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 395 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to continue our theme from the previous two episodes and we're going to talk about why you should stop thinking during your tennis matches and why you lose and why you don't get better. It's why you don't actually develop any habits
that stick with you and make their way down into your matches. So I want you to imagine what if you could make all your best swings, hit your best shots and play your best level of tennis completely on autopilot without thinking about it at all, without any reminders. That's what the best competitors at all levels of tennis are able to do. It really doesn't matter if it's professional or 5-0 level tennis or 4-0 or 3-0, the players who win the most aren't just inundating themselves
with reminders and thoughts and technical cues. They're just allowing themselves, whatever their level of skills are, they're allowing them to just flow freely and they're playing on instinct and habit instead of a married around of constant reminders and thoughts. So here's just a critical reminder and I come back to this over and over and over again with my students and whenever I work with other coaches, I'm constantly bringing people's attention back to this truth. As humans,
we can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. I'm going to repeat that. It's important. We can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. Our conscious mind is kind of like a spotlight.
Like when it's focused on one thing, everything else is not being focused on. You kind of have to pick and it's really important to remember that because if you don't remember it and you're trying to constantly go through this crazy cycle of chasing your tail and reminding yourself like one second on this and the next minute on that and then the minute after that, something else and
you go back to the first thing again, you're like, oh crap, I forgot about that. It's this crazy game of whack-a-mole that players make and nothing ever actually gets trained deeply. So thankfully, we have an incredibly deep and powerful ability to commit things to our subconscious. Otherwise, we'd be totally screwed, right? And so we don't have to think about certain things anymore. Like walking or talking, like you don't have to sound out every word that we speak.
Like you just memorize it and then you're able to just repeat it from your subconscious. Or how about like breathing? It's totally happening in the background. Obviously, we don't have to physically gather the muscles to raise our diaphragm and fill our lungs with air. Thank goodness. If we didn't have automatic subconscious habits and systems and our body that manage those things automatically, then living would be impossible. So how do we commit our best tennis skills to our
subconscious so that they don't have to be up in the front of our mind anymore? And we don't have to keep reminding ourselves over and over and over again. How do we hit our best serve, our best forehand or best backhand kind of like breathing where they just happen without any reminders or mental efforts? Well, previous two episodes of the podcast, I've been talking about the improvement circle. And I'm going to be referring back to it again today. And I think this will be
the last in this kind of series where I focus in on the improvement circle. If you haven't listened to episode number 393 or 394, you don't have to do that right now, but it would definitely be good context. But I want you to imagine real quickly in case you haven't listened to those already. Circle diagram with four different segments or phases. Imagine like kind of arrows going around the outside of the circle. And in order, here's the sequence that we move through anytime we learn
a new skill. First, we're unconsciously incompetent. We don't know what we're supposed to do. We can't do it right either. Then we gain some information. We move on to conscious incompetence. So now we know what we're supposed to do, but we can't do it yet. Then we move to conscious competence. So we have the awareness of what we're supposed to do. And now we can do it, but we have to still remind ourselves to do it the new way or the correct way or the improved way.
And then finally, the fourth phase is subconscious competence. Now we can do it without thinking about it. And in the previous two uploads of the podcast, I gave a real life example of how I took a real life student and brought her through those first three phases. And we went from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent to consciously competent with her forehand. But what about making it from consciously competent to subconsciously competent? She just doesn't even have to think
about it at all anymore forever. And she can actually do it in a real match. Well, that last and kind of final step from doing it while thinking about it to doing it while without thinking about it, you know, in the diagram, just just illustration, just to help understand this conceptually. It's one step, but in real life, that one step is gigantic. It's huge. And so to make our way in between those two different phases, it's critical that we add some little stepping stones.
And in coaching, we call those stepping stones, progressions. And I'd like to share with you for the first time ever, kind of a master list of progressions that I've written down over the years. And you can check this out. You can look at it right now if you want. If you go to essential tennis.com slash progressions.pdf. That's essential tennis.com slash progressions.pdf. Then you'll get, I'm not talking about this anywhere else. You can go ahead and just download my cheat sheet
of progressions that I've compiled over the years. And I've ordered these progressions. There's 32 of them from easiest to hardest. I'm not going to go through, you know, it'll just take forever. And give the names and the description of each of these. Maybe if that's something you'd like to see in the future, maybe as a video, let me know. I'm not going to, it would be the most boring,
uh, well, I don't know. Let me know if you'd like to hear a description of like all 32. But just for context, number one, the easiest at the very top of the list is segmented shadow swings. That means breaking down a stroke into pieces, doing one piece at a time, making sure we do it correctly without a ball. Shadow swing means there's no ball involved. We're just moving the body, moving the racket without the ball. So we can put all our focus and all of our attention.
