Personalize the habit

There’s no one way of teaching tennis.

There is no one methodology.

There’s many of them.

As many as there are personalities.

I (Izo) encourage young tennis coaches not to copy other tennis coaches. Instead I (Izo) encourage young tennis coaches to copy their habits and what really inspires you.

Take the habit mix it with your personality and into your philosophy because the world needs YOU. That’s what the world needs. It really needs your unique, genuine you.

Be the shark in the ocean

As a young tennis coach go and find a mentor because you are who you surround yourself with.

Let me provide you with an example of a shark.

If you put the shark in an aquarium it’s going to grow only 20-30 centimeters.

If you put him in the ocean, it has the potential to be a beast.

So, I (Izo) encourage all young tennis coaches to go and find the people that you are inspired by. Maybe on the way you get disappointed, but that’s not a problem. Just go out there, look for mentors, and don’t worry about people’s opinion because people actually are not talking about you. People usually don’t have a time to talk about you because they’re worried about themselves. So, as a young tennis coach just put the passion in, find a mentor and go out there and fail. Fail miserably. It’s OK. You’re going to learn from it and you’re going to get better.

The best coaching is to do

I’ve always been trying to fix everybody else. When we start coaching a player, we’re usually telling them a lot of things, but how do we inspire them after that?

For me the best way is by example.

The best way to teach is to do.

Because you are a reflection of your player and your player is a reflection of you. So, what you are trying to teach them is the habits.

Once you realize that you can’t change the world around yourself and you can only change yourself your perspective changes.

IMP-attitude is a life style philosophy that is changing the state of mind and we can apply it in anything we do.

The 4 habits of IMP-Attitude

They idea of IMP-attitude originally came from a trip I (Izo) had to Turkey a tournament. I was in the hotel room watching a commercial and I saw the word impossible on the screen and I see the letter being lowered and it hits me “I’m possible”.

I was thinking: “OK, this is how I can make aha-moment with my players” Because once you change the way you see the things, things you see change. That’s for me super important because I believe tennis is a problem-solving sport. Every moment you need to solve a certain problem.

For me it’s about how you see a problem as an opportunity and how you see failing as learning. So, For me, successful people have ability to move from a fixed mindset to the growth mindset, and that’s with their attitude.

What defines you is not what you want to be. It’s your protocols and your systems. You fall down to your protocols and the system that you do daily. So, I broke down these 4 habits.

Habit 1 – Setting goals
All successful people set goals. To put it in the perspective of tennis I (Izo) would like to know how clear you are about your goals? Because clarity is power, you need to be very clear about your goals. It cannot be a little bit of this and a little bit of that you need to put down on a piece of paper, the things that you want to do.

If you want to achieve those goals, then you need to have a strong why. Your why needs to be very strong, because once you meet obstacles, if you don’t have the strong reason, of why you play tennis or why you want to achieve that goal – you’re going to give up.

The third part of setting goals is that you start from the end. So, you start from who you want to be as a tennis player. What does the greatest version or the grand slam championship version of you look like? Where is that version emotionally, tactically, strategically, technically?

From there you break it down to the first step. From where you’re at and where you want to be, the space in between is a gap. If you do not close that gap, if you don’t bring that goal right outside of your reach, you’re going to create anxiety, you’re going to create a failure. That’s why people give up on their goals. Once you have that first goal, you go to the second habit.

Habit 2 – Take massive action
Not any kind of action. You need to take massive action. What I tell players, you have 24 hours in the day. What do you do with those 24 hours is what are you going to be in the course of a week, month, a year, a lifetime. So, what is massive action? You might be spending 2 hours on court, 1 hour in gym, but it’s not only about that time. It’s about what do you read? What do you feed your brain? What do you drink? Do you stretch?

A reason why people fail is because some day is now, so don’t try to take action tomorrow. For me, this interview with you, we could do it in a week or two weeks or not, but I really want to do it right now. Maybe I’m (Izo) not going to do the best interview or the most professional, but this is my opportunity. So, some day is now. My (Izo) golden rule for success is try fail learn, try, succeed. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. Don’t invent the hot water. If you want to run a marathon, put the shoes on and you run. Probably you can run only 10 minutes right now. That’s it. Next goal is 11 minutes. While you’re failing to do a marathon, you can learn what you need to do in nutrition. I need better shoes. I need to do this. I need to do that. So, for me it’s try, fail, learn, try, succeed.

