How To Boost Your Mental Tennis Toughness
Tennis is a very physical game, but at the same time it requires a strong mental toughness. Without this foundation of mental toughness, you can be in for some serious heartbreaks and painful experiences. There are some really great ways that you can develop this but most of all it comes from simply experiencing the game. It takes time to build up the callous that you will need in order to play with precision, without allowing frustrations and stresses to break you during your game. Here are a few mental tennis tips that will help you develop a strong mental toughness foundation for tennis.
Losing
No one enters a game of tennis expecting to lose. However, each time you lose, your mental toughness develops a bit more. This is especially true if you experience a heartbreaking loss, such as being tied and then losing the tie breaker. Other examples might include winning the first set and then losing the match, having a match point and then losing a match, or even losing to a very less ranked player when you've already beat an amazing player just before. Any of these things would cause a very painful loss, because you're pretty sure that you're going to win. It's like having the tournament in your hand and then dropping it. These things are necessary to build up a mental toughness for tennis.
Another thing that will help you develop this strong mental toughness foundation would be getting too frustrated by things outside of the game and losing the match as a result. A lot of times, when you're so psyched up for a game and you're really excited, there are things that might frustrate you to the point of not being able to play the game at your best. These can be simple things like noise or the wind. Things like this can make you lose your concentration easily. There can also be serious things like bad calls or nervousness that frustrate you to the point of losing your concentration and not playing at your best.
How to overcome these issues
The thing that separates the great players from the mediocre is learning to overcome these issues. True champions will keep a positive mindset and think of these things as simple learning experiences and they will really learn from these mistakes and losses. Staying positive in the face of these issues and staying focused on what you want is the key to becoming a great player and developing a great mental toughness.
No matter how great a tennis player you are, you will always experience these things, and if you become negative and believe that you will never win because of one thing or another, you will probably not succeed with tennis. However, by developing your mental toughness and by understanding that every single great player has experienced things like this and that it is a simple learning process that will make you great, you really will be great. So, stay positive and learn from the mistakes that you make. This is a great start to develop your own mental toughness.