Tennis Trainer – Ace Serve

When you have a reliable, powerful and accurate serve, you have a potent advantage over your opponents. So many points can be won with a powerful consistent serve, and excellent placement.  The serve is one of the trickiest shots in tennis to master initially and, like any skill, you need to practice over an over to make it “your own.”  Then once you have the technical aspects of the serve down, you need to have the right mind set.  Even people who have mastered the technicalities of serving can fall apart in the match, or may find that they don’t serve well consistently.

Being in exactly the right state of arousal – relaxed yet poised, calm yet focused – is sometimes called being in a state of “flow,” or “in the zone.”  When you enter the “zone,” there is an inevitability concerning success; it’s as if you know a split second beforehand that the ball is going to go exactly where you want it to go, and at the right velocity to win the point.  In the “zone,” your mind empties of all notions of success or failure, winning or losing.  All these concepts fade away as only the “now” exists.  Top performers in every field describe entering this state of being “in the zone,” when they are at their best.  Being consistently “in the zone” when you serve means that you’ll hit more powerful and accurate serves and be able to force more errors in your opponent’s play.

One of the worst things a tennis player can do is think about what they don’t want to do while serving.  You need a clear blueprint in your mind of what is required, not of what is undesirable.  If you tell a child to climb out of a tree carefully, you set up a blueprint for safety.  If you tell the same child “Don’t fall out of the tree!” you have set up a blueprint for falling out.  You have to have the pattern in your mind for what you want, not for what you don’t want.

It’s the same for tennis.  Study and imagine and focus on what you want in the future, and not where things went wrong in the past, and you’ll be more successful.  You need to have an almost Zen-like sense of detachment when serving.  Paradoxically, psychological detachment can make your serves all the more intimidating and accurate.  Trying too hard in all sports can actually get in the way.

To become consistently excellent at something, you need to practice it over and over as a physical action so that the right neural pathways in your brain are forged for that activity.  However, when you practice a skill in your imagination hypnotically, the same neural pathways are forged in your brain as if you were actually doing the activity.  The advantage of hypnotic practice can be truly amazing.

In ancient Japan, there used to be what were known as Zen archers.  These incredibly accurate bowmen were the best sports psychologists in the world.  They would “feel their target” as if they, their arrow and the target were all one.  When you are the target, how can you miss?  Imagine becoming a Zen server!