The Mental Zone

The Zone is your happy place. It is where you are when thinking is unnecessary, everything is natural and beautiful, and you can seemingly do no wrong. During a tennis match, your serves are suddenly overpowering, your forehand unerring, and your backhand not-as-pathetic-as-usual. The Zone is as much a phenomenon of hackers, duffers, and other fellow travelers as it is of professional tennis players. If the Zone is the ideal, then the Pit of Despair is tennis Hell. Whenever you find yourself relegated to that infernal realm, you rediscover your penchant for unconscionable errors, egregious form, and deep self-loathing.

As natural and wonderful as it feels to be in the Zone, that is how perplexed and helpless you feel in the Pit. You find yourself missing shots that you never miss, should never miss, and can't be missed even by the rankest of rank beginners. It's the shoulder-high sitter that you volley into the base of the net, the routine approach shots that keep hitting the net strap, and the serves that careen off the racket frame... I could go on, but I am sure that I am aggravating your PTSD (Putrid Tennis Stress Disorder).

Anxiety

OK, here is the good news; whether you end up in the Zone or the Pit is (somewhat) under your control. There are actual, conscious attitude changes that can direct your energies positively and increase the likelihood that you end up in Elysium rather than Abaddon. The real key is how you manage your natural, beneficial anxiety. That's right; I propose that anxiety is good. Anxiety is nothing more or less than the energy of existence in its purest form. It is how and why we get up in the morning, do our chores, study our lessons, and brave all kinds of hardships... without anxiety, we would be a species of lazy slugs. We certainly would not subject ourselves to the ego-bending vicissitudes of tennis. Anxiety engenders the release of beneficial hormones such as adrenaline, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These hormones ready us for a fight-or-flight response to a perceived threat. They make us faster, stronger and more alert. Wouldn't that be a nice way to be in a close tennis match? Anxiety gets a bad rap because uncontrolled anxiety can lead to exhaustion, depression, hyperventilation, and distraction. So how does one control anxiety? Attitude. If we perceive anxiety as a threat, sensing anxiety will make us even more anxious - a positive feedback loop permitting anxiety to increase beyond our control. On the other hand, if you embrace anxiety as a friend and ally, a negative feedback loop is established. As anxiety increases, we welcome it, which decreases our anxiety - but we want to be anxious (fired-up), so we crave more anxiety increasing our anxiety which makes us feel less anxious... Negative feedback loops are inherently stable and are the basis of control for almost every system in our bodies. All you have to do is convince yourself that your nervousness is tremendously beneficial and totally under your control, and boom! You are on your way to the Zone.

Faith

The next step is to convince yourself that the anxiety-provoking threat you perceive is not a real threat but is an opportunity allowing you to channel the energy of anxiety towards performance and success. To accomplish this, one needs only to choose Faith over Shame. A lot of bad things happen to your ego during a tennis match. The game seems designed to vex us. It is. If it were not vexing, if perfection were possible, the game would be pretty boring. Even the best players in the world dump the occasional easy volley or double-fault in the tie-breaker. One important difference between them and you is that they do not take it personally. They perceive each setback as the result of fate, not a personal failure. They truly believe that there is nothing wrong with them or their games.

An egregious error does not reflect negatively on them. It's just life - or just tennis, anyway. They don't blame themselves, their stars, or even God because God is on their side. I grant you that A-players have a history of enormous success to bolster their beliefs while you have a litany of failure and degradation punctuated by the occasional "good day" that seems much more the exception than the rule. Notwithstanding your checkered tennis past, if you want to improve your game and spend more time in the Zone and less in tennis perdition, you must cultivate Faith. You must learn to set your tennis past aside completely and convince yourself that it is N/A, non-applicable to your tennis present or future. You must ignore your painfully apparent lack of talent and presume that you can play the game you want and need to play (bolstered by the knowledge you are garnering by visiting this site). Most of all, you must believe that what you are trying to do to the tennis ball is what you should be doing. This last is the most important. It is why I am terrified of black pearls, meticulous about testing and confirming everything, and obsessed with understanding the deepest whys and wherefores of the game. Ultimately Faith must rest on a foundation of truth, or it cannot stand against doubt, shame and fear, for they are mighty and unremitting in their desire to corrupt your game. You can invest foundational Faith in a coach, a hero, a mentor, or a belief system, but make no mistake - Faith is the ultimate goal. Without unshakable, irrational, blind Faith, you will always fall prey to shame.

