Transfering Your Strokes From Practice to Competition

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Hi, this is Dr. Cohn with sportspsychologytennis.com today I have a special guest on the Tennis Psychology Podcast. His name is ian Westerman of EssentialTennis.com He's a USPTA certified tennis pro and he's teaching full time at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Great club. In addition, Ian can now say that his Essential Tennis Podcast is ranked number one tennis podcast on itunes. Way to go, Ian.

Hey, thanks. And you're close, right on my heels. So congrats to you as well.

We're on your heels. Ian has a great podcast that you can find@every essentialtennis.com where he covers all aspects of tennis from instruction to equipment, equipment to the mental game. Just provides some great information and the reason why he's number one tennis podcast is because of the quality of the guests he gets each week on his podcast.

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.

Thanks for joining me today, Ian.

You're welcome. And thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here.

So today we want to talk about something that's very, very common or a very common thing. That question that I get, and that is the ability of players to take their strokes from practice to competition. So here's a common question that I'll get in this particular reader says I don't understand how I can hit backhands so well in practice. And when I go to play a match, I can't hit one good backhand. I freeze and it won't let me hit the backhand. Another common follow up question along that line that I'll get is how can we take those perfect strokes that we have from a practice situation and bring them to a match? Ian, this is probably, as I said, the number one question I get. And this is the number one mental challenge I think that a lot of my readers and listeners have troubles with. At least that's what it shows from the survey that I've done@sportspsychologytennis.com so let's first talk about what gets in the way. If we could start with kind of an explanation from your standpoint with players that have great strokes or at least feel Great in practice. And then they go to competition and they feel like that they can't even hit the same stroke or they have tension or that they freeze. What are the explanations or the different explanations from more of a mental game standpoint, if you could.

Absolutely. And I definitely have received this question several times myself, so I know it's something that recreational players all over the place are dealing with. So it's a good question. And in my opinion, being able to take the game that you've worked on, take the strokes that you've worked on, all that hard work and repetition, and be able to transfer it over successfully to a competitive environment, I feel is really a skill in and of itself. Something like a good forehand, where you take the time to study it, figure out what you need to do to make it a better shot, then you put in the time and the practice and the repetition to start making it a habit, start making it comfortable where you can do it over and over again. I feel like then taking that forehand and being able to recreate it when you know that it really counts in a competitive environment where it's meaningful, it means something for you. I think that just doing that same stroke in a competitive environment is a skill in and of itself. And I think that a lot of times recreational players are very good at hitting the practice court, and they enjoy the process of developing a better forehand or backhand, in this instance, for your listener, and making it feel good and make it solid. But I don't think they spend enough time then bridging the gap between practice time and competitive time and actually working on the skill of being able to hit that solid shot when it really counts and it really matters to them.

Well, is that the main challenge that they have? It starts to count. It starts to matter. It has more importance when they go to the match. Is that one of the reasons why they're tightening up in a match situation?

Yeah, absolutely. And I know that as a mental coach, I know that and myself as a tennis instructor, I know that we both tell our students that you need to be relaxed, hit the ball just as you would during practice. But it's not as simple as that because our expectations get in the way, our desires to want to win or want to make our parents or our teammates or our coach happy. All these types of pressures start to get in the way of the athlete. And so, yeah, there's a little bit of that physical tension that starts to get in there. And I feel like without repetition, in that type of environment, a player will never really get used to it and learn how to find kind of the best mental state for themselves where they can be relaxed and actually hit the same shot.

So it's almost like one of the things you're saying is you have to get acclimated to being able to swing freely or just be comfortable in that environment with your strokes. It's not a given for you. It's like you got to go and you got to get acclimated to playing in those conditions, and you got to find the mental state that's going to allow you to be able to swing freely.

