This is pretty cool stuff! Imagine how huge an athlete’s swing can become when they have “chunked” all these important aspects of a forehand, like “inhaling” as they “rotate opposite hand with body” and begin “pushing the racket out and back” and then “transfer weight to back foot” and “bend knees” on the backswing. 

 

Think of all the possibilities. The athlete would be breathing properly, adding oxygen into the cells, and better regulating their body’s functions. They would be creating more space and loading up all that powerful energy coming from the ground. All good, right? 

 

But there’s a catch here! According to Barbara, you have to put enough effort into learning the “chunks.”  The following paragraph is the main point that I want to talk about. She says, 

 

“If you haven’t put enough of the right kind of effort into your studies, come test time, your little prefrontal cortex is going crazy still trying to figure out the basics. Sometimes people think they suffer from test anxiety when they perform poorly on test but surprisingly often, they don’t. They’re simply experiencing panic as they suddenly realize they don’t know the material as well as they thought they did. They haven’t created neural chunks.”

 

The above paragraph is really important and I believe it applies directly to tennis. You see, players are having match time anxiety a lot because their brain is still trying to figure out the basics. At CP we use mental training tools that help players get the basics down pat, so then they can come out and swing freely and correctly come match time.