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Hey, hey, this is Shaun with the GoTennis! Podcast powered by Signature Tennis.

Check out our calendar of Metro Atlanta tennis events and letsgotennis.com.

And today is 10 minutes of tennis with World renowned tennis coach Australian in Puerto Rico,

who I believe might be in Naples or somewhere.

He's, you never know people.

You never really know where Justin is.

But right now we are continuing our mental health conversation.

And this one is as we watch, this question is as we watch the mental health struggles of

these superheroes, of these athletes that are out there performing and running their businesses,

which is a thing we forget sometimes.

They really struggle to keep up.

Sometimes we forget these are 19 year olds that are top 10 in the world trying to figure

out just how to run a business.

But Justin, my question is, can we the social player?

I guess you and I are considered industry coach types.

But can the social player, the weekend player, the league player, what do we get from this?

Yeah, I think with this question, I thought I would just write down a whole bunch of things

that would get to help people understand, I guess the worst fundamentals are the things

that the professionals are going through that you could use because at the end of the day

we're all playing tennis.

So whether they're playing at 3-0 or 4-5 or 5-0, they're still playing another player

up the other end that goes through the same level of challenges at the same game.

So I always try to make people realize we're all playing at a certain level, but we all

go through the same mental state.

The difference between obviously the professional to what we do is we still leave the court and

go back to work and go do what we got to do.

That is their job.

So some of them too, what we've got to understand have been sacrificing a lot of things since

the age of 4-5 and they've only known one thing and they're hitting very tennis balls to make

a career out of it.

So they've got a lot of invested interest, they've had a lot of other people behind them

than the regular Joe.

But that doesn't take away from the regular Joe who's still practice a lot, so wants to keep

improving 3-5 to 4-0, 4-0 to 4-5.

So I'm going to give you a quick one, so I'm going to run through in real five.

Understanding attention span.

If you want to learn a little bit more about it, you can go on Google, there's a ton of

stuff you can learn on it.

I'm going to give you a three main one, intensity, size and movement.

Intensity is basically meaning what's the intensity of my attention span?

Like how high am I, how pumped am I, how focused am I?

Size is the length of time I've been keeping my attention span because we go in weights and

we try to learn how we can increase the size.

And I'll talk about that in a minute.

Movement.

Our attention span relies on physical movement.

So you see the players jump up and down and some players are really quattent slow.

But you can really tell how we can help our attention span by three main things like that.

So that's it.

I think for a lot of people they don't understand attention span and then by not understanding

the core of where the mental focus is, it's really hard because you're looking for all these

elements without actually understanding really what attention span is all about.

Mind drifting and how to manage it.

So basically trying to come up with tricks to identify one, your drifting meaning you're

thinking about the bikini girl walking in the back of the court versus focusing on

the next point and bikini girls just a little exaggerated.

But at the end of the day everyone knows what I'm talking about.

Their mind comes up the court versus being on the court.

Internal versus external.

You've all heard me talk about this a ton.

When you walk off the baseline you're thinking that forehand sucked, I sucked.

What's wrong with me today?

But I'm a blab that's internal.

External is looking back under the court and saying, this is the tactic I'm going to do.

This is the game plan my coach came up with or this is what I thought about at the change

of end on how to beat my person tactically and that's how to think externally which makes

you go more into I would say good momentum, good focus versus internal focus.

And that makes me think of identifying with a player.

So we watch these players on television, the men, the women, the mixed doubles, we watch

it all and we look at that one player and say, oh that guy reminds me of me.

Or kind of I picture myself like them and then I picture a ruble of type who is always fighting

with himself and everybody knows a friend that might have that same kind of internal struggle

all the time because it isn't necessarily that's an outward representation of the internal

struggle and those are the kind of things we can see and go, oh man, do I look like that

on court?

I don't know that that's a good example for my wife and kids, right?

Yeah, I mean we can go back, we call it the go to Federer.

I mean Federer at the start was smashing rackets and was carrying on and he learned to find

the silent part that we all adored and that we all appreciated and that we all looked

up to and admired.

But at the start, late junior years and even early professional years, he had a real demon

and he learned to quiet that demon down but demons can be raised a lot mentally and emotionally

from other things that are written down here which is physical conditioning.

