Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind and gauging the effect of your own strategy on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under various circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You have to realize the effect on your game of the ensuing annoyance, joy, bewilderment, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it improve your efficiency? If so, try for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, but if that isn’t possible, strive to ignore it.

Once you have correctly judged your own reaction to circumstances, observe your opponents in order to determine their characters. Similar temperaments react similarly, and you may judge men of your own type by yourself. Other characters you must seek to liken with people whose reactions you already know.

A person who can control his/her own mental processes stands an excellent chance of reading those of someone else for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after studying them very carefully .

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is rarely a quick thinker. If he was he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a fairly clear indication of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to work out a safe method of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would prefer to stay on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, quick thinking opponent. He gets his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first type of tennis player mentioned above simply strikes the ball without much thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a solid, thought-out strategy and adheres to it.

If you are into the psychology of tennis, you ought to go to our website entitled Tennis Tips for Beginners This article, Tennis Psychology (Part 1) is released under a creative commons attribution licence.