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 399 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to talk about how you can play your best tennis under pressure, which is hugely important. If you feel a drop in your level of play when it really matters and when the pressure is really on, if you play worse, then this episode of the
podcast is going to be super critical for you to listen to. We're going to be talking about a case study between Karoo Sel. If you don't know who that is, he's the owner of the YouTube channel MyTennisHQ. If you're not already subscribed to him on YouTube, you really should be. He's currently number 600 something in the world, a 632 or something
like that in the world on the ATP rankings. He just a couple days ago published a video of himself playing a set against Taylor Fritz, who as of the recording of this episode is ranked number 12 ATP. I'm not going to give away the results, what happened, but Karoo played really well, I would say, outperformed. What really blew me away, it wasn't so much
how well he played, but it was his response, his reaction. I'm going to get to that in a second, but first, I want to set some ideas here, some concepts in place so that we have a scale to be able to talk about these things from. I've invented out of thin air the mental toughness spectrum. Just to be able to define some things and maybe identify where we are in terms of our development in our mental game. I want you to imagine a
line, a continuum, and on the far left side of it is a low mental toughness. The middle is medium mental toughness, and on the far right is high mental toughness. Let's define these really quick, and we'll get to Karoo's example. Low mental toughness means that when you start keeping track of score and there's competition involved, you completely fold under that pressure as a tennis player. You become a different player, you slow down
your swing speed, you start to become really careful and tentative. Maybe you go back to worse technique that you used to use and you're trying to move away from, but you go back to your weak, bad, inferior technique just because it's more comfortable. Basically, same just goes back to a low common denominator and you're just plain not to lose. That would
be low mental toughness, in my opinion. I'm just making up these categories, but I'm just doing so to illustrate so that we can kind of be on the same page here and talk about the same thing. So, medium, so what's in the middle, kind of the middle of the spectrum, is now we have some ability to stay confident in the face of anxiety or pressure or competition.
We are able to use some of our best skills under pressure, but not all of them. So, from this position, we do have some mental toughness, but we can't really reach our full potential when it really matters because we still at least partially revert back to some old habits or we revert to slowing down and being careful. Maybe it's not to the same degree as before,
but we're not quite playing our best game. We're not quite the best version of ourselves because we're allowing the pressure and the stress of the moment to get to us and decrease our performance in the moment. And then high mental toughness would be somebody who actually performs better under pressure and with some anxiety sprinkled in, they actually raise their level to the occasion. And all your skills are available to you at this level.
It doesn't matter. And by the way, this isn't to say that everything is always perfect all the time. Still going to have updates and down days. There's still going to be kind of an average rolling average of highs and lows. And some days like your serve is going to be more on than other days. That's never going to stop. Hopefully you don't misunderstand
me here. But on average, you're able to pick from any tool you have in your toolbox and actually fully use it instead of the situation kind of handcuffing you and removing your ability to fully perform at your best. Okay. So just kind of picture that in your mind. Low mental toughness, medium mental toughness, high mental toughness. Now important to point
out, please don't conflate low medium high with level of play. Now there does tend to be a connection like in general, somebody who's a very, very high level tennis player will generally have better mental toughness than somebody who's just starting off at tennis.
But not always. Sometimes it could be the opposite. So if you kind of picture the whole range of ratings of player, I'll use here in the United States, we have the NTRP rating system AKA USDA rating system and goes from one to seven and two five to like around two is basically beginner three five is an average tennis. That's like the most common rating level is the three five four five would be an advanced player and six to seven like six point O is is
caroo. That's like a world class player professional player. Now it's important to point out that you can be an advanced level player like you can be a four or five rated player and have very low mental toughness. Trust me, I have seen that player many, many times over the last 30 years that I've been in the game of tennis. And it's also very possible to be
a beginner but have very high mental toughness. If maybe you competed at something else and you were an athlete that played at a high level some other discipline or some other sport and you're going over to tennis, your tennis skills might be very low, but your mental toughness could be very high. So please, I just I just want to point out like it's not that it's not the same thing. Just because you're a high mental toughness competitor doesn't mean
you're a high level tennis player. And the reason why that is is mental toughness is just one of the big four pillars that determines who wins and who loses. The other three are technique like a K a quality of how you move your body and how you swing the bracket, fitness and conditioning and also strategy and tactics. And then the mental game is is number four. So you could have a very, very high level mental game and very low ability and all the
other three pillars and not be a very good tennis player. And on the other side of the coin, you could have very, very low mental toughness and have fantastic technique and incredible fitness and super intelligent like strategy and tactics and be a very, very good tennis player, but still like really struggle with the mental game. And speaking from experience, like not that I was like, never been like world class in any of those things. However,
