What Mental Skills are Part of a Serve Routine?

You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast with mental game of tennis expert, Dr. Patrick Cohn. Do you want to improve your mindset for tennis? Then join us on the Tennis Psychology Podcast. What are the important mental skills that apply to the between point routine in tennis? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, a mental performance coach at Peak Sports.

And in this video, you're going to learn about the important mental skills that you want to integrate into a between point routine to help you feel more confident, focused, and composed. When you step up to the service line, you're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Want to quickly improve your mental game for tennis? Visit www.sportspsychologytennis.com today and download a free e-book titled Six Unforced Mental Errors Tennis Players Make Between Points.

So in this series, I've been talking a lot about letting go of last point and getting your mind ready for the next point. It's an exercise both of getting physically and mentally ready.

In this video, I'm going to talk about how you get mentally ready. What are the important mental skills to integrate into your routine? It starts with number one. letting go of the last point. So that could mean you're dealing with some emotions, either excitement, overexcitement, anger, frustration, worry, even doubt.

So you have to address those specifically after that point. So let's say you're upset or you're frustrated with the last point. Well, then this would be the mental skill of composure. Composure would say, I'm okay with that last point. I accept that. I'm going to leave it behind and I'm going to move on to the next point. So how we do composure at peak performance sports. is we help athletes understand what's the underlying expectation that's causing them to be frustrated. Yes.

Often, expectations are the root of frustration. So in that sense, then, we're trying to manage your expectations and replace it with something that's more effective. Composure is not the only challenge post point, but that's just an example of one mental skill that you might need to let go of the last point, to not carry. that last point into your next point and have it affect the next point. Next, we have decision making. You have to make a clear decision on what you want to do with the serve.

That means are you going to go out wide into the body, down the center? What type of serve are you going to hit? Maybe you only have two serves. Maybe you do have three serves, but you have to pick that one serve that you're going to go with. Now, the decision-making component is somewhat easy. It's the commitment to that decision that's even more important and not changing your mind or getting wishy-washy at the last moment.

Next, we have confidence. Confidence is a mental skill. Hopefully, you come into the match with confidence and it stays stable. That's ideal. But sometimes, confidence can be fragile and you might start to doubt. But in any event, you want to use some positive self-talk as you transition from the last point and you step up the line for the next point. And that could be something like, I got this.

Or I've hit this serve a thousand times before. Or I love this part of the game. Or I love the challenge of hitting a good second serve. Whatever that may be. It's a positive intention and it's something that you enjoy doing and you love the challenge of serving. Next is focus. I've been talking about focus a lot in this series.

Focus basically means you're in the moment. You're not thinking about the next set or the next game. You're really not thinking about the outcome of the current game. And you're not thinking about the last point or the last game. You're in the moment. preparing your mind and body for the next serve, and you're going to play one ball at a time. Vitally important, really easy for me to say to you, but I know a lot harder to do.

So that's the mental skill of focusing. We call that focusing on the process. The next and final mental skill that I'll talk about is trust. Trust in your skills, trust in your strokes. So one of the reasons why you might take lessons and you practice and you hit serves over and over again is to develop repetition. What we call muscle memory. It's really motor memory.

but we'll call it muscle memory. Because you have that muscle memory, your stroke is ingrained. It's in a groove. It's in the slot. Doesn't mean it's going to be perfect, but... You want to trust in that stroke that you bring to the match that day. What that means is you're not going to fix and fiddle and start overthinking about mechanics. You want to trust in that stroke. Well, how do you trust in that stroke?

by focusing on the serve and the target and going after the ball and letting your swing do what it wants to do. Now, instructors aren't going to like me saying this, but... no amount of thinking about the serve is going to help you in the match because it's already baked in. You've already practiced it. You already have the repetition. It's already grooved. So now it's a matter of getting out of your own way and trusting.

Hope that was helpful. If you want more information about mental coaching for tennis, jump over to peaksports.com and contact us. Or if you want more articles and videos and podcasts, you can jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast with Dr. Patrick Cohn. Discover the secrets to superior tennis confidence by visiting www.sportspsychologytennis.com for practical mental game strategies to improve your tennis game.