Why Tennis Players' Strokes Tighten Up During Matches

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Do you have the yips with one of your strokes in matches, but it's perfectly fine in practice? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, mental performance coach at Peak Performance Sports. Today. I'm going to help a tennis player that struggles with hitting free shots, hitting full shots in her matches compared to tennis. You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast.

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Here's the question I received from Sherry how can I overcome the yips on my forehand during matches? I seem to be able to hit it fine during the warmup and in practice, but I find myself tightening up and not swinging freely or normally in matches. Why do my strokes change in matches and how can I be better with this cherry? This is the number one reason why the tennis players come to work with us. Their strokes are fine in practice. They play great practice matches. But once they go to matches, things start to deteriorate and they start to short stroke it. Just as you identified you're tense, you're playing tentatively, you can't let go and free it up on the tennis court. So let's start with the notion of what's causing that. What's causing you to tighten up is obviously some form of perceived pressure about playing in a match. What do I mean by that? It's the same as practice, right? Same racket, same size ball, same size court. It's the same game that you'll play in a match. But what does change is your perception of the pressure when you go and play in a match. Now it becomes more important for you, more critical for you. And you might even have what we call fear of failure. What that means is you don't want to embarrass yourself by losing badly. You don't want to let down a coach. Maybe you don't want to let down a parent. Or maybe you want all your practice to pay off all the time and effort and sacrifice you've been putting into the game. You want it to pay off in some way. Well, through winning, of course. Right? And playing well. So when you go out into matches and you start to play tentatively and you can't hit out on the ball, that's most likely because of your perception of the importance or the pressure you're feeling to play well in that one on one match. What can you do about it? I always start from the perspective that you don't have the yips for yip sake. There's something that's creating the yip. What are the yips? It's just extreme anxiety and worry and it causes you at impact that you're going to stab and jerk at the ball and not fully swing out on the ball. So it's a higher level of basically fear. You can think of the yip and it's a higher level in terms of how it changes your performance as well. So the key here is to get you to swing out on the ball. But in order to do that, you have to understand what the underlying fear is. I mentioned it might be fear of failure based upon letting others down, or fear of embarrassment. Whatever it may be, you have to address that head on. I'm not going to focus on that in this video, but we do have articles about fear of failure over@peaksports.com blog and sportspsychologytennis.com you can check it out there. Now, given that once you identify the fear and you take it head on, you rationalize with that fear, well, what's so awful about losing? You're going to find out, well, nothing's really awful about losing. Your goal then when you go out and play a match is to swing fully and to swing freely. However you want to define that. It could be as simple as finish the stroke. It depends on your level, of course. But if you're a more advanced player, maybe you think about hitting it deep. If you're more beginning, intermediate, maybe you think about I'm going to swing through and finish the stroke. Let the ball get in the way of your rack. Do not hit at the ball. We call that the hit impulse when you're just trying to hit at the ball. And then that's partly what causes that jerk because you're so focused on hitting the ball. Remember a tennis swing, you're swinging through the ball to finish. So that would be a great mental cue for is to think about swinging through to finish. But ultimately you have to go out there with the objective that the only thing that matters is for me to get over these demons and swing freely. I don't care if it goes into the fence, it goes into the net. I'm going to make it an objective and a goal to swing normally, swing fully, swing out on the ball. Hope that was helpful. If you want more information about One on One Mental Training jump over to peaksports.com and check out our coaching programs. We work with athletes as young as 12 all the way up to professional athletes here at Peak Performance Sport. In addition, go download a free report@sportspsychologytennis.com and you can also listen to more podcasts, watch videos, and read our articles. Thanks for listening.

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