in college as a personal anecdote, my technique was okay. My fitness was stellar. My strategy was good. My mental game for big chunks of my college career was really, really poor. In other words, like I underperformed in that one pillar and that in a way kind of makes everything like it makes it really a lot worse because it's like on paper, I should be a really good tennis player getting really good results, but I keep getting worse results
and worse results because the mental game is not very developed. So I can be a really difficult spot to be in just speaking from experience. Okay. So back to Karu's set against Taylor Fritz. And again, go subscribe to Karu. Again, my tennis HQ. He doesn't know I'm doing this this episode. Hopefully he gets a bunch of new subscribers because of it. But make sure to watch that set against Taylor Fritz. And you'll see that he played
like his fitness, his strategy, his technique was super on point. And he played extreme. I mean, I would personally say that and I haven't asked him directly this question yet, but I think he would say that he kind of overperformed against Taylor in that setting. But what jumped out at me the most was his own personal reaction to the outcome. When you watch the video, you'll see that he keeps downplaying the importance of the results. He's
got over 100,000 subscribers. His videos have been doing really well recently. So you can see him. He's like, he's actually telling his audience like guys relax, relax. Like this isn't that big of a deal. And the reason why he says it's like, it's not that big of a deal is because he says it's just a practice set. And he repeats this several times. Like guy, don't get to you know, eufora guys are get to excited here. Like it's we just play
to practice set. Now, let's talk about that because I find that reaction to be rather profound because the environment that caroo had that result in against Taylor would have terrified 99% of tennis players out there. I mean, just think about it for a minute. There was a camera both play he's he caroo mentioned that that Taylor agreed to being recorded and being able to use the content. So both players knew the camera was out there and they knew
it was being recorded. That alone would completely explode the games of a huge chunk of tennis players out there. So there's that. Then both players, you know, in the back of their minds, know that if this gets published to the internet, tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of people might see it. That's number two. Number three, kind of on a personal level, caroo's working really hard to level up his game. Kind of make it on the tour. He's
making a run at trying to become a professional tennis player. And I think previously when he tried the highest he reached was like 300 something in the world. He's like 600 now. So the ramifications here, psychologically and emotionally, potentially are really big for caroo because this is like a big measuring stick, right? And like he's pushing and working and training to try to be able to play against this caliber of player. And of course, emotionally,
psychologically, he wants this outcome to be super positive. That would be fantastic, right? He's got a lot invested way more by the way than any of us have ever experienced way more investment, you know, personally and monetarily and physically. And so that could add a lot of pressure to caroo. And then on the flip side, Taylor Fritz could really potentially in real life really, really not want to lose, especially on camera to this
YouTube guy to somebody who's way lower ranked than he is. Taylor right now is number 12 in the world. And caroo is number 600 something. He doesn't want to lose. That's like he's a professional tennis player like he's got his whatever amount of like pride and ego that he'd really rather probably defend and probably would rather win this set very convincingly. And frankly, just roll over caroo in the set. And so layer all those together. And be honest, put yourself in
that situation with the same factors. How would it make you feel on the court? It's kind of sit in that for a second knowing it's recorded, knowing 100,000 people might see it, knowing that you're trying, you're working so hard to make it and level up your game. Knowing that this other player is way lower ranked than me. And I want to defend, you know, the ranking that I have. Just think about that for a second. And caroo, caroo's reaction is guys, guys,
guys. It was just a practice set. But the reality is there's some really significant factors at play here. But it doesn't seem to have really affected caroo. In fact, he's saying like relax, relax. It's not a big deal. So I happen to know a little something about this because for over a decade, I've been recording myself while I coach and recording myself while I play and publishing it to the internet. And hundreds of thousands of millions of people have seen
me coaching and playing now. More so coaching than playing. But for sure, hundreds of thousands of people have seen me play tennis. And over that time, I've personally grown in my own mental toughness a ton because I've had the face to pressure and the anxiety of cameras being there.
And knowing that viewers are going to see it and they're going to be judging me. And by the way, if you don't believe that makes a big difference, then just watch any of our matches where we have frequently players that are way higher level than me and much more accomplished competitors. And player after player that I have as a guest on the channel competing says, wow, I've played high level college tennis and junior tennis. And man, I felt a lot of pressure
with these cameras on and knowing that the internet is going to see this. It adds a huge degree of of pressure, which is great training grounds or not, which we'll talk about in a second. So what's fascinating about all of this is that the same environment can affect different players completely differently. Somebody who didn't play competitive junior tennis didn't play
high school competition didn't play college competitive tennis. And now maybe has picked up the sport as an adult and you know, I was playing in some some leagues or like at their club, but that's really the extent of it. That type of player is going to be hugely affected by playing on camera where they know tens of thousands of people are going to see the outcome. Like that's a that's a gigantic factor because they've just never experienced that level of
pressure before on a tennis court. Now somebody like me or other players that have played on my channel who have played high school tennis, played college tennis, played junior tennis, we still get affected by it. And like for me personally, I got I totally still get a big pump of adrenaline and excitement every time I walk out into the court to play a set when all the cameras are there.
