Bridging the Technical and Mental Divide: Implementing Technical Change under Pressure

Jeff Greenwald, M.A, M.F.T.

In tennis coaching, there is a divide between technique and the mind. There is technical development. And then there is the mental game. We assume that both aspects are critical, but that they must be developed separately.

But what is the actual relationship between technique and the mind? Specifically, how do you implement technical change under mental pressure? This question is rarely explored. But this process is a crtical key for you to grow as a player and tap into your best tennis.

In this article I will explain how we can create a synthesis between technical adjustments and the mental processes toexecute them, drawing from research-based principles in the field of sport psychology.

I proved how important and powerful this process can be to myself recently (and not for the first time) when, only three days before playing the National 40's Hardcourts, I decided to make several technical adjustments to my service motion.

According to conventional wisdom that decision could have been lethal. But the actual outcome turned out to be very positive. I was able to win the event, and the improvements in my serve played a critical part.

Changes I integrated into my serve helped produce a gold ball in LaJolla.

This article tells the story of how that happened. It is in part the story of what I changed, but more importantly, the story of how I implemented that change, a process any player can learn to use for any shot.

The Decision

The background on the story is this. For a number of weeks, as I prepared for the National 40's in La Jolla, California, my first serve percentage had been below 50%, even in practice.

The thought of playing a big national tournament under those circumstances was making me increasingly uncomfortable. Having to win more points on my second serve and/or having to break serve more often were challenges I wished to avoid if I possibly could.

Initially, I tried upping my serving practice, hitting multiple baskets of balls. My rhythm and my percentages improved, but then in a warm-up tournament, my first serve disappeared again.

Was the serving problem primarily a psychological issue? At least in part it had become one, because I had lost confidence in my ability to deliver the serves I wanted when I needed them most.

But the bottom line was the physical motion simply didn't feel right. If I wanted to increase my confidence in pressure situations I knew I would have to adjust the physical motion first.

The initial step was to develop a technical understanding of why the serve was breaking down. So I picked up the phone, called my friend John Yandell, and asked him if he could bring one of his video cameras out to Harbor Point in Mill Valley, the Marin County, California tennis club where we both are members.

John raised the obvious question whether this was a wise idea so close to the event. I told him that even though I was three days out from the tournament I had nothing to lose. I could always throw out the new plan if it didn't work.

I also told him that if we came up with the right analysis, I felt confident in my ability to implement the change, based on my previous experiences and the techniques I had developed in my work as a sport psychology consultant. So John agreed to participate, and the experiment began.

When we videoed the motion, we quickly agreed on the analysis. We both felt that there was no real problem with the racket path or the shape of the swing. However there were a several other factors that needed some degree of adjustment.

We noticed first that I was landing off balance, too bent over at the waist. We also noticed that I had lost some of the extension in the kick backward with the right leg. At contact, we saw that my shoulders were somewhat open to the baseline, compared to top players.

So where to start? John suggested I close the angle of my front foot in the starting stance, which I currently had at about 45 degrees to the baseline. We decided to make it more parallel, turning it so my toes so they were pointing more toward the sideline. We also narrowed the stance slightly and opened the angle of the back foot, turning it slightly away from the baseline.

John believed this would create more body rotation in the motion, improve the angle of my shoulders at contact and give me more power automatically. We also experimented with deepening the knee bend slightly. Our thought was that possibly I had come to rely too much on my hand and arm going for big serves and that this had contributed to my inconsistency.

To implement all this, we did a drill called the "hoppity hop" which forced me to kick my leg further back behind me, and land more upright and with better balance. You can read more on the technical analysis in the article John wrote previously in Your Strokes. (Click Here.)

When I started to play practice points, we were both excited to find I incorporated these incremental changes almost immediately - and that there was a noticeable change in the way the ball looked and felt coming off my racket.

Although the changes might appear to be substantial, the important point for me was that I did not feel that they were unmanageable if I used my focus and attention in the right way. And this is an important key for all players to address - knowing how to implement change, but also, not taking on more than you truly feel capable of integrating.

Interestingly, my pinpoint stance - something we had not discussed--seemed to naturally morph into a classic platform along the lines of Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. That was fascinating since it was something neither of us had identified as a problem or sought to change.

Equally interesting was how the stance changed back again as I worked on the other change. This turned out to be another critical point in the managing the process - but more on that below.

