MENTAL TENNIS

"What is mental tennis?", I hear you asking.

Well, as you may have known, mental tennis is one of the most important and distinct aspect we focus on at KG Tennis Academy. We believe in order to be the best tennis player, one needs to have a wholistic approach to tennis training. Tennis is not just a physical sport. It's actually also a mental game, especially if you aim to play in a pro level.

Focusing and putting in effort to the mental side to tennis has benefited me drastically. In my younger days, I never really cared about the biggest aspect in my game that was lacking, THE MENTAL GAME. At training, I was at my best level, beating so many players that I couldn’t beat, feeling the fittest ever and yet when it comes to tournaments I couldn’t win nothing.

In 2018, during pre-season, I played my best tennis ever. I tried to play many tournaments at the start of the season in 2019 and I unable to win a match at my next 10-15 tournaments. I was in distraught. I wanted to quit tennis and not purse it anymore. I didn’t feel the need to train hard for 8 hours everyday, having a lot of sacrifices to my daily life to just end up being a LOSER. I spoke to my coaches and the rest of my team around me and told them that tennis wasn’t going to be the sport for me and that I wanted to quit. My coaches told me to just try it for another 6 months however now, they hired me a sports psychologist. I agreed but I was never confident that my tennis game could evolve with a psychologist. Who in the right mindset would think a sports psychologist could make me win matches? My tennis was at its best level, how could the psychologist coach me tennis better than a tennis coach? That was just playing in my mind and I never thought that decision would change my tennis career!

I took the next 2 months off tournaments and I just trained on the court, at the gym and worked with my psychologist everyday. A lack of mental toughness is the biggest enemy of athletes. Lacking mental toughness causes athletes to give up, give in, tank the match, and give less. The level of your athletic success is in direct proportion to your level of mental toughness. To be mentally tough, you must be willing to do what most athletes don’t do. Mental toughness requires an ironclad approach to the challenges in your sport on a consistent basis. You need to consistently focus, train, and grow your mental toughness habit.

Personally, I worked on my routines on and off the court. For example, on days when I was serving well, I would bounce the ball 5 times on my racket and 3 times with my hand before serving. On bad servings days I would double that amount. Why so? On days where I serve well, I don’t want to give rhythm to the opponent hence I don’t take so much tome in between serves. On bad days, I take time to plan on where to serve/where my serve has been the most effective on that particular day and take as much time as I can to prepare serving and make the opponent lose rhythm.

There are many other things I could share to you about but this is one of the reasons that made me win my first ever tournament.

Here at KG Tennis Academy, we provide professional support to hone your psychological strength aside from your coaching session. If you guys are keen to get in touch with a sports psychologist that I work with please do not hesitate to contact us! I am sure it will help your game to another level as what it has done to be being a competitive player currently.

Vamos!

Coach, Kuhan Gopal