Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to episode number 382 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to talk about how you sabotage your tennis game. Everybody has done this at some points or another. I'm definitely not immune to this huge, huge pitfall, but unfortunately I think most people are completely unaware that it happens. It really
is a trick. It's a trap. We feel like we are accomplishing something, but not only are we not moving in a positive direction, but we're moving in a more and more and more negative one without realizing it. Today I'm going to be reading chapter 2 from my new book called Essential Tennis Improve Faster, Play Smarter, and Winmore Matches. It is the number one new release on Amazon in a bunch of different categories, including sports psychology and tennis coaching and I think racket sports.
So be sure to check it out and order it if you haven't already. It's available as an audiobook on Amazon. I'm sorry, on Audible and I read the audiobook. So let's go ahead and dive into chapter 2 here, which is called You're Always Training Something. This will be a pretty casual reading. I'll probably jump in and out and add some additional thoughts along the way. All right, here we go. Suppose you decide that enough is enough. It's time to fix your backhand. You don't know exactly
what's wrong with it. All you know is, well, it stinks. So you make a plan. Weekdays after work, you'll stop at the park and hit backhand against the wall. Weekends, you'll play a match or hit with a friend. You commit to training 30 minutes a day no matter what. When it rains, you'll do shadow swings in your garage. After three weeks, you haven't missed a day. So you decide to take the plunge as an early birthday gift for yourself. You buy a ball machine. Now, in addition to hitting against
the wall, you hit off the machine after work for an hour on weekend mornings. To say motivated, you print out a photo of Jokovic hitting a backhand and hang it on your wall. Do you get tired of all those backhands? Yes. But you know what they say? Practice makes perfect. Like a baby learning how to walk. You're going to stick with it until your body figures it out. Six months later, your hard work and dedication have paid off. You're awesome. Here is specifically what you're
awesome at. Number one, preparing late. I love the pivot in this chapter. Top level tennis players turn their upper body extremely early. The instant they recognize that the incoming ball is heading to their backhand side. You meanwhile, turn your body at the last possible moment. Late preparation leads to late contact. One of the reasons your backhand often goes into the net. You used to be good at preparing late. But now, after all this training, you're great at it.
Number two, chopping at the ball instead of swinging up and through. And up and through swing path leads to net clearance, depth and spin. You meanwhile have perfected the art of swinging flat then collapsing your arms with almost no follow through a recipe for unforcers. Number three, keeping your weight back. One of the reasons you decided to fix your backhand was because they lacked power. The reason? Instead of transferring your weight forward into the shot,
you kept your body weight back. Thanks to all this rigorous practice, you're now awesome at it. You keep your weight back on every single backhand you hit. It's true. Practice makes perfect. You're always training something. Every time you step onto the courts, you either reinforce existing habits or consciously create new and better ones. Notice the word consciously there. I'm going to repeat that sentence again. Every time you step onto the courts, you either
reinforce existing habits or consciously create new and better ones. That's it. It's either one or the other. You're either getting better at an error, that's in quotes. You're either getting better at what you already do or you're learning the new behaviors that will take you to the next level of play. There is no in between. So quick sidebar, this is so important. There's only so much room for each concept in this book. There's 38 chapters. This concept to me is super crucial. It's
why it's very early in the book. Just chapter number two, please hear me loud and clear on this. You can get better at a bad habit. You can refine a poor movement or a poor mechanic in your whatever. You serve your forehand, your volleys. You can get relatively more precise. You can get relatively better results using a poor habit. But you're never ever going to totally break through and just organically evolve a bad habit into the correct movement by doing the bad habit again and
again and again and again. But tennis players all over the world are just repeating their bad habits again and again and again. It's so deceptive because it feels like we're getting better because we kind of are like we're getting more consistent and repeatable and reliable at doing the bad habit. You can become more precise at the bad habit but that is a completely different thing than consciously moving away from the bad habit towards a better habit. Those are two completely
completely different things. All right, back to the book here. It's time to evolve past the notion that if you hit enough balls off the machine, you'll magically become a better player that by repeating a certain action over and over, your body will, in quotes, figure it out. Unfortunately, phrases like practice makes perfect, gotta get in my reps and just putting in my 10,000 hours, reinforce the idea that if you do something enough times, you'll get better at it.