As we worked, I felt my confidence soar. Hitting balls out of the basket and playing practice points, it was clear that the changes we made could produce the exact result I was looking for if I could incorporate them and use them at the Nationals.

From Theory to Tourney

The question was: how to make this happen? What exactly do you do mentally to incorporate positive technical change?

I think a lot of players are confused about this, or whether they should think about technique at all during matches. And there are good reasons for that. The verbal analysis associated with the rational, left half of the brain is incompatible with the elusive "zone" or "flow" state we all seek to find in competition.

But if you can't think about it at all, how can you implement technical change in competitive play? Here is the solution. Technical tips need to be processed and distilled into right brain visuals and/or physical feelings.

Images and the kinesthetics (physical feelings) that go with them can convey technical information to the flow side of the brain, bypassing the need for verbal analysis. Let me explain how this worked for me in the heat of tournament play.

The Nationals

I'm in the finals of the National 40 Hardcourts in La Jolla. I am playing three time champion and USC men's varsity tennis coach Peter Smith, an accomplished player and also himself a Tennisplayer contributor. (Click Here to read Peter's article.)

I walk from the back court up to the basellne to serve. My eye catches a spectator to my right. Slowly and methodically, I line up my front foot to the baseline. I can't help but notice the look of confusion on the face of this spectator. What player in the finals of a National would approach the serve like a beginner? But looks can be deceiving.

It is true that when I was lining my front foot up to the line to serve - as the intrigued spectator noticed - it was a left brain moment. I was consciously aligning my body in the way John and I had discovered would automatically increase my body turn and coil.

But this is also where the shift started to the other, right side of the brain. After getting set, I had a brief visual of my body remaining upright at contact, imagining how this actually feels. The process takes no more than 1-2 seconds.

Essentially what I am doing is "calling up" the feeling and image of a very specific technical cue. The process is simple, fast, non-verbal. Over time it becomes automatic.

It could have also been the image of the slightly deeper knee bend. Or an image of the rear foot kicking back. Any of things we worked on. In fact, at different times during the tournament, each of these images cycled through my mind based on what I felt I needed in the moment as I managed the adjustments I had made to my motion.

But there is a larger point - this process is not just about changes with my own serve. The same process can work for any player for virtually any technical cue across the entire range of strokes.

But beware. There is a trap awaiting you. Once the visual image is processed many players try too hard to actually execute the shot. And we know that excessive thinking in matches typically leads to paralysis. Let me be clear. Cue words and/or images of technique during competition should be kept to a minimum. But when you employ your right brain to process this quickly with a focus on the image it is possible to make adjustments with very little effort.

A case in point is what happened with my stance. When John and I first worked on my starting position and knee bend, to our surprise we saw my pinpoint stance change into a platform, as an unintended consequence. However, prior to the tournament, my natural pinpoint stance reemerged - again without any conscious awareness on my part.

I could have let that become a major distraction and began debating with myself about which stance was better, should I change it back, etc. My instincts told that would have been too much to process under the circumstances, and therefore definitely counterproductive. That debate would have overwhelmed the subtle, non-verbal keys we had developed, keys which had had nothing to do with the stance.

To make the process I am talking about work, your focus must be very narrow so you can be fully in the moment. The key here is to stay mindful of the adjustment you are trying to make but stay completely present in your body. There might be other issues to consider - or not - but during match play is not the time.

To site another example in keying my serve, I would simply narrow my attention to the kick back of my leg that I intended to make as I made contact. This is something John and I found had an immediate effect in our initial work. It is as if you re shining a flashlight on that particular part of your body without any other thought or distraction.

My instincts told me that this was a positive key, and to stay away from any deeper analysis of the stance that I would not have been able to process in the same simple, non-verbal way.

Outcome

It is imperative that you do not get preoccupied or distracted by the outcome and whether the ball is likely to go in or out. This, of course, is the slippery slope that we all face in competition. It's the distraction of focusing on winning or losing the point, or losing the match and the disappointment that goes with this.

And, yes. This is certainly easier said than done. But the key is to learn, little by little, to let go of this attachment and stay focused on your specific goals. You need to be very clear on the specific intention you have for any shot you are trying to improve - beyond the win or loss.

Next, keep your focus on that particular goal and repeat the process over and over until it becomes ingrained. The truth is that it's comforting to have a powerful, relevant, simple technical cue on shots that need some "clean up" from time to time. I have used the same process on my return game, for example. As you work the process over time, you feel as though you have something solid to rely on, and this creates confidence.