On the tour I saw these tennis coaches and what I really believe they do great. They make simple better. There is no complexity to it.

Habit 3 – The power of Choice
Between stimulus and response, there is a space called choice. That’s a golden ticket of your life because that’s is making a decision where your life is going. In tennis between losing a point and your next point, you have 20 seconds of choice. What do you do in those 20 seconds is the most important thing. We need to practice that. Practice how you talk because what you vocalize, it’s so important. Do you have a problem or do you have an opportunity? That’s a different take. People ask me what is the opportunity in the problem? I tell them the opportunity in the problem is who you can become to solve that problem. That’s your opportunity. What kind of player, what kind of person do you need to be to solve that problem? That’s your opportunity, my friend.

There is no failing. There’s only learning. And once you see that you realize: “Wow, I’m not a failure.”

You get to a point where opinions of others don’t become your reality. That’s a curse in our society because we think so much about others that we forget to think of who we want to be. That can become a big, big problem, especially for the young minds in tennis. That’s why I want to develop the attitude in the players before anything else, because once you have the right attitude, once you have a right mindset, then we can talk about your technique, then we can go into your footwork. Then we can talk about setting challenges in practice. But before that, before we go into anything, we need to talk about your mindset, and that’s where we come to the 4th habit.

Habit 4 – Willpower
Willpower is small daily disciplines over a period of time. That’s what success is. Successful people protect their time and their habits. They know that how they start and end their day is going to decide a lot of the outcome of the day.

Those are the 4 habits, goals, action, power of choice and willpower.

Once you acquired them in a simple manner, you have what I call IMP-attitude. You don’t need any guru. I’m tired of people charging a lot of money because to be successful is actually very simple. It’s simple and once you dive in with your pure desire and passion, you know what? You’re going to attract the people who will help you, who will take you to another level because they’re going see, “Oh, wow, look at this boy. He’s on the on the wall hitting ball day in and day out. I really want to go and talk to him and see how I can help him”. We naturally get attracted by great attitude.

How to use the traffic light for tactical awareness

When I (Carlos) went to college, I figured that I would end up coaching kids at one point. So, I took a lot of courses in child psychology. The whole idea is that kids generally assimilate best through analogy.  You can tell a kid something, but if you’re not careful how you present that information it gets too complicated for the kid to process it. I you make an analogy; the kid will never forget what you’re trying to say. So, I figured, that we have all of these situations happening in a match because every point is a different situation, which means different pressure.

We have to be able to break it down into basic situations that the kids can relate to. So, when they are under pressure in a match and they don’t know what to do next, they go: “Oh, that’s a green point. That’s how I’m going to play.”  Or “That’s a yellow point. That’s how I’m going to play.”

So, the way I designed it was simple. I broke down the game into two halves. The first half of the game, up to 30. I called it the yellow light. So, it’s a yellow cautionary type of time during a match.

From 30-30 on to the end of the game, the second half of the game. I call it red points. So those are very, very important points because if you make a mistake on a yellow point early on in the game, you can still patch it up. If you made a mistake or a wrong tactic in a red situation it can cost your whole game.

The green light is when you’re up by 2 points or more. 30-0, 40-0 40-15.

So general situations with general strategies.

The strategy for playing yellow is always playing forcing shots, forcing aggressive shots that force the player but with big targets and never hit the last shot of the point. Just always hit next to the last, next to the last and force that player to make an error.

On red points the same aggressiveness, but now increase the margin for error on your shot so you don’t hit as close to lines as you would on a yellow situation or as close to the net. So, you put a little more spin on the ball and a little bigger target. And again, it’s a red situation. And interesting because it’s a red situation for both players at 30-30, 40-40, 30-40, deuce and ad. It’s going on on the same for both sides of the court.

Green is where you are free to basically end the point with your own hands and go for a winner. That’s the only time that you’re allowed to go for a winner because you have a 2 points difference. If that winner does not make it, you will still have another point of advantage to be able to play as a red or as a yellow after that mistake on the green.

