10,000 Hours to Master Tennis? Bullshit — SS #36

Have you been stuck at the same level for the past few years?

Quietly accepted that you were only ever meant to be a 3.5–4.0 NTRP or UTR 3–5 player, even though deep within you yearned for more?

Playing in the same league, with the same friends, hitting that same crappy serve… and thinking to yourself, “Well… this is it.”

Welcome to club & rec tennis.

This is the sad, sad reality of the many of you who may be reading this. There’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good is that the problem might have to do with how you approach your practices rather than any artificial limitations you’ve placed upon yourself.

But the bad news is that there is no magic pill. There is no “secret sauce” that coaches are keeping hidden from you. Coaches are facilitators—we provide the information… but you’re the one who has to do the work to get to the next level. And to move past stagnation, you need to seriously reconsider how you’ve been practicing and the methods you’ve been using for your time on the court.

If you spend the majority of your practice sessions being comfortable, just having lovely rallies through the middle with your practice partner, getting hours and hours of practice time where you’re just stroking the ball back and forth, and then wonder what happens when the match begins or when you go to play a tournament, this is applicable for you.

If your routine is the ol’ one lesson and one league match per week, then this particularly applies to you. If you go through your practices not caring if they’re going poorly, making tons of mistakes, lacking intensity and specificity, and somehow think that this is enough to maintain or improve your level… then, yeah, this is for you.

It’s the most common issue I see with club & rec tennis players: the assumption is that if you just keep hitting and playing and competing in matches, then somehow—god knows how, but somehow—you will get better and better.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The 10,000 Hour Rule is Bullshit, Sorry Malcolm Gladwell

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ll have heard about the “10,000 Hours” rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-seller, Outliers.

The rule stipulates that mastery of most skills can be achieved through “10,000” hours of practice. I’m not simplifying that by too much.

Unfortunately, this rule is mostly flawed, and Gladwell misunderstood the studies he quoted in substantiating this widely propagated idea.

Says who?

The guy whose work Gladwell quoted when formulating this rule. His name is Dr. Anders Ericsson, and he’s the researcher who dedicated his life to studying myelin (a fatty substance that insulates neural circuits), and understanding why the best performers in the world have come to achieve their level of expertise.

In his book, Peak, Ericsson discusses the difference between proponents of the 10,000 hours rule—referred to as “naive practice” and what he coins as “purposeful practice” and “deliberate practice.”

I’ll summarize these below using a player who really wants to improve at tennis. But it applies to almost any part of tennis that falls under the technical, tactical, physical, and mental/emotional realms.

Let’s call this player Larry. He’s motivated—there’s no doubt about that. And to improve, Larry’s decided that he’s going to play matches five times a week to really make himself “match tough” and get to the next level.

Oh, by the way, Larry can’t serve above 65mph (105 kmh) even though he’s able-bodied and athletic, can only slice his backhand, and his volleys are so bad that every time his opponent hits a shot that he could approach off, Larry prefers to poke the ball and scamper back to the baseline.

Naive Practice

Larry is pumped! Five matches a week and for sure he’ll be moving on to the next level. He’s imagining that club championship trophy sitting in his impromptu TV cabinet (right next to the TV).

I have bad news for Larry.

Mastery does not stem from repetitive, mindless action. Simply playing matches is an inadequate way to approach improvement. Ericsson defines this kind of approach and methods of practicing as “Naive Practice.” That is, simply believing that doing more of something will help you improve.

Let me clarify, Larry would get better at a few components of match play and competition. He’d feel supremely comfortable, for example, entering into a tournament—because of how often he plays in a similar environment. Ditto for confidence in pressure situations.

But, and there’s a big but, what would Larry have been reinforcing in his few months of playing five matches a week? His limitations. He would have been reinforcing his problems.

• Teaching himself to get his crappy serve in again and again, building myelin around those neural pathways. Was he hitting it harder at the end of all those matches? By a few miles.

• Training his brain to only ever slice the ball, even if his opponents were approaching on that side.

• Ingraining his fear of the net due to his poor volley mechanics.

Does Larry’s story sound familiar to you? If all you do is hit, practice, or play mindlessly thinking that you’ll improve somehow, you’re living in la la land.

Yet that is the reality for many tennis players all over the world.

They think, “Okay! I have to improve my forehand. So I’ll just go and hit hundreds of balls a day.” Or, “I want to get better at tennis and beat Bob! So I’ll just play three hours today instead of Bob, who only plays for two hours. I’m sure to beat him soon like this.”

Maybe that will work.

But you have to ask yourself this: what are you really improving?

This is Part 1 of my two-part series on Deliberate Practice. The second part, which covers how you can use Deliberate Practice to improve your tennis, will be in your inbox in a week.

Disclaimer: I am not an Association of Applied Sports Psychology CMPC, certified sports psychology practitioner, nor am I a licensed mental health counselor, PsyD, or clinical PhD. I am pursuing a master’s in sports, exercise, and performance psychology, and I am a sports psychology practitioner-in-training. I have over 20 years of experience in tennis, including playing, coaching collegiately and with professional players, along with club management experience as a director of programs. I am certified by the Professional Tennis Registry and am a member of Tennis Australia. My aim is to bring the best information to tennis players around the world so that you can apply it for long-term improvement—but sometimes I will make mistakes. If this is your area of research or expertise, and you feel I’ve misunderstood something, please get in touch with me and if required I will happily issue a correction.