Shame

Shame is the absolute conviction of one's inadequacy. On the tennis court, it coerces us to question our methods, motives, and native abilities. Shame tells us that our failures are unavoidable and uncontrollable and that the fault is in ourselves, not our stars. There is always enough truth in these pernicious beliefs to corroborate our shame, and when we allow it to pull us down into the Pit, the tragic results perpetuate an intractable shame cycle. Shame engenders guilt since all errors we commit are our "fault," fear since we carry within us the very devil that torments us, and depression owing to the apparent hopelessness of our situation. The only antidote to shame is Faith - unreasoning, unshakable, unsupportable Faith; Faith not that we will prevail, but that we can prevail. We are all at the mercy of fate, and acceptance of fate is the closest we get to mastering it. The goal is to perform to the best of your ability on a given day against a given opponent. That is being in the Zone. That is as good as it gets in sports.

The Dark Side

Don't forget to exploit hostility towards your opponents. After all, they are doing everything they can to cause you to play badly. Redirecting your anger from yourself to your opponents is a powerful poultice against shame and negativity. Regrettably, the aphorism "Nice guys, finish last!" contains more than a particle of truth. Somewhere between being a total jerk or a self-hating loser, there is a sweet spot - an attitude that earns you the respect of your opponents without making you a pariah.

Factors Beyond All Control

It is not always possible to find the Zone. If your stroke mechanics are poor, a positive attitude will not help you. If you fail to snap the wrist (lock, load, and explode), then you will get no impulse, no control, and the ball will take a random vector off of your racket face. In that circumstance, you should expect to make errors. Similarly, if you starve your muscle cells of glucose, fat, calcium, or oxygen, they will stop listening to your brain, and your balance and stroking will go all to hell, taking your game down with them. I call this sad circumstance "Cellular Metabolic Collapse" and it is both a sneaky performance killer and an impenetrable barrier to entry of the Zone.

The Physical Zone

Finding the perfect spiritual harmony at the heart of the Mental Zone is only half the battle one wages with oneself. Faith is easy to get but hard to keep. It only takes a few egregious errors or unlucky drops to shatter your Faith and break your spirit. If you are 'in the Zone' but still spraying the ball all over the place, no leap of Faith can prevent you from lapsing into a morass of anxiety and shame. The deep connection of body and spirit, physics and metaphysics, grants entry into the Zone and makes it possible for you to live there. A set of purely mechanical requirements for Zone entry apply across your entire game. Finding this 'Physical Zone' is a straightforward process, free of all the mumbo-jumbo required to navigate the Mental Zone. All you need do is keep your play within your performance envelope.

Your Performance Envelope

The concept of a performance envelope for tennis comes from the aerodynamic rules of flight. Fly too slow, and you stall and lose control. Fly too fast; you lock up your flight surfaces and lose control. Fly too high where the air is thin, and you lose control. Fly too low, and you crash. The faster you go, the higher you can fly without losing control. Pilots know their aircraft's speed and altitude limits and always fly within those bounds that form an 'envelope.'

Two physical parameters matter most when trying to get into the tennis 'Zone'; power and aggression. These are NOT synonymous. You can hit the ball very hard from ten feet behind the baseline - that is not aggressive; it is defensive. You can also go for a drop shot return of serve. That is very aggressive but not powerful. Most players believe that the choice to be aggressive or defensive, to hit hard or soft, is informed by your opponent's strengths and weaknesses. Deciding how hard and aggressive to hit is all about you and your capabilities. You can more easily hit harder if you are very large or strong. Aggressiveness is more about personality - how do you want to win? Some might answer, "Anyway, I can!" but they would be lying. You know the players who would rather wear you down and drive you crazy than hit an outright winner. During a match, you may find yourself going for winners, hitting out at one stage, throttling back, or dinking the ball at others. That's fine, but what you cannot and should not do is hit too hard or soft or play too aggressively or defensively than your comfort and capabilities allow. Hitting too hard or soft or playing too offensively or defensively is playing beyond the limits of your performance envelope. Within your envelope, you can play any way that pleases you or wins the match but stray outside the bounds, and your game will fall apart.