So, dividing points into a traffic light analogy creates a sort of a map that is easier for the kids, particularly when they are out there in the middle of the sun fighting a big match where the score is going back and forth.

As a tennis player it’s sometimes difficult to figure it out. What am I going to do at 15-30? You might be so tired that you just press it too hard at 15-30 and you go for a winner and play it as a green rather than a yellow point. That might cost you the whole game. You missed that attempt of a winner at 15-30 and you’re now down 15-40. Now the other guy takes a big green shot at you and he breaks you.  So, the purpose is really to help players with a road map of how to play in different situations during the match.

The difference between hitters and tennis players

How much time is spent NOT playing tennis
In a tennis match, the ball is in play only around 10-15 minutes, maximum out of every hour. So once you think about that, when you’ve got a match the lasted three hours, a long three set match. you only really run and hit balls for 45 minutes. Therefore, the question is what happens in the other 45 minutes of the hour.

If I ask kids that I have coached over the years, they will say:

“We’re picking up balls and we are toweling off”

And while that is all correct, but the player is using every single second of those 45 minutes that the ball is not in play to apply his or her tactics on what went on in the last point. What is going to happen in the next point. In those minutes that the ball is dead that is where the thinking, the mental game is going on. So that’s where a player plays and that’s where a hitter doesn’t play.

The hitter hits the balls in 15 minutes pr. Hour and then 45  minutes of complaining about the sun, the strings, that they are losing or that the opponent hooked them. So the hitter is just so far off constructive thinking that a player is applying in those times and is what the difference is of every hitter and  player.

If you look at today’s top players, you’ll look at Djokovic, Nadal or Federer or not the hour or if you look at their mind, you look at their eyes when the ball is not in play. These people are so intensely connected to that match. While the ball is not in play, they’re playing, but they’re not hitting or running. So that’s the main difference and the proof that the game is a lot more mental then physical and technical.

You can’t just play with your body, your physicality and technique thinking that that wins matches. What wins matches is what the player is doing when he or she is not hitting, when they are not running around the court.

What to do when you’re NOT hitting the ball
Tennis is not just the execution part of the of the game, but the planning and the tactics that goes on. After every point is over, you’ve got 25 seconds between points. A very important thing that a player does is the moment that the ball is dead, and that clock starts and at 25 seconds. The first 2-3 seconds, ok, we are all humans, we are not computers. So we do express ourselves either positively or negatively after a point because we are humans, so our feelings are connected to what happened in the last point. So, if you hit a beautiful passing shot, you might go “VAMOS!”, like Rafa does, or you just double faulted and you might shake your head in disbelief. But that should not take 25 seconds to take 2-3 seconds. The key to get out of that negativity or that pumping up and use your 25 seconds and then being ready for the next point is the following question:

“How is my opponent feeling about the last point?”

Because it doesn’t matter how I’m feeling after the last point, what matters is what a point does to your opponent’s mentality. Your opponent can basically feel 3 different ways.

He or she can be frustrated because the point didn’t go their way.

He or she can be confident because the point went his way.

He or she can be neutral after either a won or a lost point, that didn’t alter their mentality due to it being a well-played point.

So the first 3 seconds, a player shows their frustrations or excitement by the last point. Then the question is, how is my opponent feeling?. That should take another 2 seconds to get to that answer. You have now used 5 seconds of your time before you’re going to play atgain and you have got 20 seconds to figure out what the score is and plan the next point.

Now you know his mentality, how he’s feeling and how you need to be able to do a tactical move. At the end of the 25 seconds you should be prepared to play the point.

Few tennis players have the ability to actually segment those 25 seconds like I just did. They are caught in the emotional part following a point, because they don’t know how to get out. In that way the emotion you travel through the 205seconds and all of a sudden you’ve got to play the next point without being prepared mentally or tactically.

Get to know how your opponent is feeling
A guy like Jimmy Connors, a guy like John McEnroe, the epitome of competitiveness. These guys were out there only, for one thing, to control mentally the opposition. For them it was never about going out there hitting great shots thinking about whether their serve was going well or not or if they were hitting the ball well on the day. all my serve is going well. Jimmy Connors never thought about his strokes. McEnroe, never thought about strokes. What was on their mind was the question of:

How can I control the guy across the net?

