Keeping the feeling alive

Marcin Lonak Asked 8 years ago

Hello Alois, hello Jeff,

Until now I had a learning curve which satisfied me. I was fond of my progress. Recently during a match with my training partner, who uses the two faced bat with long pimples, I got my first realisation that my goals might be much further away than I thought. He is slightly better than me, he wins say around 70% of the matches we play.

In this one he was leading 1-0 in games. This is very often the case that he takes the lead. I make initially a ton of mistakes misjudging my abilities and playing too risky.  If I get my feeling early enough I have a good chance to win against him. So in this match my good feeling came quite fast. I won the 2 game, had a good flow in the 3d game and than it happened. There was this long long rally, I won the point. Afterwards I was exhausted and couldn't get my feeling back. Especially serve and return was gone. I also didn't move quickly after my serve. Mentally I was longing for a break. I think the long rally was in duration as long as 10 following points. 

I got a bit of the good feeling back in the 4th game but it was too late. His initial lead in the 4 game was too big to catch him again. 

The worrying part is, it took just one long rally. I was not very long exhausted, but couldn't get my feeling back.

We don't do pauses between the games or timeouts. It's just matches after or before a training session.

thanks

Alois Rosario Answered 8 years ago

Hi Marcin,

It is OK to have a period in the match where you don't feel as good.  Firstly recognising this early is important.  Now you have a reference for where you know you didn't feel good that you can relate to the next time it happens.

When it happens, there are a few things that you can do, but one simple thing is to take a deep breath and then focus on the tactic for the next point.  Getting yourself back to the present moment is important.

Take a look through the Sports Psychology section and see what you can gain from there.