Flow of the Match
What do to when things go against you

This advice is probably one of the hardest ones to get. And I mean really get it – not just intellectual understanding of it but really knowing what is the best approach.

Here's what happens – you play a match and things start to go against you. You either start losing your lead, or the opponent starts playing extremely well, or your backhand goes south for a while and so on.

In other words – the flow of the match changes. If just a moment ago everything was going normal or even good for you, now everything seems to be against you.

The two most common responses of players are resignation or trying too hard. Both are the consequences of not accepting reality.

When the player resigns to these events, it means that he is not giving his 100% effort. This almost guarantees defeat unless your opponent starts playing awful tennis too. But the solution here is logical – you need to fight and give your best.

Trickier than this is the situation when you try too hard. We are taught from childhood that if things don't go our way, we need to try harder. This approach doesn't work in tennis and in my opinion not in any other situation.

Don't get me wrong – you give all you have but you don't try too hard. When you try more and more you cut the flow of your actions. You are not creating and swimming with the current, you are resisting it.

Whatever it is that you resist, it will continue to persist. The more you fight against losing your lead, the faster you'll be losing it. The more you fight against losing your backhand and trying to force it back to form, the later that will happen.

I know what you're thinking – so when things start to go against me I shouldn't do anything? Is that what you mean?

YES. The only thing that you need to do is to check whether you are giving your 100%. This is probably the hardest thing for you to gauge since you lost the touch with yourself. You force yourself so many times that you feel that you can always give more.

You probably think that you have never given 100% in your life. But that is not true. We are not really talking about the absolute effort that you can perform at a certain task. We are talking about the amount of effort that will produce the most effective results.

My definition of a 100% effort is the amount of effort that will produce the best results. You can of course try harder and by this definition that would mean 110% of effort. But I guarantee you that your results will be worse than in the previous attempt.

So what you need to do in the tennis match (or anywhere else in life) when things start to go wrong is to check with yourself whether you are giving 100% - not more, not less. If you are, you need to accept whatever happens as a flow of the match (or life).

There is no way you can prevent losing a lead for 100%. This will happen no matter what. Watch the best players in the world and see if they ever lose a 5:2 lead. They do of course even though they know what to do in that situation.

So if you are trying to prevent losing a lead, you are trying an impossible feat. It cannot be done 100%. What you need to do is to play with a positive 100% effort, regardless of what happens – whether you are losing or winning.

What you'll discover is that the flow of the match will change to your liking much much sooner than when you resist situations where things go against you.

The more you see all events in the tennis match as a part of the whole tennis story and accept them, the better you'll be.

Just imagine a fish swimming in a river. It goes with the flow. It speeds up when the flow is with it and it slows down when the flow is against it. But it doesn't resign and it doesn't waste energy against the current. The fish keeps its 100% effort when it swims and it eventually reaches its destination.

That's how tennis matches flow too. The more you accept everything that happens, the better tennis player you'll be.

Back from Flow of the Match to Mental Tennis

Back from Flow of the Match to TennisMindGame.com