Well, the only way you can control the guy across the net is if you know how he is feeling after every single point, isn’t it? Because then you are in control. You can control because you know how he’s feeling.

Most of the hitters, they don’t even know how the guy across the net feels. They don’t even know if the other guy across the net just twisted his ankle. They don’t even know if the guy across the net is shaky. Then comes the score. The score dictates how the opponent is feeling. Plus, the score dictates the tactical move in the next point. So, this is a very important part of being a player.

Another very interesting point, is to look at the mathematics of the game. The hitters don’t even pay attention to that. Real players have a sense of what’s going on throughout the match. They don’t just play, point by point. They have a perspective of the match. They know they’re going to play a match. That could be a 5-set match. It could last 5 hours. They pace themselves through a match. They work themselves through the match and have a perspective on the whole match. Whereas hitters, they’re just playing the next point and the next point without a perspective of how the match is developing.

How to manage your game by understanding the numbers
Understanding the mathematics of the game gets players to manage his or her game better. A regular set, 6-3 you play about 50-60 points. If you go back to your club tomorrow and you go in front of 10 juniors, ask them how many points you play a set most of them will have no clue. They never thought about it. A tiebreaker set goes to 80 to 100 points. Well, how does that work out in terms of breaking down the numbers? Well, if it is 60 points, that means that presumably I would be serving 30 points and you will be serving 30 points.

I would be involved with 30 points and you would be involved with 30 points, right? Well, how does those 30 points break down in order for you to be a player that would be very difficult to beat. Well, I tell you how you can be difficult to beat. If you make 10 unforced errors in the set, if you hit 10 winners in a set and the most important part, if you force 10 errors in a set, those are your 3 areas. So, you gave 10 points, but you won 10 points with winners and then you forced 10 errors. So, you won twice as many points as you gave away. If a player plays with those numbers, 10 winners, 10 unforced 10 forced errors, it’s a very difficult player to beat.

If you can actually do those numbers in a set, it’s going to take a better player across the net that will make, let’s say, 11 unforced errors, will make 4 winners and force 15 times. But it’s very difficult to do that.

An example from Edberg vs Courier
I chartered a match for your information when the finals of 1991 US Open between Edberg and Jimmy Courier.

Jim Courier made 4 unforced errors.

So, you would say, man, that’s unbelievable, in finals of the US Open, Courier made 4 unforced errors in the set. Do you know what the score was in that set? 6-0 Edberg.

Courrier had 4 unforced. Had 3 winners and 4 forced errors. Edberg had 6 unforced, but he had 18 winners and forced Courier 10 times to errors.

The balance between winners, unforced errors and forced errors
So, from the mathematics, it’s not the amount of errors that you make. It’s not the unforced errors or how aggressive you are that decides who wins. Because Courier, even though he did not make any unforced errors, he did not hit any winners. And he did not force any errors because Edberg was on top of him. Edberg was the one that’s hitting winners and was forcing him to error. And even though Courrier did not make more than 4 unforced errors he did not win a game. So that’s a major lesson for people, because going out there and pushing balls over the net only wins in the 12s, but once you pass the 12s and unders you can’t win by just not making unforced errors and not learning how to hit winners and more importantly, learning how to hit, forcing shots, shots that force errors. That’s the main lesson from this part of this interview.

When you coach someone, you don’t even think about the winners. You are only allowed to hit winners when you are in a green point situation when you are up by two points or more. That’s when you can take a risk and go for a winner. The rest of the time, that you are in a yellow or a red situation you are just forcing errors. You’re forcing with high margin and with certain margin for errors because that’s the bread and butter of a champion. Forcing errors is what takes the confidence away from the opponent. Think about it.

If I make an unforced error, the opponent on the other side, confidence go up because it’s like this guy cannot play. I mean, you just missing everything. If your opponent hits a winner, your confidence doesn’t necessarily change that much. You might ask yourself how many more of those kinds of winners will your opponent be able to make?  You don’t necessarily take it that seriously. So, it doesn’t have to affect your confidence. But now when the opponent comes in with a nice approach into your backhand and it pushes you out of balance and now you cannot come out of that hole and he forced you to make an error? Well, the first thing you start thinking, you don’t give him credit. You think that your backhand pass is not working. Well, that’s exactly how I want you to feel, because the more you get frustrated that your backhand pass is not working, the more I am controlling you. Controlling you so that I can win this match.

