What Can Tennis Players Do To Be More Confident, Calm & Focused?

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What exercises can tennis players do to help them be more confident, focused and calm on the tennis court? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. For the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Today I'm going to answer this question. Isabella, who's a tennis player, asked the following question. She said, what exercises can I do to make me more confident, focused and calm on the tennis court? I have the athletic ability and I know I can beat people that are higher ranked than I but barely lose when I play them. How can I change that and beat better players?

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Well, Isabella, it's a big question. It encompasses a lot. Almost everything that I do with tennis players is helping them be more confident, focused and calm on the tennis court. So let's take them one by one. First of all, to be more confident, there's a couple things that you need to do. You need to have what we call proactive confidence. Proactive confidence is basically fueling your confidence before you step on the court rather than waiting to win your first game or waiting to hit a couple of good winners. In addition to that, I'd want you to look at what's undermining the confidence for you. What's the doubt? Are you making comparisons? Are you always focused on not performing well in those critical moments against those players? What is actually hurting and dragging down your confidence? So when I work with tennis players, it's always about a two prong approach. How can you feel more confident and take that confidence into the match? And what is undermining the confidence? Because you'll find both on both ends of the scale, tennis players can improve in terms of being more focused. That's a lot more straightforward for me and I've talked a lot about that in the podcast. Being focused means knowing exactly what performance cues you need to focus on out there. And some of those things will be your tactics, your patterns, targeting, for example, and maybe one simple thing about what you're doing in terms of your stroke, like setting up early. But you do want to make that really simple. Now, once you know your performance cues, then you want to stay totally engaged in those performance cues. The second step of that is when you get distracted and someone catches you on the sidelines or in the stands, then you want to refocus really quickly. And I call that the three R's for refocusing, recognize, regroup, and then refocus quickly. So there's really no magic exercises here. As you can tell, I do offer workbook exercises in my Tennis Confidence Workbook program, and I do offer workbook exercises for my students as well. But it's not something where you could sit down and simply do five minutes of visualization and you're cured. It just mental training just doesn't work that way. As far as staying calm on the tennis court, you probably can do some relaxation exercises, what we call relaxation training, breathing and progressive relaxation. However, that often I find that's a band aid. Well, why is it a band aid? Because most of the stress and the tension and the anxiety you feel is more in your head and it relates more to fear of failure. So you could certainly learn relaxation skills. But if you don't address the real source of the fear, I'm afraid to disappoint a coach. I want to make my parents happy. I don't want to look silly in front of my peers if I lose. If you don't address those issues, which I find are often underlying issues of fear and anxiety for tennis players, then the relaxation training isn't going to help. It's certainly beneficial for you to learn how to do some breathing and relax yourself, but it doesn't address the underlying fear. So that's a much more complex issue for me and takes time to work through with players to find out what is that underlying fear that they have. If you're afraid of disappointing a parent, for example, then we have to work through that fear and get you to rationalize about that and develop what's called the more healthy philosophy about your tennis. Isabella, thanks for your question and good luck with your tennis. Hey, if you have a tennis question for me you'd like me to answer in the podcast, please visit our website@peaksports.com and click on Contact Us. And we're happy to either respond to your email or I'll include it in the podcast or a video.

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