Coaching Advice

In the previous article, I wrote about some high-level ideas for teaching tennis. They touch upon the philosophical aspect of learning tennis. If you haven’t already, you can read about it here. In this post, I would like to share practical coaching advice without getting too granular. I recommend you combine the post on Teaching with Zen and this piece to understand the big picture.

Some teachers and coaches believe they can only shape a student through control and rigor. However, if you observe the best performers (in any field), they play as if they are free. Our job therefore is to help people evolve and become great while feeling good. One cannot be free by feeling guilt for making mistakes. This is why we must understand the greater purpose of teaching and passing on knowledge. Here are some practical tips:

(1) Trust your student. You are a guide who provides knowledge and direction. But you’re not in their head and you don’t feel what they feel. They will get good if you give your students the space to explore and figure things out.

(2) A key ingredient to success is that you and your students communicate effectively. Figure out how to tune in to what they are telling you and how to connect with them, so your message is understood. There are definitions and concepts that make sense to you because you already went through years of training to understand what they mean. However, a student may not know the language that defines the physical component.

(3) Don’t be stubborn with your ways. If something is not working, then start thinking about alternative methods. We say “think outside the box” but there is no box, only the laws of physics, development stages, and the rules of the game.

(4) Progressions are logical. Use them because no one should be expected to accomplish tasks that are far beyond their current abilities. So, if the drill, exercise, or technique is too complex, simplify and build from there.

(5) Progressions also mean moving forward. Once they figured out the simplest components, motivate the student to perform tasks that are a little outside of their comfort zone.

(6) People feel comfortable doing things they are familiar with. But they won’t learn anything new or get better at hitting certain shots if they only stay in their comfort zone.

(7) Hard work is hardly effective if it leads to more pain than benefit. Some students are ready for high-level training but most need to build incrementally. So, watch them carefully and make sure they can handle the assignments you give them without getting injured. The most important thing is that they can feel what they’re doing. Slow and steady is the name of the game.

(8) If your students are children, communicate with the parents as well. Parents need a good tennis education because they are the pillars that support their child’s sport. If your message and the parent’s are different, this will confuse the student. When times get hard, they may choose the easiest way out.

(9) Keep it positive. You can push your students to focus and work better but any negativity will cause inhibitions. The goal is to help your student play without fear or guilt. Freedom is when you can just play, and problem-solve. If you teach your students to feel bad about making mistakes, they will play with fear and avoid taking chances on opportunities they see.

Teaching with Zen

When I was coaching full-time at the Kings Highway Racquet Club, a parent came to me and asked how her daughter was doing. I started telling mom about her daughter’s progress, but she stopped me and asked again how her daughter was doing, explaining that outside of the family, I would see her daughter more than anyone else. This statement made me think more deeply about our influence over the lives of our students.

Over the course of my training, my coaches didn’t just help develop my game. They taught me how to overcome mental and emotional difficulties, open my mind to learning new things. Most importantly, I learned about mindfulness, kindness, being honest with myself, and taking responsibility. Tennis is more than just a game, it’s a teacher and representation of life.

Throughout the years of coaching and playing, I learned that tennis is not an isolated aspect of our lives but an integral part of developing our being and finding liberty. Everything I learned translated into other aspects of my life. Here are some high-level thoughts for coaches (and parents who teach) to consider when teaching tennis:

• Tennis, like all other sports, is how we learn physics and math. We created parameters but in essence, we are using our body to swing a racquet and hit a ball to a set area. We learn to work with gravity, force, and other physical variables. The more you’re open to connecting with physics, the better you’ll play.

• Tennis is best played without thought. A player should learn to observe and be aware by feeling and being attentive without working with fixed viewpoints. There are near-infinite combinations of speed, height, momentum, placement, and spin that a player must adapt to. Thought, guessing, or wishful thinking will only cause a delay in reaction time and make it difficult to adapt consistently. Thought prevents the athlete from existing in the state of flow.

• Expectations of winning or losing will distract from being in the moment. It’s another thought but the most detrimental of them. If you’re thinking about winning, then you’ll likely be afraid to lose. Your mind is also in a space that does not exist. The future or the past a non-existent and if they’re taking up space in your head that means you have less for observing reality. A student must thus learn to let go of outcomes and focus on playing moment to moment. Billie Jean King Jr. would tell students that they should “play one ball at a time.”

• Tennis has the word “love” in the game. Open your mind and heart and learn to love the ups and downs of this sport. This will teach compassion. Tennis will then become a healing activity. After all, playing tennis adds about ten years to life expectancy.

