How To Calm Your Nerves Like The Pros - Tennis Mental Training and Tips

Hey guys, Nate with PlayYourCourt, and today we're gonna talk about a method the ITF uses to calm players' nerves. All right guys, today we're gonna talk about this method that the ITF uses to help their players calm their nerves and focus while competing on the tour. And this method is called the four rooms method. All right, let's jump right into it. What are we talking about? The four rooms. So what you'll notice is in between points, players are often going through rituals. And these rituals will often take place with them turning their back to the court, keeping their eyes on the strings, and then maybe coming up and getting their footwork going or whatever it might be. Everyone is different. But what's happening between the years, if they come from the ITF and they've been trained through the ITF on the ATP, they all have something in common, and they're using this four rooms method. So in between points, the first room that we're gonna visit is the bathroom. Gross. Can be. But in this case, not so much. Whatever happened in the point before, you're gonna go to the bathroom and you're gonna flush it. I know what some of you are thinking. You're like, every point, yeah, even the good points. Maybe you hit the shot of your life. You still need to flush it because it's still just worth one point, and we have a lot of tennis to be played. So we've gotta get rid of that and we have to get ready for the next point. Now, if it's a bad miss, absolutely. We need to flush it immediately and remove ourself from the situation, trying not to be emotional about it. So after we've gone to the bathroom, we're now gonna go to our favorite room in our house. So for mine, probably the living room. So I'm gonna go into the living room and this is where I'm gonna start to relax. Big deep breath, breathing through the diaphragm, long exhale, I'm gonna shake out my hands. I'm gonna start trying to compose myself for this next point. From here, I'm gonna go into the office. This is where the work gets done. And I'm gonna visualize this. I actually use this method myself and here I'm gonna visualize myself wearing my favorite blue suit, dressed nicely, and I'm gonna really focus on what the plan is. Maybe I'm looking to attack the righty's backhand with an inside out forehand. I'm gonna think about serve location. This is where the blueprint is laid, the office. And lastly is the hallway. So what's happened is in between this point, I've walked back, I've got my eyes on the strings, I'm going through these rooms and the hallway back is the approach to where I start going through rituals. Like I said, you see Sharapova getting the feet going, you'll see Rafa sit down and really dig in for return of serve, and then the ball bounces. They can range from one ball bounce to Novak's 15 ball bounces. And these rituals are used to calm ourselves and so that we can get ready to go back to work on the next point. By using these four rooms to calm yourself and focus on the point, I guarantee that your success in the court will be so much better because what's happening between the ears is so much better. Guys, as always, I hope you enjoyed this video and you find it helpful, but unfortunately, I just don't know a lot about your game. If you click the button below and answer a few short questions, we can learn more about your game and we can send you tips that are tailored to your skill level. See you soon.