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 394 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're going to talk about why you're not getting better at tennis and how to get on stuck and unlock your improvement. Don't you just hate that you know what you're
supposed to do with your tennis game to reach the next level? But you just don't do it. You just can't seem to figure out how to actually make it happen even though you know exactly what you're supposed to do. As an example, you know you're supposed to hit with more power if you want to level up. You know you're supposed to hit with more spin if you want to reach the next level. You know you're supposed to split step and you're supposed to anticipate. You know that you're supposed to be
consistent and not beat yourself and aim for dumb targets. Like duh, right? Like we know all these things. Well of course, you know I want to do those things. I know I'm supposed to do those things, but I just don't do those things. Why? After a while, don't you just feel kind of crazy? Taking all those lessons, playing all those matches, watching all those YouTube videos, listening to all those podcast episodes, you do all those training sessions with your teammates, but you still
just don't do those things. Why aren't you just doing them? Well, I'm going to explain exactly why. And more importantly, I'm going to give you the process to follow so that you can break free of whatever level you are right now and continue leveling up. Now in the previous episode of the podcast, 393, I introduced something called the improvement circle. And if you haven't heard that episode yet, I highly recommend you do and then come back to this point. It's not, I'm not going to
say it's necessary. You'll probably be able to pick up what I'm talking about here, but it will be very useful if you hear the full kind of detailed explanation of the four different phases of the improvement circle in the previous episode first. So the fair warning, you're still going to get value out of this anyway, but I highly recommend you listen to the previous episode first if you haven't already. So I explain the different phases of the improvement circle, the real quick
review, the four phases are unconsciously incompetent. It's where you don't know what you don't know. Consciously incompetent, you know what you're supposed to do, but you can't do it. Consciously competence, you know what you're supposed to do and you can do it, but only while you're concentrating on it and thinking about it. And finally, the ultimate place we're trying to get to is subconsciously competence, where now we just do it automatically. It's a new habit. We don't have to think about
it anymore. We just do the right thing without even thinking about it. Now, it's tempting to view that as, okay, well, there's four steps. So I just need to go step one, step two, step three, step four, you know, easy. And it sounds like, okay, it's a go from being consciously incompetent, which is what I described at the beginning of this episode. You know what you're supposed to do, but you just don't do it, right? You have all the information. Why don't you just use the
kinetic chain and just hit with more power? Why don't you just swing a load of high more and just hit with more spin? Like, you know what you're supposed to do, but you just don't do it yet. And on the surface, it sounds like pretty simple. Well, you just need to learn how to do it while thinking about it and then do it. Well, not thinking about it. So it sounds like, okay, so two steps, no big deal, right? But the reality is between those two steps is a gigantic
chasm. It's like a huge canyon worth a space between those two steps. And the only way to make it through is to break those big, big jumps into little bite-sized pieces. This is why maybe if you've ever recorded yourself before, you've noticed that over on the side of the court, maybe if you do a couple of shadow swings, you're like, oh, yeah, see, I know what to do. I can swing incorrectly. But then once the ball is in play, maybe you play some points, you play some,
you watch yourself do some match play. You're like, what the, what am I doing? I'm not doing anything that I thought I was doing. I'm not doing anything. I know I'm supposed to be doing. Why is this happening? Well, it's happening because when the ball is there, you're subconscious, aka your habits, your operating system that have taken you to this, the whatever level you're playing at right now, your subconscious knows that the goal once the ball is coming towards you is to hit the
ball back over the net and in. And the last thing you want to do is miss and fail. So your brain, even if you know that you're trying to do something new and different and better, will revert back to whatever movements are the most familiar. Whatever movements are the most kind of routine and give you the best chance of just making the shot. In other words, deep down, you have this old program that runs when the ball is there where you know what to expect and you know you're going to get
a certain result. Even if that result isn't very good in terms of power and span and placement, at least you know it's going to work. And so those old habits keep coming to the surface when the ball comes towards you. And this is what keeps most players at the same level year after year after year. They know they're supposed to turn their body to swing the racket at the ball. And maybe they'll practice it a couple of times with like a shadow swing or like a couple hits
without playing points and are like, oh man, it's definitely better. I know I'm supposed to turn my hips first and I'm not supposed to hit you know sideways. So they do it a couple of times and they just assume that oh sweet, I've got a new forehand. And then the next time they play a match, they don't use the new forehand. They use the old one because the old one is much, much more familiar and much more comfortable and much more predictable where the ball is going to go.