Yeah, there's the commentators, you know, they're doing commentary. And in the past, it's definitely caused me to play a worse worse than my best tennis because I've kind of struggled to get my heart rate under control and like my excitement kind of spins out of control and I get tight and I can't play well. But now after years of it, I've experienced it enough times that I actually really enjoy it. And I honestly look forward to it because it's such a cool unique experience to be able
to feel those things and play and test myself under that pressure. But that's only come through experience. And then somebody like Karoo who has played for way, way, way, way, way, higher stakes, the 99.9% of us ever will. The environment we just talked about with a camera and the YouTube audience and even a top level pro, I mean a top, top level pro across the net from him wasn't enough
to knock him off his game. In fact, I would say there's probably a really high chance that he played better than average in that set against Taylor Fritz because of the dynamics of the camera being there and his opponent on the other side being pumped up to play against somebody who's like a top pro to like test himself. And meanwhile on the other side, Taylor is like, man, you know, like he's
he's been in the spotlight on the world stage for many years. And so for him, he doesn't care about, you know, YouTube or like, you know, a hundred thousand subscribers, like it's just another day at the office for him. I mean, there's days that he competes, you know, for like hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line and tens of thousands of people paid tickets like bought tickets and paid
money to go watch him. Like that's a whole different level. And so notice how there's these different degrees of pressure. And depending on how far you've made it up that ladder, different environments and different criteria and factors can affect different people wildly different. So if you're not caroo and you haven't played, you know, high level competitive tennis, whatever that means to you, and maybe right now you feel like you're closer to the bottom of the mental toughness spectrum
than the top. How can we move up? How can we move up that ladder and perform a little bit better under pressure and then a little bit better under pressure? Well, the solution in my opinion, why isn't one of my favorite coaching principles? And I've referred back to so many times over the years in my coaching, it really is a huge north star for me in all things. Frankly, technique and the mental game and fitness and frankly, anything in life where there's degrees of excellence or
mastery, this has been hugely helpful to me. And I refer to it as the concentric circles of learning. Imagine like a dartboard with you got your bull's eye right in the middle and you have different other circles like larger circles and then larger circles outside of that. So this just imagine like this diagram has three layers of circles in the very center of the bull's eye is comforts,
it's your comfort zone. This is what you're used to currently in terms of level of physical stress and strain, level of technical stress and strain, level of mental stress and strain like how much pressure and anxiety you're feeling like how many outside elements there are like adding pressure on top of already just wanting to win for yourself. Comfort zone is just staying what right in the
middle of what you're used to in all of those different elements. You're just another day at the office like we were describing for Taylor Fritz except that his another day at the office is like wild is like crazy for us right. It's all relative. Then just outside the comfort zone is our learning
zone. So this is like 10 or 20% outside of what we're comfortable with is where we can experience growth because we're no longer doing what's comfortable but it's just uncomfortable enough that we can remain present and kind of in control of what we're doing and we can learn tremendous lessons while we're in the learning zone. It makes sense right. Then outside the learning zone is the panic
zone. This is where the level of stress and the level of challenge is so high that we essentially just go to fight or flight and we just go to like an instinctual like kind of protective oh crap kind of state. Now we have no ability to be present or conscious or aware of what we're doing and it's just survival and we're just fighting to just make it through another second of whatever level of stress or pressure we're under it. Again, might be physical, might be technical,
might be mental. We can be in the panic zone in all of those areas or just one of them. And so the secret to growth and continuing to improve your mental game is to consistently put yourself in your learning zone. If you stay in your comfort zone, it's just like physical fitness. If you don't ever stress your muscles or your heart or your lungs, at least a little bit, your fitness will never ever improve. You'll just maintain, you'll just plateau forever.
Or if you don't do anything, then you'll obviously decline. A comfort zone will just maintain. You have to leave your comfort zone and do something uncomfortable for there to be growth. Both in fitness and in technique and in the mental game. And unfortunately a lot of tennis players, frankly, they just prioritize enjoyment. And there's nothing wrong with that. If you're if you're primary thing that you're getting out of the game of tennis is enjoyment or socializing
or exercise or whatever, then it doesn't make any sense to leave your comfort zone at all. You're just because not a lot of people is kind of a unique thing where somebody enjoys being outside of the comfort zone. I've been doing this long enough on the internet that I am weird. I enjoy leaving my comfort zone. And my comfort zone is different than probably your comfort zone. And my comfort zone is also widely different than Kauru's comfort zone. He's a way more developed,
you know, competitor than I am. And if you didn't play college or high school or junior tennis, then more than likely I'm probably more developed competitor than you are. And if you want to improve and get closer to Kauru, then it's just a matter of leaving your comfort zone significant amount of time once in a while, even. It will at least keep the needle moving in the right direction.
I'm not going to get into details on how to do that specifically today. I just wanted to kind of talk about top line, you know, conceptual stuff here today, create kind of the framework. Hopefully this is super helpful for you. If it has been and you'd like to support the podcast, please do me a favor and go to dietemspourts.com. Use code ET15 and you get 15% off, grips and rackets and strings and bags and shoes and tennis balls and literally everything you need
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for listening. I'll talk to you next time. 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.