The opponent eventually is going to realize that he’s not just not missing his backhand passing shot because his backhand passing shot is not working. He is going to realize that he’s playing against a player that is taking him out of balance. And without balance, you cannot make an active, accurate shot. So, what is a forcing shot? A shot that takes the opponent out of balance while he has to make a shot. once you. That limits their ability to come up with a proper shot and there will be errors and that starts wearing people down. So, the bottom line is that this breakdown is very important in going from being a hitter to be a great tennis player.

John McEnroe played with a grip that doesn’t even exist

Q: What do you consider the biggest waste of time or biggest myth in tennis?

Working on the strokes until you can no longer hit a ball. You can become so mental about it that you don’t even know how to hit a ball anymore and that’s bad and I (Carlos) unfortunately see that happening quite a bit. Coaching is not about just getting a stroke perfect. Because it will never be perfect. You have to train the situation rather than practicing individual isolated strokes. So it’s not always about where that backswing is.

Let’s go back in time when John McEnroe was 15 years old and I had not yet developed my coaching philosophy to what it later became.

I said to Mac: “Let me take a look at your grip’s.”

He said: “Why?”

I said: “Well, because I noticed you don’t change grip’s, right?

He says “no”.

I said: “And I noticed that the grip that you use, it doesn’t even have a name!”

So, this is a guy that is this genius that is being one of the greatest players to play our game. He played tennis with a grip that doesn’t even exist.

His grip is somewhere in between a continental and eastern forehand. So, for a forehand, because as it is still between a continental and an eastern forehand, he doesn’t have that ability to really crank a big topspin, obviously.

And on the backhand side all the time, the natural way of the wrist is to be able to slice the ball with that grip. So, I said:  “You will never be able to hit a topspin with that grip. You would have to turn that wrist so much that you’re never going to be able to hit topspin on a flat ball with that grip. And on a forehand, you need to have a little bit more of an Eastern So you can put a little bit more whip on the ball.

Mac says: “Nah, it’s fine.”

Mac has a grip that means that he has a callus in the middle of the palm of his hand that none of us have because we don’t hold the racket the way he does.

And I never forget that I said: “I’m sorry to say this, but if you don’t start changing the grip, I think that you’re going to do okay in the juniors and maybe in the beginning of college, but it’s not going to go to well, later on.”

Now, the guy won all of the stuff that he has won – boy I was wrong.

Why “Play your game” might be misleading advice

I’ve (Carlos) always had a hard time with people that said that.

You do have to know your strengths and what you need to bring in the game, that is the most comfortable game for you because it’s in your DNA. If you are an attacker or if you are more of a defensive player, yes, that’s in your DNA, that’s who you are as a person, and that’s how you bring that game to play.

However, we’re not playing a video game or hitting against the wall. We’re playing against a brain on the other side of the net, and if you do not consider the opponent’s feelings out there every single point before you even strategize what you’re going to do next, you’re missing a big part on how to compete.

So, my point is, that, yes, you do play your own game, but what determines the next shot is the opponent feelings after the last shot.

The 2nd serve is the free throw of tennis

To me a lot of people do not understand how important the 2nd serve is. For me it’s the most important shot in tennis. You either win or you will lose matches with your 2nd serve. And oddly enough, very few people practice the 2nd serve if it is the most important shot in the game.I think that’s something that tennis players should be doing.

Just like when kids are playing basketball in their driveway if they have a basketball hoop. over their garage. They are practicing free throws since they’re 8 years old. They practice free throws so that when you do get to a match and you are a basketball player and it could 1 second left in the clock, these guys rarely miss their free throw. They come into that line. They’ve got their routine. They do exactly the same routine for years and years and years. They go in there and “boom” and it’s just nothing but net.

Well, the free throw is the 2nd serve for a tennis player and a tennis player should get to know their 2nd serve to the point where he or she can take that 2nd serve as his ally to the battle rather than his enemy to the battle.

