Peterson on What Beckons you Forward

 

Health: Your Feet, Chemicals in Water Threshold, Regrets - Mental health

Foot Health

This is a good article on keeping your feel in tone and strong for balance and safety.   The article suggests it's even the secret to a long life but aren't so many things according to the experts.  But we all have to walk so having your feet in tip top shape makes that happen.

Chemicals in Water Threshold Lowered for Safety

Life of Regret - how to avoid it.

This is great advice and what it ties into is your self image and what you expect of yourself.  If you don't match up to what you dreamed of doing and being or at least working toward it then yes you might feel failure and regret.  Relative to your dreams of a career in tennis many of us have had to make compromises.  In my own case a matter of injuries, finances, and reality of my existing options led me to choose teaching tennis as a life career.  Of course we all would love to play competitively for a living but I saw teaching as a way to stay with tennis throughout my life.  The reality is that a majority, a very big majority of those who tried to make a living playing end up teaching anyway.  Of course it does give you a leg up in terms of credentials to at least have played professionally even if not successfully enough to stay with it.  Think of this when you plan your future on the court and consider that everything you do is eventually leading you toward sharing your skills and what you have learned with others.  In the meantime enjoy every day on the court whether it's as a player or teacher.

Visualization to Improve your Tennis Performance

Practicing mentally is an important component of sports performance.  It is proven in scientific studies that imagining clearly the motions and actions you take in hitting a ball can actually improve your skills as much as going out on the court and doing so.  This applies to golf, archery, and any other discipline that you can practice in your mind as well as on the field or court.  Of course you can't bypass physical efforts completely or even the majority of your training, but adding a considerable amount of time using mental imaging will give you fast improvements.

The original theory for this approach to self improvement is a book titled Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.  It is well worth reading and using the knowledge you get from it to change many aspects of your life.  In addition to working for your sports performance such as how you stroke the ball you should consider also imagining yourself winning against specific types of players or even specific players.  Go through the mental steps of visualizing your strategy, how you hit the ball, the movements you make, and the shots that you take.  All of these aspects of your game can benefit from imagining yourself doing something as an accompaniment to your on court efforts.

Here is the book that I suggest you read to understand fully the value of this added aspect of training for mastery.



If you're not into reading a tremendous amount or don't have the time consider an audio version of the book.