• If you teach your students to love and believe in themselves, then you’ve succeeded. Failure in coaching occurs when your student feels guilty for missing.

• Don’t take this sport too seriously. Commitment is important if you want to become a professional player. However, tennis did not always exist and thus should be seen as a sport that enriches your life. It’s not life or death. If doom and gloom is overshadowing your daily life, then it will be difficult to enjoy tennis.

• Tennis is a safe space to learn to become a better person. To find freedom from within.  

Training During Tournaments

When I was 15, I began stepping up my fitness training. I gained a great deal of muscle and strength. My USTA coaches, Junior Fed Cup, and Davis Cup teammates noticed how I got fitter and my arms got bigger. In May 2005, we played the North America Cup in Mexico to qualify for the Junior Davis Cup. After winning the team event, I traveled to Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria on the ITF junior tour. At the time, I thought I needed to conserve energy during tournaments and avoided strenuous fitness exercises. It worked in the past when I played one tournament that lasted no more than 5 days. After the short trip, I would return home to train.

However, during the two-month-long adventure in Europe, I practiced and occasionally jogged. But I did not continue the fitness training to maintain my strength. The result was that I lost nearly all of my physical strength and endurance gains and returned to my prior baseline. It was a setback.

Fitness maintenance for competitive athletes: If you’re traveling for several weeks playing tournaments, you should incorporate strength and fitness training into your routine. The pros do it. It’s easy to neglect the fitness gains you made leading up to your tournaments. Some players will get stuck thinking they must remain in conservation-only mode, as I did. However, your body is efficient; so, if you’re not using certain muscle groups, it will break down those muscles.

And playing tennis is not sufficient to maintain the all-around body strength necessary to ensure that you have maximum control over your movements. So, incorporate fitness before your stretching and after resting from your match. Don’t spend long hours, but make your body work for 30 to 45 minutes.

You should also consider making a routine of reinforcing your strengths and closing gaps in your game by completing a short tennis session after you’re done with matches for the day. This means you will need to expend more energy, but the long-term payoff is tremendous.

During my second year in college, I had an 18-1 win-loss record. A big part of it came from spending an extra 45 minutes training after our matches. All but one of my teammates would go back to the hotel. My friend, a victim of my desire to train more, was convinced to stay and train with me. In most cases, we had already been on the tennis court for about five hours. But that extra 45 minutes of training was where I was able to clean up my game and develop mental focus and strength. If I was feeling extra tired, I would cut the extra training session to 20 minutes. It might sap you at first, but you’ll eventually feel stronger from the extra post-match training.

Your mind and body need to be worked on. It’s not a one-and-done process. It’s continual. So, educate yourself on getting enough sleep and nutrients so you can handle training a lot during tournaments. Eventually, you will be a super athlete.

Letting Go of Control is Control

My first experience of intentionally letting go was during a match in the 12’s Orange Bowl. I was playing against the No. 1 ranked U.S. 12’s and under player in the back draw and won the first set. Steve beat me in the second set. Back then, we had ten minutes to rest before the third set would start. Somehow, during those ten minutes, I found my zone and stopped worrying about winning. I completely let go of any notion of needing to control the outcome. I played so well, winning 6-0. Unfortunately, I didn’t register the significance of that pivot and after many years of ups and downs, I got distracted and forgot to work on the art of letting go.

Ten years later, another pivotal moment of letting go came to me during a pro circuit match. I was up a set and struggled in the second. I had trouble playing freely and was unable to control my attacks. The second set dragged on, and we ended up playing a tie-breaker. During the tie-breaker, I felt like the sky was a ceiling made up of hard rock, lowering to my height and then pushing me down. I couldn’t handle any point. I was down 6-1 in the tie-breaker. At that moment, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll be playing the third set.’ That thought took the pressure away from winning, and I suddenly felt relaxed and playful. I won every point in the tie-breaker and avoided a third set.

I played hundreds of matches, but those two were memorable because they made me question my state of mind. Typically, when things were not going my way, I would try to force the win. It would work against weaker players but never against the best. They could smell my fear.

It’s common to be trained to think you must win. There is an obvious reason for that: you compete to win. But thinking about winning is the same as thinking about the future. You have no control over it. So, wishful thinking will not get you there; only moment-to-moment action will give you the chance to win.

Letting go is the way to bring yourself to a state of mindfulness, and it will help you stay sharp for each shot. Billie Jean King Jr. told us as kids that we must ‘play one ball at a time.’ If you let go, your attention to the match will be undivided. Your mind won’t be polluted by the need to control an outcome in the future, and you’ll be free to just play.

