When Relaxing and Visualization Doesn’t Work

Question: I have a girl who kept hitting her forehands high and deep. I tried relaxing the wrist and grip and visualization the ball going 4-6 feet over the net, but no change. Can you tell me how to fix this?

Answer: In my opinion, any time you visualize something and it doesn’t work, there are two things that need to be addressed. One, as you tried already, is to work on relaxing some part of the body more. You tried to have her relax her grip and wrist, but the fact that it did not work tells me that she is not relaxing this enough or there is some other area in her body that needs relaxing. Sometimes one person’s idea as to what is relaxed is not what being relaxed really means according to my way of thinking. I have had students who, on their scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest level of relaxation) feel that they are at an 8 when on my scale they are at a 3.

Maybe her breathing is too tense. Maybe she is not relaxing the arm movement at her shoulder enough. Also, I would make sure she is specifically feeling how relaxed these areas are. It is not always effective to just tell someone to relax. It may help if you have your student re-read Lesson #4 in my book which is goes into more detail on relaxing.

The second issue when someone is visualizing something is that there is the tendency to try to do what it was that they were visualizing. This, of course, leads to being too tense. Once you have visualized, you must truly let it go and just be aware of what is happening.

So, I would suggest going back to work on relaxing the grip and wrist to the max and at the same time visualizing the ball going lower. There may be some other issues, but without actually seeing the girl hit, I can’t really know what is going on.