like baseball and golf and tennis, that what happens is when you change your technique, the idea is that you're going to get better. You're working on your reverse backhand stroke. The goal is to improve, to have better control, have more consistency, maybe more power. Whatever the goal may be. And what happens in that process is that your confidence initially will go down, your trust in that stroke will go down. You essentially take a step backwards with your confidence and your trust in it until you start to develop the consistency. Now you're at that point where you have the consistency and you said it's near perfect in practice and that you don't miss any shots with that particular stroke. But you also said that in a match now you're unable to use this stroke. So what that tells me is that you haven't built up enough trust in your skills. The confidence is there from practice, but the trust is lacking. What is trust in this case? Trust is the ability to take the skills that you're learning in practice and apply that to competition effortlessly, easily, automatically so what often happens in that case when you're working on something new is there's still a little bit of hint of doubt in the back of your mind whether you can perform that in competition. But in this case, you're simply not using the stroke, I think out of fear that it's not going to work for you, or out of the fear of missing, since that's part of your game, being very consistent player and not making a lot of errors, then I think it's holding you back from using this new reverse backhand stroke that you've been working on in practice. Okay, so what are the suggestions? What can you do in this case? Well, first of all, what I'd like you to do is work up to being able to use this stroke in bigger matches. In other words, if you can play some local practice matches, for example, and I'm sure you do that, I want you to be able to integrate it into your game slowly to develop that trust that it can work. In addition to that, I think you could do some simple mental rehearsal of seeing yourself playing a consistent, effortless match where you're actually using that stroke and you're using that stroke consistently. You gotta get it in your head that the stroke is there, that now I just have to have the confidence to be able to go ahead and put it into the match scenario. So first, work yourself up into the bigger matches of being able to trust that shot from the local maybe to the regional to the state, for example. And then secondly, I want you to visualize being able to use that successfully in your matches. And thirdly, I would say maybe set a goal for yourself to hit that particular shot and that you're actually going to use it from the get go and from the start. And that will be your objective or one of your objectives for that match. Thanks for your question and good luck with your game.

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