Why you need to know which 1st serve you are practicing

So, you have to practice those kinds of situational shots rather than a shot, just like a serve.

It seems to me that still people haven’t caught up on this. After all these years, you see kids getting a lot of balls and go on a tennis court and pound serves for like 20 minutes. Sometimes I can’t help myself and I walk in and I look at the kid and I say: “So what serve are ou practicing?”

They might answer: “My first serve.”

I respond: “Which first serve?

The kid goes “My first serve”

I go: “Which?”

”Oh, you mean flat or slice?”

“No, I mean which first serve. Is it the 40-0 serve the 30-30 all first serve or the 15-40 first serve -which first serve? So, it takes the kids a while to figure this out that every single first serve is a different first serve.

So, when you are practicing the first serve you always need to know which first serve you are practicing.

You want to practice in situations so that when you’re in a match, you’ve already hit that second serve 15-30 100 times in a practice. You’ve already simulated that 15-30 feeling or that 30-30 or 40-0 feeling. And then, of course, that grips with the philosophy of those lights, the yellow points that you probably saw it in the book and the green points, and the red points is a very simple analogy

When I directed the Nike Camps nobody ever served a bucket of balls. When it was time to serve the kids were playing games against themselves. So, you have a target put in 1 the corners of the box. E.g. the 2 corners of the box have a target. Now you have yourself basically three targets. You have the target out wide, the down the T, and then you have the body target in between the target.

So, 1 drill that can help you to get more confident on your serve is to serve, e.g. a game against yourself. You can go ahead and extend that into a whole set. You can play 6 games if you like to. The idea is, if it’s 0-0, what kind of first serve do you open up with in the game? Are you going to go for a bomb and already have the chance that you missed the first serve and now you’ve got to open up your service game with a 2nd serve that allows your opponent to jump on it and become aggressive against you right off the bat, possibly putting you already in a hole at 0-15?

Most of the time the correct serve to serve at 0-0 at the first point of the game is obviously a three quarter first serve that gets in there. It doesn’t have to be a bomb or the biggest first serve you have ever put in, but make sure that you increase your chances of starting that first point with your first serve so that the opponent is not aggressive. Because when we return first serves, we are reacting.

When we miss the first serve, the opponent become aggressive. So, you don’t want to allow that player to become aggressive right off the bat on a 0-0 point.

Then the serving drill progresses from there. So, the drill goes that if you then try a three quarters serve, to the backhand and you miss the target, but made it in the box then it doesn’t count. Now, you got to put a 2nd serve in there and then you  have to call the 2nd serve. E.g. I’m going to the backhand. You get the 2nd serve in to the backhand and it’s 15-0. If you on the other hand don’t get your 2nd serve into the backhand corner. Then it’s 0-15 and then you got to figure out what 1st serve to now come up with at 0-15. put that 1st serve now. If you didn’t start with a bomb at 0-0 then much less now you want to go for a bomb on the 1st serve. now you’re still going to work on your three quarter 1st serve so that you can get back into 15-15.

Then of course, if you get to a 40-15, then go for a bomb and go for the ace.  So, let the players work with scores and targets, but understanding which serve, they actually have to hit for each particular situation in order for them to get confidence on how to hold serve easier as the match progresses. At the end of the day, the basic strategy of the game is protect your serve and go for 1 break because that’s our bottom line.

If we can do that then we are going to win the sets 6-4 or 6-3. So, we need to help players understand how they protect their serve and how they hold their serve. Serving smarter over serving harder.

Pancho Gonzalez in the past was a great example of this. He used to be the guy that hit the biggest serve of all times. Players in the 60s used to be afraid of Pancho’s 1st serve. Oddly enough, he was interviewed 1 time. I read that interview and they said: “Pancho, you’re 1st serve is so intimidating. You’re hitting it at 130 miles an hour. How can you do that day in, day out?

He says, I don’t. I do just a couple 130 miles an hour. The rest of them, they think that I’m popping them at 130, but I’m not. I’m just serving smart and holding easy. So Pacho knew that there was more than purely serving hard going into holding serve.. But talking about the serve, I think one important point that you probably read in the book is that I believe that the most important shot of our game in people do not.