3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Your Next Match — SS #51

By far the most common question that I get is how best to prepare for matches. So with that in mind, I want to give you three questions (and the answers for them) that you should be asking yourself before your matches.

Without further ado, here we go:

Do I know how to manage anxiety and arousal?

There are three components that you need to learn to manage: cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and arousal. In layman’s terms, that means being able manage your mind and your body before and during play.

“Body on fire; mind calm” was advice that was given to me when I was younger. And even though it’s generally good advice, no one told me the how of achieving those states. So I’ll do my best to guide you through that process.

For your mind, if you find your thoughts racing before a match, you need to learn strategies to get them under control. This is where strategies from cognitive behavioral therapy can come in. We can work through your negative automatic thoughts, thinking errors, and core beliefs—all of which could be contributing to your racing thoughts when it’s time to play your match.

If you want something that could be effective in the short term, you might try present-moment awareness and mindfulness skills. Learn to come back to the present moment through breathing, body scans, and other present-moment awareness skills. But, as a reminder, this is a skill. And you cannot expect to call on it when you need it; you must practice it consistently to be able to count on it. This should help you with cognitive anxiety.

The second component is somatic anxiety, which is the physiological symptoms that you experience. Sweaty palms, heart-racing, shortness of breath—these are all common symptoms. How do you control this? You can try progressive muscle relaxation. This is a technique that was first popularized through the behavioral era in psychology. It comprises of connecting to breathing and gradually tensing and relaxing different parts of your body.

I encourage you to try a session when you’re feeling anxious. Here’s a video:

Ensure that you keep breathing throughout it and also don’t tense beyond 70 to 80% of your maximum. These are the kinds of scripts that sports psychology professionals create for and deliver to their clients. But you can also find some available on YouTube.

The final component here is your physiological arousal.

While anxiety is usually experienced as unpleasant, arousal isn’t necessarily bad. It’s your overall activation level—and you want to find the right level that helps you stay alert without being overstimulated

This can be measured on a scale from sleeping to extremely pumped up. Since tennis is a skilled sport, I encourage athletes to try to find an arousal level that is somewhere in the middle. It’s not like you’re trying reach a personal best on your deadlift and pick up 350 lbs—for something like that you might have to be completely amped up. You might also experience tunnel vision or a narrowing of your focus, which inhibits you from taking in all the information that you need to be able to play tennis well. Finally, you could also experience increased muscle tension and thus struggle and experience jerky movements and also be more prone to injury.

There is obviously a mental component to how your body feels, but let’s say if you’re feeling a little low energy, this is where you should try easy activities like on-the-spot jumps, or a custom warm-up routine to make sure you’re feeling ready.

If you’re feeling over-aroused, then you need to use some relaxation or calming techniques to ensure that your arousal level doesn’t interrupt and stand in the way of your performance.

A note here as we round out the information on cognitive and somatic anxiety. While the cognitive behavioral model of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is key to understanding, there are actually two more aspects to consider: physiology and the environment (Padesky & Gerber, 2020). So a better way to understand this is that they’re all related; thoughts, emotions, behaviors, your physiology, and the environment. As you trial interventions that target your somatic or your body’s anxiety, don’t be surprised if you also find your cognitive anxiety abating.

Do I have serve + 1s or patterns of play?

One of the biggest challenges about playing tennis and playing it well is to get out of our own heads, or to get out of our own ways. That means learning techniques to manage our own thoughts so that they’re not constantly interfering with our performances. And while it is possible to get out of our own heads, we still need somewhere to turn that attention towards.

This is why patterns of play are so important.

Patterns of play are “set plays” that you try to execute when the point is on. An example of this is serve + 1s. Why are these ideas important? Because both of these concepts give us simple, external, and task-focused points of attention on which to turn our minds. It’s fine if you learn to get out of your own head and move past the internal interference that you’re struggling with, but you still need practiced patterns of play that you can turn to.

Picture this: it’s 5-5 and 30–30. Thoughts are doing somersaults in your head. What if I double-fault. What if I choke? etc. You might learn to come back to the present moment through mindfulness skills… but it would be even more beneficial here if you drew on your favorite pattern and turned your focus towards it. Let’s say it’s body serve and then serve and volley. Your attentional resources should shift towards executing that play, giving you a concrete, external, and distal pattern that you are trying to execute.

I find that there are still many myths about sports psychology and what it is. I try to dispel the most common here:

What are my expectations?

Our beliefs are the filter through which we experience the world. These can be conscious, subconscious, or unconscious. Let’s say for example, you believe that you should never lose to someone who is rated or ranked lower than you. Just go with me here. Other than that belief being irrational, if that is the belief you hold, what’s going to happen when you start losing a match against someone who has a lower rating than you?

Depending on your coping skills (or lack of), that could result in behaviors like getting angry, tanking, or being unable to understand why you’re not winning the match, leading to an increase in frustration and emotional disregulation.

On the other hand, your if belief centers around the idea that tennis is a fascinating game and that upsets are normal and that all you can do is stay process-oriented, try to execute your game the best that you can, adapt as necessary, stay focused and task-oriented, and the chips will fall where they may, then, yeah, you’re going to perform better in your matches.

The challenge is that most tennis players, if they’ve played a little bit, may kind of already know this. They might have heard it from a coach or a sports psychology professional. But simply having that information doesn’t mean that they’ve bought into it.

This is where techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy are applied by sport psychology professionals to help athletes assess, reframe, test, and change their core beliefs. These are the beliefs that are driving their emotional responses and behaviors during competition.

Your takeaway

Playing matches can be a harrowing experience if you don’t know how best to approach your performances and competitions. But if you start thinking about your tennis through the lens of these three questions, my hope is that you’ll learn to perform better and better.

Try out these skills. Notice the word I’m using, “skill,” not “hack,” or “trick.” For these are mental skills, and the better and more appropriate you practice them, the easier it will be for you to call on them when you need.

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.

P.S.: 51 weeks! We’re nearly to a year! If you’ve been here from the start, you’ll have noticed that I’ve shifted my attention toward sports psychology and mental performance, and away from purely technical analysis and coaching. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

This is a labor of love, and if you’re getting value from it, please forward it to one ofyour tennis friends.