The Mental Game - Part I
social facilitation—language v image—implicit motor learning
Until now, A Thread of Order has mainly analysed the game from the observable world of techniques and tactics (and has even argued that Rublev’s problems are not mainly mental, despite his own admissions). My intentions have not been to dismiss the mental aspect of tennis (I think it plays a big role), but merely to ask the question: are there observable differences technically that might explain some of the differences between top players? I believe the answer to that question is yes. I also believe the term ‘the mental game’ has become a feel-good bromide, over-prescribed for why a player seems unable to break through a particular ceiling, or as a diagnosis between two players who look inseparable to those who don’t bother to look closer.1
Over these past months, I’ve tried to point out technical markers of excellence on the forehand, backhand, and serve, not because I think perfect technique guarantees success, but because the best players (and the best shots) tend to have a fair amount of convergence technically, and technique is observable, unlike the black box of one’s ‘mental game.’ I believe we have pretty clear technical ideals. As I have argued my position on technique, here is how I view ‘the mental game’.
The Inner Game
My best attempt at building a unifying framework for elite tennis performance runs along the lines of the theory of ‘Social Facilitation’ with respect to audience effects and Cotrell’s (1968) ‘evaluation apprehension model’.2 It sounds more complicated than it is. A summary:
When performing simple or well-learned tasks the presence of an audience improves performance. However, when performing difficult or novel tasks the presence of an audience hinders performance. Cotrell (1968) theorised that it wasn’t the presence of an audience but the apprehension about being evaluated by them that mattered.
We value what others think of us, so when we play matches of a skilled sport like tennis there are two games going on. One is observable and plays out in the forehands and backhands that we pay good money to watch. The other is what Timothy Gallwey famously wrote as “the inner game.” An excerpt:
“This is the game that takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance."
— Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
Gallwey outlines two entities, or selves, that are at odds within us:
“One, the “I,” seems to give instructions; the other, “myself,” seems to perform the action. Then “I” returns with an evaluation of the action.”
Gallwey labeled the thinking “I” Self 1, and the performing “myself” Self 2. The great roadblock in our ability to perform, Gallwey argued, is Self 1 not allowing the unconscious Self 2 to do what it is perfectly capable of doing. Instead, Self 1 worries about what others will think if we lose, scolds Self 2 for missing shots, and tries to steer a situation by trying too hard to perform a skill.
In my eyes, there are two distinct components to this inner mental game as well. One is the act; the tight and ‘effortful’ attempt of the shot. The other is the reaction; the emotional regulation and processing of thoughts and feelings after the fact.
Part 1 focuses on the act of hitting a tennis ball.
Unconsciously competent
“It is a general principle of Psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use…”
— William James, 1890.1
Gallwey was a proponent of “natural learning”. He argued that we were all imbued with a remarkable ability to learn through visualization and un-instructed trials—watch someone else stroke (correctly) and then try yourself. Using language—"point your elbow", "turn with the racquet in both hands", "roll the wrist" etc.—was derivative of the action itself (emphasis added):
“Perhaps in the interest of being able to repeat that way of hitting the ball again or to pass it on to another, the person attempts to describe that stroke in language. But words can only represent actions, ideas and experiences. Language is not the action, and at best can only hint at the subtlety and complexity contained in the stroke. Although the instruction thus conceived can now be stored in the part of the mind that remembers language, it must be acknowledged that remembering the instruction is not the same as remembering the stroke itself.”
— Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
Gallwey’s methods were in-line with research on “implicit motor learning”, something I wrote about in-depth here. Basically, teaching motor skills explicitly with verbal instruction will lead to “an inward focus of attention in which an attempt is made to perform the skill by consciously processing explicit knowledge of how it works.”3 The challenge is to teach correct fundamentals without participants gaining too much awareness of the specific movements. Many studies have documented superior skill execution when participants have been taught an implicit learning protocol. An excerpt (emphasis added):
“Researchers in China instructed novice table tennis players to ‘hit up the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle’ to teach them the topspin forehand. “Unlike literally instructed participants, analogy learners accrued little conscious knowledge of how they executed shots, and performed without disruption in attention-demanding or pressured conditions.”4 The researchers concluded that analogy can be used to create ‘biomechanical metaphors’ that provide learners with knowledge of the skill as a whole, rather than the individual pieces.”
The ‘hard’ evidence for why this occurs may be revealed in electroencephalography (EEG) studies. EEG reveals the electrical activity of your brain. ‘Co-activation’ means parts of the brain are working in tandem, or are ‘coherent’. Low coherence indicates autonomous brain function. High coherence indicates a mutual reliance on another brain region. In a nutshell, “expert performers show greater cortical efficiency than novices, characterized by attenuation of nonessential brain functions (the reduction of neuromotor ‘noise’).”5 Just as the best swings tend to have fewer moving parts, experts have less ‘noise’ between verbal-analytic left brain regions and motor planning frontal regions of the right brain when performing. However, this doesn’t mean that professional players are immune to overthinking a shot.
All top players are unconsciously competent. Are some more consciously competent?
