The Mental Edge in Racquetball: Overcome Challenges & Reach Your Potential - with Mind Training

Do You Play Better Racquetball in Practice, Than Competition?
Affected by Doubt, Nerves, etc?  or Just Taking Your Game to the Next Level?

Mental training, when added to your on-court training, gives you the 'edge' over your competitors. When you are playing your highest level, your strokes and movement are actually flowing instinctively on auto-pilot, and this is controlled by your powerful subconscious mind.

And when two players are almost identical in physical ability and strokes - its the mind, and the difference in their levels of belief, that separates the winner from their competitor.

Champion tend to use far more of their subconscious than intermediate players (as you will see from the list of champions further below), and often use mind training methods regularly - such as the renowned visualisation technique (which we will discuss in more detail shortly).

And so racquetball players who use mind training (along with their physical training) improve much faster than those who only train on court.

Benefits of Mental Training

Mind training helps us to also create a mindset of success.  This acts like a powerful protective shield of confidence - an expectation and belief that you will perform strongly on court, no matter who your opponent is.

When mental training is used correctly, it delivers consistently strong results in players of all levels, every single time.

Most often these improvements are shown in the these areas..

 

It gives racquetball players that "edge" over their competitors, including their ability to handle pressure and intimidation - and this transfers into confidence in their stroking ability and successful results.

It creates a shield of resilience to the physical and mental demands of the sport - by managing your thoughts and emotions during the most stressful situations, allowing you to remain focused and positive when faced with a particularly challenging opponent.

The Power of Visualisation

Visualisation is one of the most powerful mind training methods used to transform performance at elite levels of sport around the world.

This involves regularly and realistically picturing in your mind the exact way you want to perform during a game, with aspects such as:

• Mentally rehearsing all strokes to peak efficiency - such as down the line shots, cross court passes, wide angle passes, ceiling balls, kill shots, pinch shots, etc.

• Serving strongly, accurately and consistently using drive serves, Z serves and lob serves

• Solid footwork - reacting perfectly to each shot from your opponent, easily retrieving any ball they hit, attacking when possible and defending when appropriate

• Moving your opponent around the maximum distance on court, playing good strategic racquetball

When used correctly, visualisation brings major improvement to almost any area of a player's racquetball performance.

However, like your strokes on the court, visualisation also has to be done correctly to get the best results. For instance, the correct level of relaxation is required to open up the link to the subconscious mind.

Also, the visualised images need to be powerful, emotionally charged and realistic to pre-program performance within the subconscious.

Overcoming Self-Sabotage

Unfortunately many athletes who experience any kind of recurring patterns or self sabotage in their performance (which are common mental issues I work on with athletes) are most often caused by lack of real belief in themselves and their ability.

This inner doubt and anxiety send mixed internal signals from the body's control panel (the subconscious), and the results are usually a clear reflection of this inner doubt.

This is one of the strongest areas that mental training addresses - boosting up the self-belief so that there is no more hesitation.