More Focus

Based on a wide body of research, we now know that elite athletes have the ability to narrow their focus under pressure and have a sense of clarity about their intention in the moment. For me, narrowing my attention to a technical cue on my serve, and under pressure, I was automatically reducing thoughts about other irrelevant distractions such as the score or the last point. The benefits for me in this tournament were significant.

As my focus improved so did my serving percentage and ability to use my serve to generate more offensive opportunities. This created more pressure on my opponents, forcing them to think and guess more on returns. This in turn decreased the pressure I felt to break, and therefore actually created more confidence in my return game and gave me the courage to go for aggressive returns myself.

One of my opponents, Morgan Shepherd, now a teaching pro in the Bay and the National Grasscourt Champion in 2009, put it this way: "It was a rude awakening to be on the defensive on your serve throughout the match since I wasn't seeing that many second serves. It was like trying to climb a mountain because I never felt like I had any chance to break. It created a lot of pressure."

Tennis Versus The Brain

One of the greatest mental challenges on the court is to think less and be more productive with the thoughts that inevitably emerge. This should not come as a surprise when you consider that humans, on average, have approximately 60,000 thoughts per day, as revealed by research connecting people's brains to biofeedback.

Human brains are designed to think and fix things, not be quiet. Having a calm mind, staying focused in the moment, being loose in competition - those things are not normal.

We were conditioned to run from our predators or fight them for survival. The fear center in our brains, known as the amygdala, is still very prominent factor in influencing our behavior. Tennis can bring out a primal response in many of us, which means that we need tools to manage these high-arousal moments. (Click Here for more on tennis and the brain.)

The two sides of the brain process the same information in different forms.

Let's look a little closer at how a technical adjustment on the serve can help you focus. The fact is the mind will wander when it is not engaged. In the context of competition, given the pressure to win and expectations we invariably place on ourselves, this means that without a specific plan and a routine, the mind can travel to dark places; all for one reason - the mind's obsession and deep attachment to outcome.

This is why engaging the mind in any productive way is often better than leaving it to its own devices. A technical "cue" or image of your swing like this can help narrow your focus and direct your mind, which will reduce the brain's tendency to run away on you.

This is a subtle but very important point. The right technical adjustment, made in the right way, can actually improve your mental game. It's important that the technical adjustment is highly relevant to your stroke and can be performed with ease. This is where video analysis and good coaching are critical.

And the Larger Issue

I would now like to explore a larger issue - one that influenced my choice to make this change in the first place. The truth is I debated about whether to call John for a few days - I was playing well, felt pretty fit, and wondered whether I might just end up causing problems for myself.

Twenty years ago I would not have made that call. Twenty years ago I was more focused on winning than improving my game. Carol Dweck describes this mentality as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when you view your performance as a reflection of your self-worth.

The growth mindset is the opposite. Outcomes are viewed as feedback - the more feedback the better so you can learn to master whatever you do. Setbacks are opportunities to learn.

Years ago I based my confidence on how well I played, and whether I was winning or losing. Without a doubt, more often than I would have liked, winning was more important even if it meant playing tentatively. Improvement was great as long as it didn't jeopardize any chances of short-term success - i.e. the next tournament.

Fast forward to November, 2009 in La Jolla. I chose to change my serve days before an important tournament because I wanted to improve my game. I wanted to play the tournament with all of my artillery. Once again, what I learned is that positive changes in one part of your game can have ripple affects on other parts, technically, mentally, even strategically.

For me, walking up to that service line with a distinct image in my mind of what I wanted to do technically, permitted me to move my serve around the box more, hit it with more intention and confidence and focus my mind on what was relevant in the moment.

I was less distracted with the should's, the what if's, the fear of going for it and missing - and found a rhythm that helped me narrow my attention and enjoy the process, match by match, set by set, game by game and shot by shot. Winning the tournament felt very good but the mindset that I developed and utilized was the best outcome, one I hope to have again and again.

Next time you are considering whether to put extra time into improving a stroke, consider the long-term impact. Risking short term opportunities may be more than worth it in the long run. I took the risk and was able to let go of the possibility that it might not work out. I stuck to the process and it paid off. If it hadn't, I still feel it was the right decision. What part of your game will you take to the next level?