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Overcoming the Mental Challenges of Relaxing

Daryl Fisher

Have you ever noticed that you play tennis with freedom, accuracy, and consistency when you are practicing, but do not seem to have all of your weapons at your disposal when it counts during a match? If so, you are facing the common problem of too much tension during your matches. Not to worry, every tennis player faces mental challenges related to staying sufficiently relaxed. Though addressing these challenges could involve volumes written by the finest experts of sports psychology, this article can at least get you started in the right direction.

The first step to solving any problem is to recognize that you have a problem, and so with relaxing you must recognize which challenge you are facing. The three general categories of challenges are 1) technical, 2) knowing that relaxing will help you, and 3) improving at overcoming the emotional obstacles to relaxing under pressure.

Technique

It is possible to have problems with nerves as well as with technique, but if you cannot yet execute a particular shot in practice when you are not nervous, then your challenge probably has more to do with learning proper technique in the first place. For more information on how tension and technique are interconnected see the article Relaxed Hands and Good Technique.

As a brief overview, as players develop more advanced strokes they learn to use the larger muscles of their legs and torsos to do more of the work. At the same time, players must also learn to reduce the amount of work done by the arms and hands, and in fact relax them through the stroke. Many players learn to make use of their larger muscles, but what many people do not learn is how to take their arms and hands out. Improving at tennis is not always about adding in what works, but it is sometimes about simplifying and removing the extraneous.

Tension

Ask yourself, if things go well for you in practice, but then poorly in a match situation, do you wonder what went wrong with your strokes? Consider that perhaps your strokes were fine, but you were just playing with too much tension. Excess tension can reduce your feel for the ball, and it can cause some muscles to work against others, thereby causing you to lose power. Even with a stroke that looks just fine, the loss of control and power that is due to excess tension can cause you to hit the ball out. Of course it is important to learn the various components of good strokes, but the problem remains that good strokes do not necessarily lead to playing well, and the gap between having good strokes and playing well can often be traced to excess tension.

Extra tension is often simply overlooked. The answer to not knowing that tension affects your game is partly that you are reading this article right now. Awareness cures the problem of a lack of awareness. It is important for each of us to know that even a player with absolutely perfect looking strokes is still susceptible to excess tension.

Perhaps the easiest way to gauge your overall tension, especially in the heat of a tennis battle, is through awareness of tension in your hands. When you play tennis next, try to evaluate your hand tension. I proposed a simple drill in the article Relaxed Hands Part II for evaluating your hand tension on a scale of zero through three, but the drill can be made even easier by just answering the question of whether you are sufficiently relaxed or not. If you are not sure what sufficiently relaxed means, ask yourself if you feel tension, strain, or effort, or do you feel easy, effortless, and relaxed. There are different levels of tension, but generally you should be able to distinguish between overall strain and comfortable ease, so which is it?

The most common objection to playing with a sense of comfort and ease comes from players that feel they lose power in doing so. The arms and hands are actually poor sources of power, however, so if you are losing power by playing with comfort and ease, you may need to return to working on your technique.

Overcoming Emotional Obstacles

For those of you that have read my previous articles on the topic of relaxed hands, you may have had moments of spectacular play and leaps of improvement, but now you may be wondering why you cannot always maintain it, and why relaxing can be elusive when you want to play your best. The bad news is that the mental side of relaxed hands can never quite be mastered (as John McEnroe said, “everybody chokes”), but the good news is that you can improve.

Improvement begins, just as in the previous section, with just being aware that tension affects your game. As you play a match, try the following experiment. After each point, evaluate how tense your final shot was. Were you relaxed and comfortable, or were you tense and strained?

Even after a player learns good strokes and that relaxed hands allow us to hit well with a sense of ease, sometimes this knowledge only lasts until the beginning of a pressure-filled match. It is common to hear someone describe how easy tennis is in practice when there is no pressure compared to how difficult things become in stressful competitive situations. The difference is the emotions associated with the two situations, and those differing emotions result in differing levels of tension.

Tension can be dictated by nervousness, anger, and any number of other emotions. Just knowing that you are straining and trying too hard is the first step to overcoming it and playing better. As an example, many players want to serve hard, and many times, especially in a tense match situation, a player will strain like crazy for a little extra pop on the serve. The irony of this is that any knowledgeable pro will tell you that the dominant hand and arm needs to be like spaghetti on the serve, relaxed and loose, in order to get the full racquet head speed that the body is capable of creating. Straining and giving a lot of effort appeases the human fight or flight response to stress, or maybe it satisfies the “work hard” and “give it your all” mentalities, but what it does not often do is lead to your best tennis.

Some people have the emotional obstacle to face that hitting in a relaxed and comfortable way feels too easy, so it cannot be right. What is odd about feeling the need to strain is that we do not imagine that the top pros struggle with their strokes. Do you think Federer feels as much strain as you do to hit as hard as he does? I guarantee he does not. On top of that, one of the reasons that we want to have good strokes is to increase our efficiency so that we can hit with little effort and get a big result out of it. If giving a big effort is actually getting in your way, how are you ever going to get the benefit of having good strokes? Many of us imagine that if we develop our strokes we will somehow magically start hitting with more power and less effort, and if we did not want this to happen, why would we bother with good strokes at all. The truth is that we need to apply our good strokes in an effortless way on purpose.

Whatever your emotional obstacles are, be careful not to beat yourself up over them because everyone has to face them, even at the top of the game. In fact, if you attend professional level tournaments and watch the best players in the world practice, you probably will not see much of a difference between them, but some win more than others for some reason, and it has a lot to do with how well they handle match tension. Not only should you not beat yourself up over your battle with tension because it is difficult, it would also only lead to more tension. That is, many people get tense simply because they do not have perfect control over their tension. How ironic. In response to this challenge, be easier with yourself and recognize that it is just a challenge at which you can improve in the same way that you can improve at just about any challenge that you give yourself.

Trust and confidence

Even if you can relax and play well one day, this does not mean it will happen again on another day, so it is a skill that can be improved, but never quite mastered. This is, of course, why tennis is challenging for a lifetime. Through practice and improvement, however, you will learn to trust your abilities. This is what confidence is. The saying that “you are only as good as your second serve” could instead be that you are only as good as the shots that you trust yourself to hit under pressure. The best players are not the best because they can hit the best shots, but because they can hit their shots under pressure.

Sports psychologists suggest that we need to learn to handle pressure, but typically what they offer is an altered life view, a way of looking at the pressure in a different way. I do not deny any of that, and I think that such altered life views may be very useful, but what I am suggesting is far less of a mental shift, far less amorphous, and reasonably quantifiable with the answer of a simple question, “is my hand tense or is it sufficiently relaxed?” This is a simple question, but it is generally very indicative of how you are playing. Of course you already know how you are playing, but awareness of your hand tension will give you an understanding of why you are playing the way you are.

In addition, just having the answer to that question gives you just a bit better chance of performing well. If you do not know the answer to the question, then your performance will be as random as… well, as random as it is now. With the awareness of how tension positively and negatively affects your game, however, you have a starting point from which to move forward. This knowledge leads to all sorts of additional challenges that are related to tension, ranging from fitness, nutrition, sleep, and general health issues to mental toughness and even your life perspective. Those additional topics are for another time, but the point is that with the awareness of how tension affects your game, you are really making progress.

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