Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of the biggest differences in tennis between top players and good players is the difference to play important points.
The difference is in the flow.
Flow is a magical state where everything looks easier. Move, hit, think are all well connected.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted himself more than anyone else to the study of this state of consciousness not marked by effort, and the term he proposed for it, FLOW, has entered the language.
People who experience flow describe it as a state of natural concentration, a concentration so deep that they lose all sense of time, of themselves and their problems. And the joy that comes from it is so great, according to those who experience it, that Csikszentmihalyi calls it the optimal experience. (Think fast, think slow)
In my opinion this state comes from high self confidence.
Confidence includes the concept of faith, a positive approach that everything will go in the right direction, even if it will happens in a long term.
Faith is believing in the process that will leads to the goal.
This attitude couldn’t be an aptitude and rationally can be reached, but also with a little bit of foolish especially in depression moments.
Will power to improve and grow up everyday has to be the MUST, the first requirement for every player that aims to ambitious goals.
1 Information Overload. In the era we live in, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern who is knowledgeable and who isn’t.
Amid the constant feedback on social networks, distinguishing between fake information and genuine, valid content has become complex.
There’s a tendency to copy and paste, constructing seemingly interesting topics, and the influence of follower counts gives a sense of credibility to well-known figures.
2 Credibility vs. Popularity. Some individuals, by proximity to these celebrities, attempt to align themselves with them.
3 Silent Experts. The flip side, there are scientists working behind the scenes, making incredible discoveries but lacking either the time or the desire to share their findings for various reasons. Please come out! In every profession, it is challenging to differentiate between skill and incompetence.
4 Evaluation of Expertise I believe it’s nearly impossible to assess an expert’s quality from the outside, as, from the inside, I often admire the abilities of those who seem unremarkable.
This issue can arise in various fields such as sports, finance, or wellness, but it is particularly critical in medicine, where a mistake can have dire consequences.
In my view, many professions can be performed at varying levels (A, B, C, Z), but that is not the case for doctors, especially certain specialists, since an error can cost a life or ruin it. It’s nice to receive 2 completely opposite diagnosis!
5 Coaching Dynamics. In tennis, as in other sports, there is ongoing debate regarding the priority of knowledge versus experience in achieving expertise. Results are commonly viewed as indicators of competence.
For instance, there are coaches in football who win championships with some teams but fail to secure victories with others. How is this possible? Are they truly experts or not?
In tennis, some highly intelligent coaches avoid tough challenges and only work with top players. But what is the actual percentage of added value a coach brings to a player?
In my opinion, a good coach is one who leads each player to achieve their best success based on their potential and current life circumstances.
6 Perception and Performance. A coach’s skills are more evident with lower-level players than with top talents. It’s interesting how fans, especially in football, glorify a manager when the team wins but harshly criticize the same individual in the event of failure.
How many times have you big delusions from your teachers, coaches and trainers or crucial or lethal consequences from some doctor?
Only small DETAILS can unmask the real diamonds from common coloured stones.
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#carbonemethod #gianlucacarbone
#strategy #tactic #tennisbiomechanics #knowledge #experience #expertise
Recent studies on the combination of isometric and eccentric strength training have shown promising results, emphasizing their complementary effects on muscle development and performance. Here are some key insights:
Many times I asked myself if it is better to suggest to my players to control their emotions or blurting out all the anger they feel in that moment.
What happens in the case that a player doesn’t destroy his racket and apparently block his emotions.
Are we sure that it is the best reaction, show to the world that we can control ourself?
To repress an emotion can cost a lot of energies, not only mental but physical energies.
Players don’t understand many times because they miss power without a reason, their legs are weak and they fell different from the day before.
From a study of the psychologist Roy Baumeister the following activities can burn important physical energies:
avoiding obsessive thoughts, inhibiting an emotional response to a moving film, making a series of choices that involve conflict, and trying to impress others.
“If you are too worried about doing well on a task, sometimes you will worsen your performance by loading your short-term memory with useless anxious thoughts.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister’s group has repeatedly discovered that an effort of will or self-control generates fatigue, if you have had to force yourself to do something, and you are less willing or less able to exercise self-control when a new problem arises.
The phenomenon has been called “ego depletion”.
In a typical demonstration, some volunteers are asked to repress their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film. Then, subjected to a physical energy test in which they were asked to maintain a strong grip on the subway dynamo in the face of increasing discomfort, the same volunteers showed very poor performance.
The emotional effort of the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to tolerate the pain of prolonged muscle contraction and, therefore, those who have suffered ego depletion give in sooner to the impulse to give up.
As Baumeister notes, the discovery personally made by another group that the idea of mental energy is more than just a metaphor.
The nervous system uses up something from almost every other part of the body, and strenuous mental activity appears to be particularly expensive in terms of glucose.
When the mind is engaged in cognitive reasoning or a task that requires self-control, blood glucose levels drop.
The effect is similar to that of a runner who, during a sprint, uses up a lot of glucose and stores it in the muscles.
The clear implication is that the effects of depression that could be counteracted by glucose intake, and Baumeister and colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments.” From Thinking fast and slow. By Daniel Kahneman
What is the advice? Don’t repress emotions
Many top players are genetically so strong that they don’t get injuried even if they do a failed physical training.
They can understand or may be not the mistakes on the training only after a systemic pain in some area of the body.