Just on moving correctly and segmented means we're breaking it in the pieces. And all the way down at the bottom is real match play. And there's 30 steps in between segmented shadow swings and real match play. And if you go to essential tennis.com slash progressions.pdf, then you'll see I've color coded them. The top section is red. And so you don't need to know what the individual ones are, but just just kind of visualize this. The top chunk is is color coded red. And those are all
progressions that I use without a ball involved. Then there's yellow ones and goes from five to 16 or yellow. Those have a ball involved, but they're either an underhand toss or a very, very controlled feed off the racket of either a coach or like a practice partner. So it's not a live ball. It's a feed or a toss. Then from 17 to 24, they're colored green. Those are cooperative, different types of cooperative rallies. So now it's a live ball. But we're not trying to win.
We're trying to keep the rally going while we train something. But that's that's much harder than off of an underhand toss or off of a feed. And then from 25 to 32, those are colored blue. And those are different styles and different degrees of challenge of competitive rally. So now the goal
is that actually try to win the rally while we work on something specific. So a, hopefully that's helpful just to hear like the order of those things and have just kind of this idea in general that wow, like there's 32 steps between just doing it at all without a ball and doing it in match play. And there's different degrees of challenge from step one to step 32. Do we need to use all of them
to get a new skill to being subconscious? No, we don't. In fact, here just as an example, an episode number the previous one 394 of the podcast, I talked you through a lesson with Brenda where we worked on her forehand. And we brought her forehand from staying sideways and just using her arm to using her kinetic chain correctly. And we brought her from being unconsciously incompetent all the way to phase three being consciously competent. And we used four different progressions
in order to do that. And we use, so I'll tell you what they were a number one, two, four, and ten. And those are segmented shadow swings. Then we did smooth, continuous shadow swings. Then we did fake tosses, which I described in the previous episode of podcast. Then we did feeds where she was standing on the service line. So where we left off with Brenda, she was able to hit a tennis ball from the service line from an underhand toss and do it correctly and do it right while focusing
on it. So she was consciously competent with that level of challenge when we last left off. Well, what about using her new forehand without having to think about it anymore in a real match? Well, there's 21 progressions. There's 21 stepping stones in between where we left her off in real match play. Well, she needs to master all of them before her new forehand is finally
subconscious and she's able to do it correctly. No, definitely not. She's not going to have to do all of them, but it's also critically important that she doesn't leave the court right after we're done working on her forehand and just go to a match and have any kind of expectation or assumption that sweet, all right, I got my new forehand time to go play a match and like crush, crush my
opponents with my new forehand. No, it doesn't work that way because where we left her off on the service line hitting underhand feeds is not anywhere in the ballpark of the level of challenge needed. I'm sorry, not anywhere near the level of challenge that she's going to undergo in a real match. It's not even close. She's not having to run or track. She's not having to keep track of her opponents like strengths and weaknesses. She's not having to track different patterns and
strategies like what's working well in the match. She's not having to sink her body or her movement with whatever the speed of the rallies is and try to move. You know, smoothly, she's not having to do any of that. We are giving her the benefit in a training environment of controlling the level of challenge and allowing all of her focus. Remember, we can only focus on one thing at a time. So if I took Brenda to the iPad and I was like, hey, look, Brenda, you're doing it this way right now.
That's not very good. And you need to do it like this. Okay, got it. All right, great. High five. Now go do it. And I just sent her out to play a match. I was like, okay, sweet. I'm such a good teacher. Man, I found exactly what the problem was. And I explained it super good. And now she's got a new forehand, right? Well, no, that's not how building new habits works. That's not how building
skills works. There's a progression that needs to take place of a student being able to do it at all at first and then slowly but surely adding a little bit of challenge and a little bit of challenge and a little bit of challenge until the student gains more awareness and more ability and more capacity to do the new thing correctly until finally, hopefully, eventually, they can actually
use it for real in a match without even having to think about it. But there's a lot of steps in between the initial learning and being able to do it without even thinking about it. So how long, right? This is the question everybody wants to know. And when I work with them in person, they're like, just tell how long is this going to take? I think you used Ian for showing me my serve and my forehand and my backhand and showing me what's wrong. And for doing the drills with me,
like I totally get it. And now I understand how to practice it. That's great. Thank you. But how long is it going to be? How long do I actually have to do this until I can just do it? And I don't even have to think about it anymore. How long is that going to take? Is it going to be hours or weeks or months or like years? How long is it going to take? Well, it's impossible for me to say for sure. But I can tell you that it depends on four different variables. And there's no way that it's ever
going to show up in real life in a match unless all four of these things are managed. Ready? This is super important. So the first thing is how frequently the student practices the new thing. So this is pretty logical. If you just kind of spell it out. So if Brenda goes home and she practices that new forehand once a month and then in between her practice sessions, she plays 20 matches in between each for practice sessions. Every 20 matches she goes out and is like, oh,
you know what? I should probably practice that new forehand. Do you think that new forehand is ever going to show up in match play? No, it's not ever. It's just not going to happen. So how frequently a student trains the new thing is a big variable. The second big variable is the quality of the training. So frequency is important. But the quality as well as the quantity is super critical. So if she, let's just say she practices seven days a week her new forehand for a half
an hour, seven and just just throwing an example out there. Seven days and seven days a week she practices for half an hour. But half the time she's doing the old one because she's super distracted. And so she's not really concentrating that much. She's hidden some back hands too and checking her phone and like taking a water break and and not really paying attention very much. She never checks herself on video to see if she's doing it right. Doesn't do the shadow swings. Just kind of sets the
ball machine up and just wax a bunch of forehands. But she practices seven days a week. Well, that's very low quality of training. So she could practice seven days a week with a low quality. And also never actually train the new forehand. Never actually have it be a part of her game. So quality is super important. Number three. And this kind of ties in with number two. How often does she repeat the old
habit? So even if she practices the new one seven days a week and the quality is good, if she only does it 10 times, if she does it seven days a week, but only 10 times does it perfectly those 10 times, but then also goes out and plays a match where she uses her old forehand. And so now we have a a big quantity of the old forehand being hit and a very small quantity of the new forehand being hit. It's going to be really hard to ever fully trust and ever fully subconsciously train
that new better forehand. And then the fourth variable is a big one. How, and I'm putting this in air quotes, how naturally athletic or talented is the students. Now it's technically possible. If you're athletic and talented enough, you can skip the first three. This does happen, but very rarely. I think it was two podcast episodes ago. I said it's one percent of it's probably less than that. It's probably less than one percent of humans that you can just tell them, hey, you know what?
