How Elite Athletes Train for Pressure — SS #42

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Most tennis players I know train in calm and controlled environments. Practice is delightful. Full of lovely hitting in comfortable and predictable environments. The courts are usually quiet, with no pressure, or distractions around.

They play the occasional practice set and think that qualifies them as ready for performance in a series of matches in a tournament. Transparently, this is how I used to view training for tournaments. If I had one coming up in a few weeks, I’d try to hit two times a week instead of once, and then play a set or two so that I was “ready” on match day.

Trust me.

I was not ready.

And neither are most tennis players when it comes time to flip that coin to decide whether to serve or return.

When the match starts, your execution and comfort seem to desert you. The amazing level that you produced in practice? Gone. Poof.

But what if how you prepared could play a pivotal role in how you performed?

What if, instead of trying to get rid of your nerves and anxiety, you learned to see them as facilitative of an upcoming great performance?

That’s exactly what the best performers do.

Simulation Training — Inspired by Hanton et al. (2008)

A fascinating study by Hanton et al. (2008) examined four advanced psychological strategies used by elite performers—these athletes were all at the international level in their chosen domains.

Their use of simulation training, and the ways they engaged in this simulation, was fascinating to me, and could be extremely beneficial to you and your performance on the tennis court. Simulation training is exactly what it sounds like: it entails practicing under various forms of pressure to best prepare you for competition.

It’s one of the most powerful tools used by elite athletes to normalize and get them used to pressure. It’s not that elite athletes never experience anxiety—it’s that their relationship with anxiety is different compared to poorer performers.

Use Simulation Training In Your Tennis

Recall a time when you were out of tournament or match practice. Imagine, then, that you had played three or four tournaments in a row, coming up to maybe your twelfth match in about three weeks. My guess is that you would have been feeling radically different about your performances by then.

From a personal example, the first match of the season was always nerve-racking or the first tournament after a break was always a challenge. The sixth match? By then I had settled into a nice groove. I had become familiar with and accustomed to what a match required from me.

Now here’s the thing, it sounds obvious, but we can actually train and simulate these conditions so that we are ready to perform at a great level right from the start. If you want to perform well under pressure, you have to train under pressure. That’s the whole premise of simulation training—intentionally practicing in conditions that replicate the demands of competition.

So to simulate the intensity, pressure, and anxiety of match play and performance, here’s what I recommend.

Here’s How for Tennis Players

Play For Stakes: Most players treat practice matches as casual hitting sessions, but that doesn’t prepare you for the weight of real competition. The psychology is often drastically different.

If there’s nothing on the line, except bragging rights, some people struggle to engage well—and even disengage as a coping mechanism. They tank. You can challenge this by attaching real consequences to your practice sets. Play a match where the loser has to do extra sprints or rounds of burpees. Maybe the loser has to string your rackets. Whatever hurts just enough and is within both competitors’ means.

Even small stakes, like losing the right to choose the next drill, make you care about the outcome in a way that gets close to mimicking real match stress. When practice has consequences, the stakes of competition won’t feel so overwhelming.

Create Adversity: Too many players train in quaint, perfect conditions—quiet courts, no distractions, ideal weather—and then struggle when the realities of competition introduce stress and discomfort. For example, I know players who don’t practice when it is too windy. Why? How will they react on a windy day?

To simulate match conditions, you need to make practice unpredictable. Play sets while fatigued, maybe after a workout on the track or in the gym. You can run 6 × 400m sprints. Then, go play your sets. Or you can work through a grueling session in the gym and then play your match. (Remember to stay conscious of your body’s limits though and don’t push yourself too far.)

You can also introduce controlled distractions—train with music in the background, or even have a coach make bad calls on purpose to see how well you can reset.

Find a player who has a lower rating and ranking than you and ask to play them in a set where you start 0–3 down. Or 0–15. Or 0–30. If you only train in a comfortable environment, the chaos of real competition can overwhelm you. But if you intentionally train in stressful conditions, then when match-day adversity arrives, you’ll be unfazed—you’ve been there before. Many times.

Every Day is Match Day: The best players understand this.Too many tennis players separate practice and competition in their minds, trying to play with intensity only when it “matters.”

That’s really not how it works.

This approach can lead to inconsistent and lackluster performances. If you want to compete with confidence, you need to train with the same intensity. Stop hitting balls mindlessly—keep score, track your errors, and treat every session on court like it matters. It is mentally more exhausting to approach training in this way, and you’ll definitely feel more engaged.

When you miss, pay attention to how you respond—do you mentally reset, or do you spiral into frustration? How you handle those moments in training is exactly how you’ll handle them in a match.

If you learn to develop habits of treating every time you’re on court like it’s a time to perform well, then when you step onto the court for an actual match, there’s no mental shift required. You’ll hopefully already be used to being in that zone.

College and Academy Coaches: I hope this is helpful! You can also try to have intra-team matches. Split your team up into two warring factions. Spread the skills equally. Ask them to wear different colors, chirp each other during the match, and give each player one “hook” call that they can use at any time during the match. They can call a ball out at any time—even though it might be in. Simulate the intensity. Do it a few times before your first match of the season. Watch the level of performance skyrocket right from the start.

Note: let the players know what you are trying to achieve so that they do take it seriously… but also not too personally. Let them know that their teammates are not their teammates for match. But also that it’s a simulation and to not take things personally.

Facilitative vs. Debilitative Anxiety

This is a big, big component. In many ways, it’s almost impossible to entirely rid ourselves of anxiety. But we can definitely change our relationship to it by using a little bit of cognitive restructuring. Put another way, we want to change the way you interpret anxiety and what you associate it with.

Consider this: the best performers in the world don’t experience less anxiety than everyone else. They just interpret it differently. While many players feel their nerves and assume something is wrong—“I’m too nervous. I don’t have it today.”—elite athletes take the exact same sensations and frame them as readiness: “I feel this way because I care. This means I’m ready to compete.” Or: “My body and mind are telling me that it’s time to compete well. Yes.”

Hanton et al. (2008) found that elite athletes are more likely to see anxiety as facilitative, meaning they believe their nervous and anxious energy helps their performance. In contrast, lower-level performers often view anxiety as debilitative—something that disrupts their chance at playing well and that it needs to be avoided.

The physiological response is the same: increased heart rate, tension, and increased awareness. But the interpretation changes everything.

One athlete in the study described it like this: “I already know that I will get nervous. Nothing can faze me; I’m in full control.” This is where our work on simulation training comes in. The more you train under stressful conditions, the more familiar those feelings become. You can even stop seeing anxiety as a threat and start recognizing it as just another part of the competition—something that comes, something you’ve handled before, something you’ve prepared for, and something that won’t dictate your performance.

If you want to compete at your best, you don’t always have to fight anxiety.

But you can redefine your relationship to it through simulation training and cognitive restructuring.

References

Hanton, S., Wadey, R., & Mellalieu, S. D. (2008). Advanced psychological strategies and anxiety responses in sport. The Sport Psychologist, 22(4), 472-490.

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.