Anybody who has played a single match in an organized tournament knows the feeling of pressure and nervousness well. It doesn’t matter if you’re ahead or behind, in the opening round or in the finals, anybody who tells you they don’t ever get nervous either isn’t human, or is full of crap.
This feeling of nervousness or anxiousness is mental, and what follows physically can destroy your confidence and technique: deceleration. Simply put, deceleration is the slowing down of your racket head speed below what you would normally swing at. This has devastating effects on your game, which I will discuss below.
Why it Happens
Mental tension often brings physical tension. If you’ve done much reading here, or listened to many of the Essential Tennis Podcasts, you know that I’m constantly advocating being as relaxed as possible so that your body can work efficiently, and you can get the best results possible out of your efforts. Well, when mentally you’re tense and nervous, it’s very difficult to keep your physical body from following suit. Once your muscles start to tense and tighten it takes more work to move them, and often times when a tennis player “gets tight” his or her swing decelerates rapidly, and the range of motion and racket path become shorter and choppy.
Why it’s Bad
Once you’ve allowed your might and muscles to get tense, and you’ve lost your racket acceleration, two big parts of what make up a quality tennis shot are taken away: power and spin. Without being relaxed, and allowing your body and racket to move and swing freely, power and spin become almost impossible. There is still a chance you could fight through and manage a decent shot, but it will only be through much greater effort than what you’re used to, often times tiring a player out much more quickly. More times than not, the result is a weak, floating shot that is easy to attack, and very difficult to keep deep in the court where your opponent will have to work to challenge you.
Even if you are able to fight through it and maintain your regular level of power and spin, the shortened range of motion makes it very difficult to be consistent and accurate. This is because the racket is facing and traveling towards your intended target for a shorter period of time, which makes the timing of your swings much more difficult.
Getting the idea here? Tightening up makes things awfully difficult!
Avoiding Deceleration
As I said earlier in this article, being mentally anxious and nervous is totally normal, it happens to low level recreational players all the way up through the top pros. The key is handling it properly.
Step one is admitting to yourself that being nervous is ok. In fact, by keeping a good attitude it’s often times pretty fun! Being nervous means that you’re playing for a purpose, and there’s something on the line, that’s pretty exciting! Stop thinking you’re the only person in the world who gets bothered and tense about competition, everybody deals with it. By realizing these things some of the pressure is taken away, and you can relax mentally and physically.
But what if the nerves stay? This is part of what makes so many of the pros so special. They deal with nerves, they get mentally tight, but the best in the world are so good at dealing with it, and even feeding off it to play even better tennis than before. The key is forcing your physical body to stay loose and relaxed, even if mental tension persists. The only way to get good at this is through practice and experience. I’m constantly suggesting to students and Podcast listeners to play your practice games and matches with something on the line so that they can get used to pressure. That’s right, I want you to bet! It doesn’t have to be anything big, 20 push ups, Gatorade, lunch, whatever. Just make sure you get yourself used to playing loose and relaxed while something is on the line, so that the feeling isn’t foreign to you when you’re in the middle of a match that you really need to win.
By putting yourself in the middle of competition with something on the line over and over, you can become more and more comfortable with being put in a pressure situation, and your body can become better at staying loose and accelerating as it should.
Take care!