So instead of using the new and better forehand, they use the old one. And that starts this crazy merry go round of taking lessons, doing practice, assuming that they're learning and improving. But then they go out and play a match. They go back to the old habits and they don't actually get any better and it just goes around and around and around. That sounds familiar. Okay, so here's
how to make it stop. I'm going to talk about an example. I just had with a great student named Brenda where we made a huge improvement in a short period of time with her forehand by breaking down those two big steps into much smaller pieces. So the first thing we did was we rallied some forehands together. She wanted to work on her forehand ground stroke. So we recorded some forehands and then I played them back in slow motion and I showed her that she was keeping her
body sideways and she was just hitting the ball with her arm. So we identified immediately that the improvement we needed to make to get more power, get more spin, use her body more efficiently, more athletically like get AKA open up the door to do everything better was to start initiating with her shoulders and her hips instead of staying sideways and just hitting the ball with her arm from a super late contact point. So our first training progression focused only on just initiating
her hips and her shoulders before her arm did anything. So we didn't even do a whole swing. We just broke down the swing into just preparation and then just the initiation of the body. No arm movement or like racket movement at all. Just focusing on the body turning. This is critical because she didn't know that her body was reversed when she hit her forehand.
If you would have asked her at a time, hey do you think you use your body to hit the ball? She would be like, oh yeah, I've been playing tennis a long time and I've hit lots of great forehands. I've hit lots of winners. I've won lots of matches. So yeah, of course. If I had to put money on it, I bet I'm probably using my body. Well, guess what? She wasn't like at all to hit the ball. She's mostly using her arm. So first things first, we got to get her to just feel what it's like for her
body to start the swing and lead the swing. So that was step one. Step two was I had her practice initiating her body before her arm and then actually going through the rest of her swing. But just taking some pauses and some checkpoints along the way and breaking it into pieces. So that she could put it together one piece at a time and those pieces were preparation. I had
her drop her racket and just turn her hips and her shoulders and create a stretch. Then come forward slowly to contact, pause there so she could see what position her body was in and looking how different it was from her normal contact position. Then go forward and finish this swing. So we broke this swing into like four pieces. Okay, so we did some segmented shadow swings. That was step two. Once she was able to do that, competently, then we moved on to step three. So notice, we've already
moved through the improvement circle. This is where it'd be helpful to have really good grasp with the improvement circle twice already. We went from consciously incompetent, not being able to move her body correctly to be able to move it correctly just by itself. Then move it correctly
with a segmented shadow swing. And now step three was becoming slowly, consciously competent while smoothly, slowly, continuously going through a full forehand shadow swing without any checkpoints, without stopping, without pausing and just concentrating really hard on just her body, initiating. These are slow, smooth, calm. There's still no ball. It took her a couple minutes, but eventually she was able to consciously, competently make a shadow swing while moving her body
in the right order. Great. So notice, I didn't show her the video and be like, hey, you need to turn your body. You're not turning your body soon enough. You're waiting too long. And so you're just hitting the balls your arm and then just start chucking balls at her and be like, turn your body, turn your body, turn your body. He started from a very, very easy starting point, made sure she could do it right and it made it a little bit tougher and made sure she could do it right. Then made it
a little bit tougher and made sure she could do it right. And so notice, we're instead of focusing on the way most tennis players and most tennis coaches focus on the outcome, aka, how are you hitting that ball? Is it going over the net? Is it staying inside the lines? Is it going faster? Is it going with more spin? Most hits of a tennis ball that players and coaches do are focused on
the outcome. Notice, we haven't had an outcome yet. This is very different. This is process focused coaching where we're not focused at all on what's happening with the ball because there is no ball yet. We're just making sure that she can move her body correctly because she hasn't been moving her body correctly. So we didn't just make sure that she can do it competently and correctly first and then we can start introducing a ball. But if you skip those first couple of steps,
this is where players get stuck. This is where players spin their wheels. If you skip those first couple basic steps, it's too easy when the ball comes into play to just go back to the old habit. And now you're not getting any better. You're just reinforcing the habit you've always had. And you're not actually progressing at all. So at this point, we've done three progressions and I tossed Brenda a ball. And guess what? She went right back to her old habit. By the way, if you want
to see this in action, then you can go to YouTube. And I'm releasing a video version of this lesson where you can actually see this all unfolding. You can see it happening. It's going to be the same title. Why you're not getting better at tennis. So if you go to YouTube and type in why you're not getting better at tennis, essential tennis, then hopefully it'll pop up first. You'll see me talking about the same topic and you'll see the actual real life footage of Brenda going through this.