Based on all this, it’s easy to think that the best players are the ones who can simply control their Self 1 better. While I think that probably explains some of it, it’s also possible that most players experience similar levels of doubt, nerves, and Self 1 talk, yet the player with a simpler game can manage Self 1 better. Better technique and athleticism may be more robust to Self 1’s sabotaging thoughts because better technique only contains the essence of a stroke (and may even reap the other side of the social facilitation effect where an audience helps their game/shot). If we look closely at great forehands and backhands, I would argue that the very best tend to have a reduction of moving parts. As Duane states in Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique:
“Decreasing the number of body segments and the extent of their motion will increase the accuracy of the movement.”
We have to entertain this angle; the top players are not immune to nerves and anxiety, yet they still find a way to consistently perform over a long time horizon6 possibly because they possess a degree of control in their game that helps them to play with Self 1. Their game has a higher floor or ‘worst’ level. From last week’s piece:
“there is variance in performance, but the very best have less of it on the downside; simple technique skews your performance variance in your favour.”
Just as polyester strings came to dominate the tour because of their control-oriented properties, we have seen the game dominated by a crop of players who have paid their bills by often controlling the power of bigger hitters. As Davydenko said in a recent interview that I wrote about (emphasis added):
“In my opinion, tennis is not making much progress. The players who are at the top now – not Nadal and Djokovic, but the younger generation – are not that good technically. I got surprised by that. It’s more physical – big serves, hitting hard–, but we still see that Nadal and Djokovic can control all this power over the new generation. They are still winning Slams and beating guys who are ten years younger than them, which is amazing. Anyway, I do not feel that the new generation is playing on an unbelievable level.”
This feeling of control may generate what is known as a ‘virtuous circle’: the player makes more shots even with Self 1 interference, which in turn increases confidence,7 leading to less Self 1 interference, leading to hitting that shot even better. From the outside, we simply see the results of a player in a high-pressure point and declare them ‘mentally better’ without even considering the reverse: that the technical/physical precedes the mentality. To make a connection to another sport, Tiger Woods’ 2000 season is regarded as the greatest of all time in golf. Below is a short video the PGA put together, which discusses how he changed his swing despite already being dominant in the game.
Some excerpts (emphasis added):
1:30 - Woods: “It was just an amazing year of control.”
7:25 - Woods: “It feels very nice, to go out there and get a victory on this golf course (Bay Hill)...It is a lot of fun to go out there and compete and know that you have a chance to win a tournament. That’s where you always want to be, and that’s one of the reasons why I changed my golf swing from 97’ to now.”
7:54 - Bubba Watson: “Whose swing do I wish I had? 2000 Tiger Woods.”
8:00 - Billy Horschell: “Tiger Woods 2000. The greatest swing ever in my opinion. If I could have one swing that would be my swing.”
8:07 - Rory McIlroy: “How he drove the golf ball then was unbelievable. That’s the pinnacle of hitting it long and hitting it straight. If guys could replicate that, golf would become a lot easier.”
8:32 - Woods: “I felt like I couldn’t be in contention every time I teed it up with the swing I used to have. I felt that I was not hitting it in the right direction for the long haul…I think the main thing in those changes I’ve made is I’ve become more of a consistent player. My bad shots aren’t that bad, and my good shots are always going to be pretty good, but it’s the bad ones that are the key to shooting good solid numbers.”
A recent quote from Nadal echoes a similar sentiment for his fellow GOATs:
“The most important key in tennis that I think Federer, Djokovic and myself have is winning a lot of matches despite playing badly.”
Nudging technique toward simplicity
It seems that some of the best tennis players in the world are blissfully unaware of exactly how they hit the ball. They have avoided absorbing explicit knowledge for whatever reason. Federer when asked about his forehand:
~ 1:02: “I have no idea. I don’t know what my grip is called…It’s just all automatic. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Another sweet and simple timer of the ball, David Nalbandian, kept his advice vague regarding how to hit the forehand:
~ 0:38; “Um, I think the way to get more power..It’s, uh, with your legs, your body, and acceleration..with all of it. Body and wrist.”
(Spoiler alert: it might also be a result of using an absolute hammer of a racquet8 )
Some of this may be that Nalbandian isn’t all that fluent in English, but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. They genuinely have no clue on the ins and outs of how they hit, but the kicker is that they still arrived at an incredibly efficient swing. My hunch is that learning with a heavier racquet and non-polyester string (ideally find something that incorporates both from a garage sale) is more demanding, and nudges a player toward this swing path.9
Going back to Tiger, he is doing something similar in golf with his son, Charlie Woods, as Jack Niklaus revealed in 2020:
“He says, I’ve got blades in his (Charlie’s) hands so he learns how to play golf instead of learning with all those forgiving golf clubs. I think he’s very wise.”
