What's The Best Age To Start Mental Training?

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Are you a tennis parent or coach and have often wondered what's the best age to start your players off with mental training or sports psychology techniques? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I answer a question from a tennis coach about a young student that he works with.

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Here's what Rayfield asked me in a recent email. He said, I'm a four year old student and tennis player. She's pretty advanced, but when things do get difficult she breaks down. I see junior tennis matches with girls crying and I don't want that to be my player. Is there a way to address this now? Rayfield, thanks for your question. Four years old, pretty beginning tennis player I assume and is not really ready for the mental coaching at this point in time. We typically recommend the parents that you can start the mental coaching. Around age 8 would probably be the minimum, but even at that age you want to start off with very, very simple ideas. We actually created a series called a children's book series called called the Confident Sports Kid Children Books. And those are just simple lessons that you can go over with your kids to help them deal with things like perfectionism and teamwork and confidence and letting go of mistakes, for example. But here's the thing, athletes at that age aren't really going to comprehend and understand the mental game at 4 years old. However, there's some things that you can do at this age that will help them later in their tennis career for sure. And that's going to be coming both from the sports parenting side and the coaching side. In other words, we see a lot of perfectionists today in tennis and perfectionism obviously has good and bad characteristics or traits to it. More so the bad traits is what holds them back and causes them to get upset and break down. These athletes have very high expectations. So from a coaching perspective and a parenting perspective, you want to make sure that they understand that the game cannot be perfected, that they cannot be perfect in tennis, that mistakes are going to happen. They're going to hit balls into the net, they're going to hit balls out, they're going to make double faults and so you can start to educate them about the idea that they're not always going to be perfect on the tennis court and that they have to accept adversity. They have to accept that they're going to miss shots, for example. They have to accept that they're going to be playing from behind and not always playing from out in front. So just, I would say just start with some simple messages about those type of things so that they understand that they're not going to be perfect, they're not always going to win. And, and the fact that you, as a parent or a coach, don't expect them to win. I just started working recently with a young athlete where he's actually a racer and not a tennis player, but he expects to win every race. And a lot of that is coming from his parents and his coach. And that's a tremendous amount of pressure for a young athlete. So at this age, you're really not starting to do any formal training at 4 years old. But, but you can certainly start to integrate some ideas from the area of sports psychology and mental coaching. If you want to learn more about the mental coaching process, Visit us@peaksports.com and check out the coaching programs. Or go to tennispsychologytips.com for more articles and podcasts about how you can improve your mental toughness in tennis.

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