So we did those first three progressions. She checked all those boxes. I tossed her a ball for the first time. She just went back right, right back to her old forehand. And this is why it's so hard. This is what the ball does. It pulls us right back into our old habits. And this is why we can't just practice something a few times and be like, Oh, sweet. I got it. She is consciously competent without a ball. But when the ball was there, she went back to consciously incompetent
with using the kinetic chain correctly. So most players and coaches at this point would try to solve this problem through volume and just feeding more and more and more balls and just repeating the same phrase out in front, out in front, turn your body, turn your body. And unfortunately changing habits doesn't work that way. Like it's not a volume game. It's a volume game to iron in
a new habit that you can do correctly. But if you can't even do it correctly at all with the ball coming towards you, more tennis balls coming towards you are not going to fix the problem. So I introduced a fake toss. I used this a ton in my coaching. And what I started doing was tossing
a ball off to the side away from her. And instead of having her run after the ball and go get it and try to hit it, I instructed her to stay there, let the ball bounce and go past her off to the side of where she was standing and focus on moving her body correctly in the right order. Which is what we were focusing on before before the ball was there and she was able to do it. But then the ball blew everything up and she went back to the wrong technique keeping her body
sideways and just swinging her arm. So we started alternating between shadow swings with no ball and fake tosses where she would practice the right process of how to move her body. But without actually hitting the ball, the ball was just there to add a little bit of extra challenge and a little bit of extra friction. But it wasn't fully triggering her brain back into outcome mode. She wasn't subconsciously so worried about the results anymore. Whether or not she hit the ball over,
hit the ball in the court. Instead, because she knows she's not hitting it and there is no outcome, she can fully focus on just doing it right. And now we're making progress. If you go watch the video, you see that slowly she starts to be able to do it with a fake toss. So now four different ways she's moved through the improvement circle from unconsciously incompetent. When we started this lesson, probably half an hour before this point, she had no idea she was staying sideways
and she couldn't do it. She couldn't do it right at all. Now four times we've moved through phase one and phase two, which is consciously incompetent, into consciously competent four different times. She can do it now with a fake toss while thinking about it and really focusing on it. Then we started mixing these together shadow swings, fake tosses and then finally some hits. So specifically, I think the sequence I was going through was I would do two shadows with her,
no ball at all. Make sure she did it right. Then two fake tosses. So the ball is there, but she's not hitting it. Make sure she does it right. And then finally toss her a ball to actually hit while I'm just encouraging her. Just Brennan, I don't care where the ball goes. The result doesn't matter. Just make sure you're doing it right. Make sure that your body leads, your hips, and your shoulders are going first and you're not just hitting the ball with your arm.
Guess what? Finally, by mixing and matching and layering those different progressions, she turned her body first and hit the most athletic, best kinetic chain, most
athletically kind of organized and efficient forehand she's ever hit in her life. If you go look at the side by side, the video of her hitting with her hips facing forwards, her shoulders facing forwards, the ball contact point way out in front and look at that compared to the way she was used to hitting her forehand totally sideways with her contact point way back behind the front of her body.
Night, absolutely night and day. Now, is this easy, this process? Is it easy to use this kind of wide range of different progressions and layers and like shadow swings and like having the patience to not hit the ball, having the patience to have the ball involved, but like not hitting it? No, it's not easy. But guess what? This is why most tennis players, the first couple of years they play, they improve and then on average, players plateau about three five or maybe if they're lucky
4.0 and then they play at that level for year after year after year after year. Essentially, they max out their and air quotes here, natural athleticism or like natural level of talent and then their bad movements and their bad habits get in the way of moving past that and the I'm just going to be really honest here, the standard process of instruction and practice and matches is broken.
It's keeping players stuck at their current level. Now, if your goal is just to hit a lot of balls and play a lot of matches and just you just have fun doing those things, that's totally fine. Just play it three five forever and just enjoy it and and love the activity, love the exercise, love the camaraderie, love the competitions, totally fine. But if you're still listening to me right
now, if you've made it through this point in this episode, that's probably not you. You're probably not satisfied with just staying at three five forever or 4.0 forever, whatever level you are forever. And so if that's true of you, this type of process is necessary to rewire, to rewrite your old habits, those subconscious programs that get run when the ball is there and replace them with something different. So to this point, with a previous episode of the podcast number 393,
we introduced the improvement circle. In this episode, we talked about a real life case study of me moving a student through the first three stages, unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competence with multiple different progressions and hopefully
kind of picture, I know this is audio, but hopefully you can kind of picture how we've layered things and taken, we followed a process here, we haven't focused on the outcome or the result, we focused on the process of bringing her through those different phases of the improvement circle with multiple different levels of challenge. And now what's the last phase? We need to get her from being consciously competent, hitting the ball correctly, to subconsciously competent,
doing it correctly without having to think about it anymore. That's the final stage. And in the next episode of the podcast, I'll talk about making that final jump from being consciously competent in a training environment or in a match, being able to do it, but while having to concentrate and think about it, to being able to do it in practice or in a match or anytime automatically, without having to think about it anymore because it's just a habit. That's what I'm going to focus
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