Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

By Gail Jones

Tennis psychology is only understanding the workings of your opponent's mind and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.

Nevertheless, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. So, you have to study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under various conditions. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You have to understand the effect on your game of the ensuing irritation, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, go for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it deprive you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, but if that isn't possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have accurately judged your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents in order to decide their characters. Similar characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Other temperaments you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you know.

Someone who can control his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of determining those of someone else for the minds works along certain lines of thought and can be examined. One may only regulate one's own mental processes after studying them meticulously.

The steady, unemotional baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indicator of his/her sort of mind. The impassive, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her torpid mind to think out a safe method of reaching the net.

However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would rather remain at the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to disrupt up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, quick thinking antagonist. He obtains his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above just strikes the ball without much thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and sticks to it.

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