Well, these expressions miss is the role of habit. The ironclad grip habits have on how we behave. A habit is any behavior you perform automatically without thinking, how you brush your teeth, how you hold a pencil, and how you hit a backhand are all habits. You've performed these actions so many times the same way that the neural pathways associated with them are hardwired into your brain. Dr. Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at USC and author of Good Habits, Bad Habits,
found that more than 40% of our daily actions are done habitually. From an evolutionary perspective, this is good. The more we can do without thinking, the more brainpower is left for actions that are essential to our survival, like gathering food, pursuing a mate, and choosing between two similarly priced tennis rackets. 40% might sound like a pretty high number. On a tennis court, it's even higher.
Here's how I phrase it to my students. When you play tennis, you're 100% the sum of your habits, minus whatever conscious effort you dedicate to moving away from them. Returning to our earlier example, your backhand was poor because you had poor habits, and because you didn't consciously change any of your habits, all your diligent practice did was ingrain your bad habits more deeply into your brain. So, going off script here,
this is where the role of your goals and your aspirations comes into play. This is very, very, very important. If you're currently 3-5 player, just a random example, if you're currently a 3-5 player, and let's say last season, you won 10 matches and lost 10 matches. You're like ultimate goal. The biggest thing that you hope to accomplish is that eventually, one of these years, you win out of those 20 matches, 15 of them, and you lose 5.
But you maintain that 3-5 level. So, all you really want to do is just win more at the level you're already at. Well, if that's your goal, and there's nothing wrong with that goal, please hear me loud and clear. I'm not setting this up as like, this is a bad goal, or you're not a good tennis player if that's all you're trying to accomplish or anything like that. If that's all you want to accomplish, then you probably don't have to do any major surgery.
You probably don't have to overhaul all of your habits into completely new ones. You can probably just polish the surface of what you're already doing, and win some more matches at the same level against the same players that you did last year. But if on the other hand, you're currently a 3-5 player, and more than anything, you want to be a 4-5 player. You cannot keep your fundamental base level habits, and just polish the surface and move from 3-5 to 4-5. That's a completely
different, that requires transformation from one set of habits to another set of habits. You can't just hang out on the surface and polish your way to 4-5. So neither path is the right way. It's totally subjective. You have to decide for yourself. But this is why this chapter is so important, because if you're the latter player, if you want to move from one level to another level to another level completely, then those habits have to be changed, and that only happens by consciously changing
them. No amount of just repetition is going to naturally evolve your game from 3-5 to 4-5. Okay, back to the book. To frame it in terms of the pros, one reason that Serena Williams' father, one reason that Serena Williams' forehand is better than yours, mine, and pretty much everyone else is on the planet, is not because she's hit tens of thousands of forehands more than us, but because she hit them correctly. She was also extremely conscious of how she was hitting them at first,
until finally it became a habit. At this point, the movements are so ingrained that she doesn't have to think about it. The key phrase in the above paragraph is conscious of how she was hitting them. Tennis isn't like learning to walk. Our bodies don't just figure it out. This is why
simply hitting a million balls off the wall or off a machine isn't enough. To be clear, if you're happy with how you play now, and you want to continue beating the players you already beat and losing to the ones who already beat you, then by all means, buy a ball machine or go hit at the wall. You'll get more consistent and precise at what you already do. But if you want to take your game to the next level, 10,000 hours of mindless practice won't cut it.
This is really important. Here, this clearly, this next sense. It will push the next level farther from your reach, because your current habits will become more permanently ingrained. It's not just that you won't reach going back to that 3, 5, to 4, 5. Example, if you're a 3, 5, and you just year after year after year, just hit thousands and thousands and thousands of
just repetitive air quotes practice. You just continue to hit your forehand the way you always have, but you just get in tons and tons and tons of training and practice, hitting it the same way. Not only are you not going to just organically become a 4 or 5 player, unless you just have very big, well, deep, well full of talent. This is the vast, vast minority of tennis players. I'm not in that section of players. The vast majority of people are not. They don't have that kind or
that amount of just intuitive talent to just pick something up. It's not impossible, but it's probably one in 10,000 or one in 100,000 players that are able to just intuitively evolve, you know, athletically into a better and better and better version. Without any input, without any checking, without any conscious, you know, movement in one direction or another, just by hitting balls. If you're not that type of athlete, then simply repeating what you already do, again and again and
again. Not only will not help you reach that bigger goal, but it will actively move you further away from it. Excuse me, because what you're doing is further and further and further ironing in, all the bad habits that you already have. And so you're actually moving a further from your goal. Because once, let's just say hypothetically, you know, five years from now, after years and years of just rote repetition, you're like, okay, I'm not reaching my goals.