My general feeling is that it’s a myth that juniors “need” lighter frames10 for injury prevention11 or correct swing mechanics. It’s purely commercial. Making juniors and beginners learn the game with unforgiving racquets and strings might not be good for a club’s bottom line and participation numbers, but I do think it is more likely to implicitly nudge a player into a simple stroke. An excerpt from Death of a Forehand - Part II:
In fact, David Epstein’s ‘Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World’, suggests the very opposite:
“…it is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later. It is so deeply counterintuitive that it fools the learner themselves, both about their own progress and their teachers’ skill.”
The paradox of coaching
A heuristic I’ve noticed that is in line with much of this piece: the older the coach the better the student becomes—not because the coach has been able to impart decades of technical wisdom onto the student—but because older coaches are jaded and not looking to prove themselves. They say less and feed more.12 Young coaches feel the need to “prove” themselves or for the student to feel that '“they got their money’s worth”, so they dissect the forehand into components and drown you in metaphors.13
I’ve written about Thiem’s swing changes and posted a video of Massu working on Thiem with what looks like an implicit drill to create a shorter swing by feeding balls rapidly into Thiem’s forehand and backhand. Here it is again below:
Intentional or not from Massu, this kind of drill captures the elegant simplicity of nudging swings shorter without using any words at all. It’s in stark contrast to what most people think of when they think of great coaching. Rick Macci, undoubtedly knowledgable in the game, seems more like a salesman than a coach when he posts videos like the one below14:
In just seven minutes, Macci breaks the forehand down to a complex science: shoulders take the racquet back (‘more torque/more speed/more giddyup’), elbow away from the body, (“pretend you have a light on your elbow and point it at the ball”), racquet inversion (“you should experiment with this”), the hip turns and you pull (‘it’s like you’re pulling a rope’), elbow up-elbow extension (“pat the dog”), “turning a doorknob” on the finish. Each movement is tagged with a slogan that no doubt sounds impressive, but at the end of the day, knowing all of this might not help at all. It reminds me of another Taleb-ism from Skin in the Game:
“The principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor - and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker, is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker.”
— Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game
External Focus
By now it should be no surprise that an external focus of attention is superior to an internal one. It takes the focus off the Self/gets you out of your own way.
“Watch the ball” is pretty simple advice, but it turns out it may be the best thing a coach could keep harping on about. It’s Lindy and keeps the focus off the Self.”
Of course, to become a high-level player requires pretty good technique, and working on specifics won’t kill your game. You need some direction. The point of this piece is to point out that more is not better. The best have less going on; with the swing, and with the head. There is a place for specifics, but when you are playing, the best thing you can do is watch the ball, and let it happen.
However, we’ve seen players who hit the ball great yet fall apart in the game played between points. This is the game that takes up 75% of a tennis match’s total time, and is the one most people think of when they think of “mental toughness”. Next week’s Part II is about the reaction.
Again, this isn’t to say that it is never mental, sometimes it is clear a player is struggling with confidence or another mental aspect.
Masters, R. (1992). Knowledge knerves and know-how: The role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex motor skill under pressure. British Journal of Psychology, 83, 343–358.
Hodges, Williams, A. M., & ProQuest. (2012). Skill acquisition in sport research, theory and practice (2nd ed.). Routledge
Rich Masters & Jon Maxwell (2008) The theory of reinvestment, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1:2, 160-183,
All players have a patch of form—a few weeks or months or even a year—where they get on a roll and play with supreme confidence. Jack Sock at the end of 2017, or Tim Van Rijthoven this Wimbledon. We must zoom out and assess the player/shot over a longer time horizon; during periods of confidence/winning, and when in a drought.
The Latin root of confidence is ‘confidere’ = have full trust.
Nalbandian uses an extended length frame weighing 377grams, 377SW. My hunch is a heavy racquet promotes a simple swing.
Of course, being incredibly talented is another reason. But the point remains, I think a heavier stick can nudge players toward simple swings.
I’m talking mainly of the 10-15-year-old crowd here. For very young players I have no problem with a shorter and lighter racquet.
From Technical Tennis: "In theory, a heavier racquet should help to reduce arm injuries. There is anecdotal evidence from veteran coaches that arm and shoulder injuries increased when heavy, wood racquets were replaced with modern, light racquets at the end of the 1970's. When you strike a ball coming towards you, the ball tends to push the racquet head backwards as your arm swings forward. Alternatively, the head slows down while your hand is still accelerating. Light racquets get pushed backwards more than heavy racquets. A sudden twist of the arm or wrist, repeated many times, can result in tennis elbow and other injuries. The problem is magnified by the fact that light racquets need to be swung faster to pack the same punch as heavy racquets, so the impact shock is likely to be greater, especially if you miss-hit the ball near the tip of the racquet or near one edge. Some caution is therefore needed in choosing a light racquet. It might feel great for a few months, but you might notice that your arm is getting sore. If that is the case, try a heavier racquet to see if it helps." p. 32
I’m still guilty of this, and I suspect a lot of coaches are. It’s natural to want to help. Plus, I do think you need to explicitly correct a flaw in the stroke—otherwise the ceiling of that shot is significantly reduced.
I don’t know Macci and I have no doubt he knows the game inside out, I’m merely pointing out that this kind of video probably won’t help your forehand all that much.