You should turn your body on your forehand before a contact gets made. You should use your kinetic chain and they're like, okay, yeah, sure. And then they just do it. And they don't have to do a big volume and they don't have to maintain a lot of focus on the quality. And they never go back to doing the old one again because they're just like, yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll just do the new one.
You should have told me sooner. That is exceedingly rare. In fact, I can virtually guarantee, like if you're actually listening to a podcast about how to get better at tennis, that's not you because you wouldn't bother listening to it. If you could just do everything you wanted to do the first, you know, try because you were that coordinated and that athletic and that aware of like what your body is doing. Very, very, very few people have that level of talent.
So it, but it's a scale. Okay. So number one, frequency of training, number two, quality of training, number three, how often you do the old one, like what's the balance between the new good one and the old bad one and number four, level of talent or athleticism. So if she, if she's killing it on all four of those elements, all four, she's like, man, just absolutely destroying it. She could have a new forehand in like a couple of days or a week. If she doesn't do well on any of them,
then she'll never have a new forehand. And of course, there's obviously a lot of gray in between. So it could take anywhere from a few days or a week or two to never having a new forehand in everything in between. You know, I could maybe try to give you a ballpark estimate. But as you can tell, there's so many variables. And so I don't even want to like guess for you. I don't know how athletic or coordinated you are. I don't know what your schedule is. I don't know what your
level of focus tends to be when you're trying, I don't know those things. So I can't really give you a guesstimation on how long it's going to take for you to change your forehand or your serve or your back end. There's a lot of nuance, how this works and quality and quantity of things that I don't know about you. But I'm just trying to give you the ingredients here. So you can mix them together and be successful developing a new better subconscious game. So I want to close by just
sending two messages here. So this is really different, isn't it? Isn't this like very outside the box compared to the status quo? Most tennis players who take lessons will take a lesson like once a week and then they'll go play a bunch of matches. Then they'll go back take their weekly lesson and then play a bunch of matches. Then take their weekly lesson then play a bunch of matches. How can you ever actually make substantive changes like really meaningful fundamental changes
to your technique if that's your schedule? Because guess what? Every time you go play a match, you're just going to go back to the way you were doing it before. Maybe you'll make tiny incremental improvements here and there. But for the most part, your core skills are going to stay the same. You might get better at those core skills. You might get more precise at doing your crappy forehand. You might get more consistent at doing your crappy serve. But you're not going to
go from a crappy serve to a beautiful serve with that schedule. And less year to that 1% of 1%. Just really talented athletic people. So students, players, it's your responsibility to do your homework. Hopefully listening to this episode, you've heard loud and clear that it takes commitment and it takes a certain process and it takes frequency and it takes quality and it takes discipline
not going back to the old way that you used to do it. And you have to take responsibility for that process because your coach, you know, can't follow you around every time you go to the tennis court, it's up to you to check those boxes. And coaches, it's your responsibility to communicate this process to your students so that they have a chance of actually developing new fundamentally different and fundamentally better skills. You have to educate them about the work they need to do
when they're not on the court with you. And you need to educate them that if they leave your lesson and they just go play a bunch of matches and then they come back in a week and take another lesson and they expect to get better, you need to be transparent about the fact that that's not
going to work. And all those matches are just reinforcing their bad habits. And that's hard because it's more to be totally like just honest and transparent like this is all this takes more work and takes more focus and takes more dedication than what I think most people in tennis understand to be true. So on one hand, I'm kind of sorry, sorry about that, but on the other hand,
this is the reality. This is how humans learn. And this is how this is what it takes to get better at a very complicated challenging skill like tennis, especially when we have pre-existing habits that are not ideal. Hopefully this was super helpful if it was please go to dietimsporets.com. And whatever you buy, just put in check out at checkout coupon code ET15. You'll get 15% off your entire purchase. I use their tennis balls in my teaching basket. I use their rackets and their
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Hopefully this is super helpful. Keep up the great work with your game.