In Some Respects, you Don’t Want to Play a Match Like you Practice!
You’ve probably heard me say that practice and competition take a different mindset. Practice is where you…practice! You make mistakes. You think analytically. You enhance physical and mental skills. You change and adapt systems to fit where you are trying to go. Right? Competition is not the same; at all. Your brain cannot compete, deal with pressure and try to figure out how to fix mistakes, change skills or think too much about anything other than what’s happening during the match.
One of the reasons you think too match during a match is because you think a lot during practice. This is one good reason to employ using mental skills during practice. The brain is used to needing a lot of thinking during practice and it’s duplicates that during a match. Besides employing mental skills during practice practice should be broken into periods of thinking and periods of lack of thinking. You need time during practice when you are pulled out of thinking mode.You need time to practice what happens when you are not thinking.
A tennis client came in yesterday and said that this lack of thinking left a void: what do I do now. He is so used to thinking he didn’t know what to do. This is common. We let our brains takeover and consume us with thoughts all day long. This is why during a match you can shut the thoughts up. You have no practice shutting them up during any part of the day and particularly not tennis. That is a problem and an even bigger problem because most of that thinking is analytic or negative.
What do you do? You have to set time aside in practice to move outside of thinking mode and move into action mode. Ironically you cannot think and act (effectively) at the same time. Split your practice in two: thinking mode and non-thinking mode. Thinking mode is analytical, changing, adapting and making mistakes; physically and mentally. Non-thinking mode is where you figure out how to get out of your head; physically and mentally (bring yourself back to the moment, let the thoughts go, press play). It’s where you play.
Back to my client. She said, I need something to focus on. I said, you can bring yourself back to the moment, focus on your breath, use a mantra or focus on fiddling with your string like Maria Sharapova does. We talked about the options and she chose fiddling with her strings. She is going to take a leap of faith and practice letting go of thinking so that she can be in control to play her best tennis. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Tennis season is in full swing! Enjoy!
Dr. Michelle
