Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

The number one question I get asked whenever a player needs help with something is how to improve the mental side of their game. Many of us are excellent in practice, but transferring those great strokes into real-life matches can be difficult. So, here are my suggestions on improving your mentality in matches and becoming a mental giant during competition. The "Ego" and the "Task" motivated player As a coach, I used to love the hard worker. I felt that I had the suitable material to mold a future champion if given a young player who worked hard. But often, these hard-working players, I call them Task motivated players, never fulfilled the potential I thought they had. The good results I expected just didn't materialise. Task-motivated players worked harder and longer than anybody else but often lack the ability to clinch close matches and will sometimes  lose to players who don't work as hard or train as well as them. So what's going on? I began to cal...

A no-nonsense look at what it takes to be a professional tennis player After what many would consider a successful career, Jo-Wilford Tsonga recently retired from professional tennis. But I felt he could have done a lot more with his talent. I could observe Tsonga off-court quite a bit, and over the last few years, he had become just a shell of the player he was when he first burst on the scene. He seemed to have accepted the role of a journeyman tennis player, a player who was merely going through the motions at each tournament and wasn't willing to put the extra work in to maintain his position as a top 10 player.  Many players, men, and women, merely show up each week to make up the numbers. Becoming a professional tennis player is not easy, and it's perhaps even more challenging to stay at the top once you get there. If your goal is to turn professional one day, there are 3 essential elements that you might not have thought about much. Watch out for outdated training method...