This is not working. Now I need to take, I got to take a deeper look at this. Well, you just reinforced all those bad habits for five years straight. And now changing those habits is much harder now than it would have been five years before, after all that training and practice and repetition. All right, back to the book. This might sound daunting. The fact that every time
you pick up a racket, you're either getting better or more deeply and grainy bad habits. But I like to think of it as an opportunity for starters, it means you can get better anytime, anywhere. Once you improve your serve, which you currently hit with a forehand grip, simply pick up your racket a few times throughout the day and hold it in a continental grip for 10 minutes. When you watch a match on TV and prove your footwork by doing a split step, every time the player on the top of
the screen hits the ball. It doesn't matter if you're standing or sitting, pairing other guy hits ball with the action of a split step starts to build muscle memory that you can carry with you onto the court. Second and more important, now that you know how how improvement happens,
you can speed up the process by practicing correctly. Instead of wasting time mindlessly hitting balls and thinking your body will somehow get it, you can do purposeful, focused progressions that simultaneously build new and better habits while pushing old ones aside. Next time you head to the courts and your spouse or partner asks you where you're going, tells them the truth. I'm heading out to rewire the synaptic connections between backhand related
neurons and my cerebral cortex. If they have no idea what you're talking about, explain, I'm playing in a big tournament next month. 200 people from all over the states are coming to find out who has the best habits. Reflect, think about one stroke you've tried to improve in the past that still needs work. Now that you're aware of the role of habits, how might you go about
fixing that stroke today? And so yeah, think about that. What would you do differently? I kind of teed it up there with that example of for five years just repeating the same habit. First of all, you have to be very honest with yourself about what your goals actually are. And please, again, hear me loud and clear. There's no right or wrong answer. It's purely subjective. And if your goals are more or less within reach already and you're not
shooting for any kind of big transformation, then stay the course. Keep working hard. And just a couple of epiphanies here and there are probably going to help you get there. But if your goal seems kind of audacious and it's a big one and you're maybe even not even sure if you can do it. But you want it really badly. Then it's time to find out the truth. It's time
to learn for sure where are good habits and where are bad habits. Because if you don't know, if you're just hitting forehands and just hitting backhands and just hitting serves, and you don't know what you're doing that's fundamentally sound and what's fundamentally flawed. And you just keep repeating both. Whatever percentage of each of those shots is flawed and sound, and you just keep repeating those same things again and again, it's going to get harder and harder
and harder down the road. And in a nutshell, I believe that's kind of my specialty as a coach in person is revealing the difference between the flaws and the fundamentally sound and then creating a plan to tackle those flaws. Because if those flaws don't get corrected, then you're just making a tougher and tougher and tougher with each passing year to finally go back and correct them.
So this is how tennis players sabotage their improvement by not being aware of what's a flaw and what's fundamentally sound and just hating lots and lots of tennis balls. And so hopefully this was helpful to hear. If you enjoyed this content, then please go order your copy of Essential Tennis. This is one chapter out of 38. And if you want to hear more of it, episode number 380 of the podcast was the introduction to the book, which is super important and insightful.
And 381 was chapter 1, which is called Domination Delusion, which is all about kind of the nature of tennis competition, a really important perspective. Thank you so much for your support, especially if you've already ordered your copy, really happy with how the pre-release is going. The official release is May 31st, which is just about two weeks from the recording of this episode, really excited to finally get it out there. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you for listening.
And I'll catch you in the next episode. For more free, game-improving instruction, be sure to check out EssentialTennis.com, where you'll find hundreds of video, audio, and written lessons. Also, be sure to subscribe to Essential Tennis on iTunes and YouTube, where we are the number one resource in the world, providing passionate instruction for passionate tennis players. Thank you so much for listening today. Take care and good luck with your tennis.