Absolutely. I feel like it takes repetition again, just like the actual physical repetition that it took to develop that solid backhand in practice. I think that it takes mental repetition, if you will, in a competitive environment to build up the confidence and the toughness and the resolve to then go out and feel like, okay, I can hit that exact same shot. I know that it counts right now, and if I miss it, maybe I'm going to feel like ideally not, but maybe I'm going to feel like I've let myself down or I've let somebody else down, or I'm going to lose the match. And this match matters to me. But I think recreational players need to do a better job of repeatedly putting themselves in that position so that they can work through those issues and become tougher to where they can, just like in practice, go for the shot without any added pressure to themselves and be able to perform up to what they think that they should or what they know that they should.

Yeah, absolutely. And I also put it under the heading or the rubric of a lack of trust in their skills. So you may have the skills to do it in practice, but can you really trust it when it comes time to play when, as you say, when it counts or when the player is putting a lot of importance? So how can players have that greater level of trust in their skills? Because to me, if you're tightening up and you're freezing and you're over what I call you're over controlling the stroke, then all of those things to me, are going to prevent you from using your normal stroke that you have in the practice situation. So what would you say are a couple of things that players can do to have that greater trust so when it comes time to swing that they're going to be freer with it, they can have greater trust in what they practice?

I think that those of your listeners who want to be able to consistently perform up to as high of a level as Possible when it really counts and it's a competitive match. I think they need to put themselves in a competitive environment as often as possible. And obviously specifically in a tennis competitive environment would be best and is most applicable. But even outside of the tennis court, and just speaking from experience being a college high school athlete and a college athlete, I've been around high level performers a lot of in my life and I could live with him in college specifically. And I can tell you that those of us who were on my college tennis team, we were constantly competing at something, whether it was ping pong or video games or poker or whatever, whatever we happened to be doing while we were on the road or we had off time outside of practice and match playing, we were always coming up with some kind of game or playing some other kind of sport and cross training and we were always challenging each other in competitive situations to come up with the goods. That's what it comes down to is in that competitive situation on the tennis court or anywhere else, do you have the toughness to put aside your fears and your anxieties about performance and just do it and just be able to perform as freely and as confidently as possible. And I think that as often as your listeners can play competitive games on the tennis court, even put something on it, raise the stakes, play for 20 push ups in a baseline game up to 10 or play for who's going to buy water or Gatorade after your practice session, raise the stakes a little bit, put some extra incentive or pressure on it and practice on purpose, being confident and hitting out. I think the more they can do that, the better they'll get in competition.

Yeah, you beat me to the punch there, Ian. I was going to say there's some things that I think you can do from a practice situation and I would say that's the first thing is get away from the academy mindset. The academy or the lesson mindset is I got to have, I got to just work on my strokes and develop perfect strokes. But no, if you want to play well, you got to start playing in your practice, you've got to start playing practice points, start playing practice sets. And my rule of thumb in is 50, 50, you know, so if you spend four to six hours a week in practice, half of that should be in competitive like scenarios. What do you think, Ian?

Absolutely. And I would almost, I would add to that, I would say if this specific person who asked the question of you, if they're consistently going out and their strokes and backhand specifically, or maybe strokes in general are just not the same. They're just at a significantly lower level as in practice. I would personally tell that person you should probably double if they're playing six hours a week on a tennis court, probably four of that should be spent in competition and only two actually practicing or repeating that stroke. And I would tell this person that they shouldn't work on adding anything more to that stroke. In other words, trying to improve it technically until they can at least come close to matching their competence and competition as they do when it doesn't really, really count for something and they're just hitting for practice.

Yeah. Great tips. I've been talking with ian Westerman of EssentialTennis.com go check out his website at EssentialTennis.com that's where you can also get a link to his tennis podcast. It's now the number one tennis podcast on itunes. But he's got much more. He's got a video channel now that you can check out. He's got lots of articles on EssentialTennis.com go sign up for his podcast on itunes and check out his website@every essentialtennis.com Ian, thanks very much.

Thank you, Dr. Cohen. Great talking to you.

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