If you're not as good as in shape or you're not as fit as you need to be the other guy

better, as your physical condition comes down, your emotion comes up higher which changes

your mental state as well.

So be aware of your physical conditioning, that's really important, change events, drink

in water, having a snack, change time between points.

If you rush from one point to the next point, you haven't given yourself a chance to reduce

the heart rate and increase to improve the breathing, sleep and recovery.

You haven't slept well, you haven't done a few good sleep nights, that's going to be

a big one that's going to change your mental state when you go to play.

So negative to positive thoughts, you have to do this many a times in play development

which you could do it in adult stuff as well and that is what's the same bad word that

keep coming up and find what positive change those words so that when they come up, you've

written down what can be changed and what information will fix that negative.

I like that a lot because it makes me think of the mental health benefits of tennis.

Now it isn't just of tennis by virtue but it's of the fact that I want to be a good tennis

player and therefore I'm going to do these things which are going to help me be a better

tennis player and all of those things are good for my longevity, they're good for my health,

they're good for my mental health.

If I really want to be a great, I don't know what poker player, maybe we don't get the

same health benefits from that, from preparing for something else I guess is what I'm trying

to come up with because in this case you're describing good healthy habits that are a result

of preparing for my hobby and that's really a great thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Even to the things like you can be, I mean, Naples right now, right?

95% of the population here can drive very fast, having got very good attention span and they're

all over the place.

So what do I have to do?

Hey, you're going to take me 30 seconds to another two or three minutes to get somewhere.

That's it.

Wait, can I sacrifice two, three minutes?

Yes.

So why would I create stress the whole time on the road?

Same thing when you're on the court.

Why rush?

Why keep pushing?

Why try to?

People, a lot of juniors try to rush things to go through the pain when actually they need

to reflect and go through it and be up the other end.

And I am Roger Federer.

I am Roger Federer.

I am Roger Federer.

I am Roger Federer.

Yeah.

And Ruben, Ruben, is a good example because he is very high in intensity.

We don't know he's background.

We don't know how he was raised.

We don't know all that stuff.

He obviously has a lot underneath and he's going to learn to have to keep channeling and

keep channeling it.

This has to reason why sometimes people get injured as well because they keep pushing and

keep pushing and the mind can control and push the body.

But then if we push it too far, something breaks.

We get to listen.

Yeah.

Mentally, it's a big thing.

So trying to go back to what you are saying, what the average player or what the amateur

player can learn, there are things like adrenaline.

Watch your pump ups because if your adrenaline goes too high, the first thing your body is going

to do is shut down.

The heart rate comes down.

The mind says straight away, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

really high."

So now I am going to bring you all down.

So you might win one big point, come out like Balmau, like Nadal, and then the next

two points you lose, and you're like, "What happened to my momentum?"

You got nothing left.

My adrenaline was so high that my mind said, "Hey, bring everything down to catch up."

I have tons of tests.

My momentum swings, watch them, manage them, figure out what they do, what they don't

do.

And what I mean by that is, journalize after a match, what works and what don't work,

journalize, journalize, and what you do is once you start reading back, you'll start

to realize where the patterns are of what you do to manage momentum or what you do to feel

positive to get a win.

And if you keep writing them down, even if it starts writing down all your failures, because

all the negatives, you'll start to understand patterns on how to change those.

So I would say journalize is really important to understand every single match adds up.

There are patterns in it.

I can be the Tony Robbins right now.

It happens in everything.

Yeah, right?

And I was going to say, it sounds like we can go on forever.

Maybe we'll do 10 more minutes next week on the same thing.

But in this case, it really sounds like I am running a little business, the business of

my hobby, in this case.

Because if I'm going to write down the notes from my meeting notes and what happened and

what didn't happen, because I want to improve, all of it just sounds like I'm getting really

good at my hobby.

And the benefit here is the mental health benefits of the actions that we take to improve and

be better at what we do.

Just in word of time, we will come back to it if we need to.

I appreciate it.

This has been 10 minutes of tennis with Justin Yo.

Thank you, sir.

We'll see you next week.

Thank you, guys.

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