My Favorite Tennis Quotes by Roger Federer and What They Mean

The greatest pro players give us plenty of knowledge from a distance. They might not share every detail of their training routine (although more have been doing that recently), but they offer their wisdom into their way of thinking that we can isolate into quotes. Below are a few crucial bits of Federer’s wise remarks.

“There is no way around hard work. Embrace it.”

It seems pretty trivial to say that to get somewhere you need hard work. However, when we look at the great players, many of us think they made it there because of talent or some other magic. That kind of thinking might convince the rest of us and players, who have not accomplished greatness yet, to work less hard because it might not be worth the sacrifices. You will never hear Roger Federer tell us that he made it because of talent. 

“Once you find that peace, that place of peace and quiet, harmony and confidence, that’s when you start playing your best.”

I love he shared that thought because we often chase results and, because of that, we can’t find any peace. Instead we find ourselves frustrated by a deficiency in expected outcomes. We thus live with tension and force our actions. One way to find peace is to let go and just be. No judgement on yourself or your results.

“I always believe if you’re stuck in a hole and maybe things aren’t going so well you will come out stronger. Everything in life is that way.”

That’s superb thinking for several reasons. One, believing the opposite will stop you from continuing your development and that will put a stop to your aspirations. Champions are made, you need to make yourself one. Two, being stuck and overcoming the extra tough obstacles is the kind of experience that helps you jump in knowledge and ability. This brings me back to the first quote, that you need to “embrace” all of it.

“Mentally, I’m not ever going to go away.”

This is a sign of what it truly takes to master tennis. Tie this quote together with everything else, and you’ll be able to get through the difficult moments and find peace. Because the only way to get things done is to mentally stay with what you’re doing. 

We are only truly limited by our beliefs and mindset. Don’t trap yourself thinking that you can’t master a skill. You can do it! And, as we see with Federer’s insight, the great players share key pieces of high-level wisdom to help the willing reach mastery as well.

Self-Belief

Have you noticed how anytime you return a serve that lands out, your return is almost always fast and flawless? We can do that because we're relaxed, and there's no pressure to win the point. On a deeper level, we don't doubt ourselves because we don't expect an outcome. The ball landed out, and we can just hit it without any consequence. So, the lack of doubt unlocks our ability to hit the shot we like. Isn't that a sign you can take steps to unlock your mind for any point you play?

The pressure you build on yourself to win makes you fear bad outcomes. So, consequently, your body and mind tighten, and you end up playing with inhibitions. It's normal at first, but you need to grow out of it. You do this by using tennis and life as a journey to reach enlightenment.

Your enlightenment is to fear nothing and be in the moment when playing in a state of relaxation and focus – that becomes your optimal performance. All players will tell you they play their best tennis without thinking about how to play. They're simply in the moment.

Here are two ideas you can use to gradually achieve that optimal mental performance:

(1) Learn to let go of controlling outcomes. The irony about wanting more control is that you'll get much less of it. The logic is quite simple. The world is full of variables outside of our control, and your mind is built to interact with this world. But when we're conditioned to focus on results that will take place in the future, our brain spends its resources on thinking about that future. I can predict when a player will miss an approach shot with 99% certainty – it's when their head moves to look to the other side before their racquet makes contact with the ball. It signals they're thinking about hitting a winner, so they move their head where they hope the winner will happen, and they suddenly become a spectator rather than the actor.

The future does not exist, and you have no control over it. Only the present moment exists. Accept that you have no control over the ball once it leaves your strings; so, focus on the moment.

(2) It's not so easy to stay in the moment. But you can practice that like anything else. Meditation, mindfulness, and equanimity are your three pillars to building mental strength.

• With meditation, you sit and spend a few minutes at a time focusing on your breathing and letting your attention stick with that. Without forcing thoughts out, you simply let them slide away as they appear.

• Mindfulness is the practice of observing the now. You pay attention and feel objects in your environment without distracting yourself with thoughts.

• Equanimity is the practice of being mindful without judging. You look at a cup, and you're not for or against it. You watch your opponent hit an ace against you, same rules apply.

Winning Against Less Skilled Opponents

I cringe at my own blog title because I do not like to judge people, especially for their skill level. I do not like to call players unskilled because everyone can get better – skill is not a measurement fixed at one point. Skill is a moving variable that usually grows as you train more and learn to adapt to different shots. With that said, for the purpose of this blog, I will recognize that players are at different skill levels. Some are better players than others. And you will play people who are not as skilled as you in the game of tennis. But, even if they are not as good, you can lose to them.