More is Better

Wrong! My greatest tennis failure has been the futile quest for 'more .'More power, topspin, balance, foot speed, bend lower, reach higher, get closer to the net... There is no limit to athletes' appetite for more. Yet turning the volume up to '11' has never helped my success or enjoyment of tennis. "Less is more" is equally fallacious. The magic formula for sport is 'just right. 'Neither too hard nor too soft, too aggressive nor too defensive. Finding your performance envelope's center and outer limits is not complicated, but it is challenging and personal.

Hitting Too Hard or Too Soft

Underhitting and overhitting are real and they are important. The common wisdom on overhitting is that it results in a ball that is ballistically incapable of clearing the net and staying in bounds, a ludicrous notion. You only need to go to a professional or division 1 college match and marvel at the consistency and pace with which they strike the ball to appreciate the compatibility of power and control. Consistency requires control, and control requires power. You must inject impulse force into the ball to get it to go where you want it to. However, the power you invest in a strike must be focused and, coherent, manageable. The proper application of power requires exquisite balance, footwork, preparation, timing, and racket head control. As pseudo-athletes, we own strong, conditioned muscles and weak, neglected ones. If the strong ones contract maximally, they will overcome the weaker muscles trying to balance them. I call the result overmodulation, and it imposes an absolute and inviolate limit on how hard a given player can hit a ball with control.

Hitting too soft is no better. Without sufficient power generated by the legs and transferred to the ball, there will be no 'snap' and thus no control injected into the ball. Just as A-players can hit harder without overmodulating, they can hit softer while maintaining control. Thus the power dimension of an A-player's envelope is wider, giving them more options. Instead of whining about that injustice, you must explore the power dimension of your personal envelope and then restrain yourself from wandering outside it for any reason. You can beat an A-player if you play within your abilities better than they do within theirs. Ninety percent of winning tennis is getting your opponent to violate their performance envelopes.

Too Aggressive or Too Defensive

This dichotomy is trickier because it involves several choices. Fundamentally a player on offense wants to end the point quickly, while a defensive player prefers a long rally. Being too offensive means trying to hit a winner on every ball or giving your opponent too many opportunities to hit winners against you. Too defensive means letting each rally drag on beyond your ability to maintain concentration and cardiac output. Court position is the most obvious determiner of aggressive versus defensive play. Playing belly-up-to-the-net is considered the most offensive position since defensive play in that location will get you killed, but even a miss-hit can be a winner. But success at net depends on a high-quality approach shot, a deep, well-placed volley, and quick feet to cover the inevitable lob. If you don't own all these things, standing too close to the net is suicide. Baseline play is generally more defensive, but standing ten feet behind will fail without superhuman foot speed and reliable groundstrokes, especially the lob and passing shots. Note that I have not brought up the opponent's capabilities in the forgoing discussion. Exploring your physical envelope is not about your opponents but about you and your game. The goal is to play your best game against any opponent, on any surface, and in any situation. Once you know the boundaries of your performance envelope, you can freely vary your playing parameters to accommodate the demands of the moment. Bjorn Borg would serve and volley at Wimbleton and stay back behind the baseline at the French Open, but unlike McEnroe, Borg rarely came in on his second serve or 'chipped and charged' on the return. Borg and McEnroe had contrasting strengths and weaknesses, but both were supremely self-aware and disciplined. That is what makes their matches so fascinating.

The Physical Zone
• Hard vs. Soft
  Muscular effort
  • • legs and feet
    • hips
    • shoulders
    • forearms
  Size of swing
  • • unit turn
    • backswing
    • followthrough
  Swing speed
• Offensive vs. Defensive
  Court positioning
  • • net vs baseline
    • distance behind baseline/service line
    • running around backhand/forehand
  Ball Placement
  • • aiming for the lines
    • depth - deep or drop shots
    • angles
    • flirting with the net strap
    • passing shots
      • allying the net man in doubles
      • down the middle in doubles
  techniques and trick shots
  • • topspin lob
    • drop shots
    • heavy spin
    • low lobs