Most of the times pain doesn’t come from direct causes. It comes from a reaction to a missed sinergy in muscle groups.
In this exercise there is an open kinetic chain with the cables, eccentric work for the isokinetic effect and functional movement for the same tennis kinetic chain that the player use on the court.
Only small details make the big difference between a specific workout for tennis and a generic workout that can appear specific.
Barbell trainings for example can improve the Strenght of many muscle groups but if players don’t transform the general Strenght in functional Strenght they can become weaker in some specific run direction and slow in reaction on directions change.
Curiosity, understood as an innate desire to explore, discover and understand, is a fundamental trait of human nature. This impulse is at the basis of the learning process, as it pushes us to ask questions, seek answers and build new cognitive connections. Numerous studies in the educational and neuroscientific fields confirm that curiosity not only stimulates the acquisition of new knowledge, but also promotes memory and critical processing of information.
One of the most common mistakes in professional athletes is remaining attached to the personal technique and tactic.
The top tennis players for example showed in the last twenty years that they changed everything they needed to figure out problems after a weak performance in specific conditions.
For example Nadal added more aggressive tactics, Federer exasperated aggressive tactics introducing the chip and charge, Djokovic improved the anticipation and the serve.
Curiosity and the Brain: A Biological Connection
Curiosity activates the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation. A study conducted by Kang et al. (2009) showed that, when a person is curious about a topic, the regions of the brain associated with learning and memory (such as the hippocampus) show greater activity. This suggests that curiosity creates a fertile ground for the storage of information, significantly improving the learning process.
Curiosity as an educational lever
In the school context, curiosity is a powerful tool to motivate students. If educators are able to stimulate authentic questions and interests, students become active protagonists of their learning. As highlighted by Engel (2011), “children are born curious, but the educational environment can stifle or fuel this natural predisposition”. This means that a teaching approach that values discovery and problem solving can increase not only participation, but also academic results.
What about teachers competences?
Teacher, coach and trainers have to be like surgeons. They have to be ready and able to cut, take off, add and rebuild, breaking a movement and change the only missed chunk of the kinetic chain.
Same for a physical trainer analyzing the muscle or muscles group that doesn’t work well and develop it to prevent an injury.
Or in re – habilitation protect the injured zone working around to push up the weak muscle, tendon or joint.
Cannot exist a teacher if there are no competences otherwise the approach will be conservative and “intolerant” to the curiosity.
Curiosity and lifelong learning
Curiosity is not limited to childhood or formal education, but is also a key element in lifelong learning. In a constantly evolving world, the ability to ask questions and adapt to new knowledge is crucial. As highlighted by Kashdan and Silvia (2009), highly curious people show greater resilience and greater psychological well-being, as they are motivated to explore and face challenges with an open mind.
How to nurture curiosity? The cat approach
Home cats are thought of essentially the most curious animal on the planet. They at all times love to do new stuff and study their environment. Cats are very good and considerate species and have the flexibility to find new issues.
Don’t be koala! Koalas possess one of the smallest brains of all the mammals.
The curious people are skeptical, they need to check before trusting. They need to check the quality, the origins, the objectivity of the knowledge.
To promote curiosity, it is essential to create environments that stimulate discovery and creativity. This may include:
Conclusion
Curiosity is the engine of learning. Cultivating it means not only encouraging cognitive development, but also promoting personal and social well-being. As Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” This simple principle encapsulates a fundamental truth: curiosity is the seed from which all knowledge grows.
When we analyze a movement, a technique and we compare what we like with what we don’t like we cannot limit the check up to a simple, concrete measure of the angles and the pushes. Many times in a shorter and explosive push there is more confidence, control and intentionality. In a longer push there is a sense of waiting, an exigence to have more time for controlling more but in the same time there is a lack of intentionality and killer timing.
Behind a movement there is an emotion. I think that some time emotion can influence the power and sometime can be the opposite. Flow is a mix of physical and emotional feelings. Below what the father of the flow concept says:
“DISORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: PSYCHIC ENTROPY
One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.
ORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: FLOW
The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly.
They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against. We have called this state the flow experience, because this is the term many of the people we interviewed had used in their descriptions of how it felt to be in top form: “It was like floating,” “I was carried on by the flow.” It is the opposite of psychic entropy—in fact, it is sometimes called negentropy—“
From Flow of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Albert Ramos went around the ranking of 100 Atp in 2019 June, but recovered in few months an amazing performance reaching the following results:
n the 2019 Albert Ramos Vinolas was Champion of ATP Gstaad, Finalist in ATP Kitzbuhel, Semifinalist in ATP Bastad and ATP Zhuhai.
At the begin of 2020 he started the new season with a good ranking of 41 of the world, working to go up on the next tournament.
As Jose Diaz says: “The best as to come still!”
A good season reaching the best ranking of 127, but ending with an elbow injuries falling down at the Manerbio Challenger in August.
However here the best result of a great season where Lorenzo was n.1 of the Challenger ranking 2019 until the injury.
Lorenzo Giustino was Champion of Almaty ATP Challenger, Finalist of Launceston and Zhangjiagang ATP Challenger, Semifinalist of Atp Challenger Lisbon and Blois.
He started a great 2020 with the first qualification in his life to the Main Draw of Australian Open where lost against Milos Raonic.
Later he reaches Quarterfinals at the Launceston Challenger.