So, here are five things you need to know to ensure you win against less skilled opponents:

(1) Do not underestimate any opponent. If you think you will win easily or that you must beat them because you’re the better player, you’d be setting yourself up for the risk of losing.

• First, the pressure of "you must win" could crack your mental game if you start making unforced errors. I had that experience and lost multiple matches where I was up a set and a break and would suddenly choke. One example was at a $15K Futures event. I was winning 6-0, 3-0 and up 30-0 in the game. I missed two backhands in a row and suddenly felt a rush of pressure. Couldn't relax and lost the match 6-4 in the third set. The reason was I set a lot of pressure on myself using the "I must win this" talk.

(2) Prepare the same way for every match. Sometimes, we may not think we have to win or that we are much better, but we show it by taking the match less seriously. The physical and mental preparation for the match gets a little lame, we don't hydrate or sleep properly. Maybe we will go out to a party thinking we’ll be fine the next day – there will be enough energy to play and win.

• Good preparation is about making sure that you will play at your top level. If you do not prepare well, you risk lowering your level, and then you could end up making the match balanced, giving your opponent a chance to win.

(3) Practice hitting dead-ball feeds regularly. Dead-ball feeds are shots fed by hand and not the racket. They are slower and generated from minimal force, which means you must do all the work to make it a good shot.

• Solid players usually hit a heavy ball. These are easy to counter-punch. But some less skilled opponents will give you “junk” shot and those are not easy to hit because there is less momentum and “weight” behind those types of shots. You need to be comfortable generating your own power and acceleration consistently if you want to control the points against players that don’t generate much power behind their shots. Otherwise, you will find yourself making a lot of unforced errors.

(4) Master the approach shot. Many less skilled players will hit shorter more often. But I've seen so many solid players mess up matches against less skilled players simply because they are not comfortable attacking the short ball. After missing a few short balls, confidence begins to wane and seep into the rest of the game.

• Simply practice attacking the short ball repetitively, and you’ll feel comfortable stepping inside the baseline and attacking the short ball.

(5) Be consistent. You might have a bad day, which will lower your playing ability. So, you need a plan-B game: that is consistency. If your A-game, where you attack the ball, is not working, you can’t keep it going because your unforced errors will pile up and affect the score. You could lose. Grinding, playing high-percentage tennis, is thus the best way to ensure that lower skilled opponents won’t get to take advantage of the days when you’re just not feeling good.

• Consistency is practiced by drilling cross-courts and playing with movement but without trying to end the point.

Lastly, enjoy the game no matter who you play.

Post-Match Routines: Conserving Legs and Energy

The preceding post on post-match routines covered the reasons you need to take care of your mind and body after a match and how to replenish yourself. In this post, we go over your second recovery objective: to save your legs and conserve energy. Your priority should be to minimize stress on your legs. If they're stiff and tired during a match, you'll feel slow like there's lead inside. But you want them light and fast so you can get to any ball.

• Standing consumes energy and fatigues your legs. You need to take care of physical recovery with exercises and stretching, explained here. Otherwise, you should stay off your feet whenever you can.

• Take off your tennis shoes when you don't need them. Tennis shoes are heavy and stiff compared to running shoes or slippers.

• Elevate your legs to reduce the heaviness you feel from leg fatigue. The research is not conclusive as to the benefits, but you will feel a difference after spending 10 to 30 minutes. Taking pressure off your legs will reduce swelling and add to the resting component.

• Get some alone time where you're doing nothing. Chatting and socializing constantly is fun but takes up energy as well. You need to listen and pay attention to other people, which takes up resources. You don't need to completely isolate yourself, but try to find at least 30 minutes where you're relaxing.

• Minimize stress. When you're stressed, your brain will release adrenaline and cortisol, and your muscles will get tense. The key to addressing stress is to avoid things you know will stress you. But the best method is to work on mindfulness so fewer things outside your control will stress you out. In a state of mindfulness, you're not judgmental about things that happen. Mindfulness is also an important skill to use during a tennis match.

• Practice breathing deeply. Shallow breathing causes stress and slows recovery. There are also negative long-term effects from shallow breathing. Deep breathing improves your oxygen intake, makes it easier to relax, and will help you focus.

Resting, hydrating, and eating well do not complete proper recovery. You must also help your body recover with light exercises and stretching. More on that here.

At competitive events, you want to be at your top physical and mental state so you can perform your best. Part of your top performance is accomplished by proper maintenance during the tournament. A good post-match routine is critical to your well-being and your ability to play your best the following day. Your routine must help you recover your mental, physical, nutritional, and emotional states. The goal is to recuperate well enough to be mentally and physically energetic and to feel good about moving your body and paying attention to the ball.