Learn Like the Pro's

This past January I bought a book called Everyday Millionaires. For me it is not about having a million dollars. What I was interested in is what are the habits that your everyday people did to manage their money so they were prepared for the future and to be able to give. I tell you this because in our lessons  we teach the students the skills, habits, and technique that the professional tennis players use.  I do not go into this with the idea I am training professional tennis players. I just want to teach them the habits and skills so they can be successful. I should define successful also. Successful is looking good, loving the feel of the ball on the strings, being able to participate in different levels of play, and being able to teach their skills to some one else. 

The reason I always tell our students to love the feel of the ball on the strings, is because that has to be a WHY. It may not be your big WHY, but if you don't love the feel of the experience at some point you will quit. On that note, we release that tennis is not about the competition, it is a practice. It is not just going to practice, but a practice. When you think about the professional tennis players, we only see the tournaments on television. That is only 10% of the professional's practice. What is the other 90%? I like the way EXOS breaks down the habits into four pillars, Nutrition, Movement, Mindset, and Recovery. The first habit is nutrition. We have to eat well to perform well, regardless of what we are doing. We not only need to practice our technique and skills on court, but we need to work on our movements off court. The professionals do a lot of specific conditioning, but we can go for bike rides, hike, play frisbee at the park, take your pet for walks, or go swimming. Professionals also take time to recover. They get massage, foam roll, and stretch through yoga or specific programs. We can do the same thing, even some days are active rest. Last, professionals work on their mindset. This can also be a part of our recovery as well. Meditation, visualization, mindfulness, and positive affirmations are all apart of the setting a mindset for success.  In our classes we teach our students STAR breathing and the art of noticing. As they notice, they are always in the present. As they learn to STAR breath (Stop, Take a breath, and Relax with the mantra,"I got this." ) 

In closing, I find that it is important to model after the professionals, not because we want to be at that level, but that it gives us a framework to be successful at our practice. 

High School Tennis

Last week I was a part of a professional development webinar that was discussing the attrition rate for junior tennis players. Actually, that was just a key point. The webinar was about single sport athletes versus the multi-activity approach. One of the things that came about was the high ranking junior player quit tennis after the juniors. If they did not get a college scholarship, they never or rarely picked up a racket again. They also discussed how many of them had overuse injuries, which I think is really a misunderstanding of how to periodize  a program than anything. You cannot always go one hundred percent and think you will not need a break.
One way to periodize a tournament player, especially if they are not going to participate in other activities is to play high school tennis. This is usually not as intense as the sanctioned tournaments and can really allow for the player to come back to a place where they can discover the true why they play the game. The true why could be to love the feel of the ball on the strings. If you don't love the feel of being out on the court, running around, and the ball hitting the strings, it can be very difficult to want to play. High school tennis and non-sanctioned tournaments are opportunities to work on the mindfulness part of our practice. They are the opportunities to develop the love that will carry you to play with your friends when you are in college and the weekly social gathering as you move on in life. It might also be an opportunity for you to pass something on to your children. A lot of the players who go out for high school tennis do so because they love the game and may not have access to tennis instruction for affordability or logistic reasons. They may have been looking for a sport to fill their time or they wanted to find something they could do to help them belong. Sometimes tennis players find tennis late after  burnout from another sport. 
My point for all of this is that we should periodize our tennis with our students whether they are playing at a ranked level or not. It is important that we find opportunities for them to go back to loving the feel of the ball on the strings and still being able to work on their skills. High School tennis can give a lot of players an opportunity to play everyday instead of just taking lessons. Lessons without application becomes monotonous.