Am I Learning or Am I Getting Worse?

There is a conversation I have had more times than I can count.

A player comes to me with a problem. A forehand that floats. A backhand that collapses under pressure. A serve that disappears when it matters most. They've been living with it long enough that it has a name in their head — my bad forehand, my weak backhand, my nervous serve. They've decided it's a flaw. Something broken that needs fixing.

I watch them hit. I see exactly what's happening. And then I tell them something that almost nobody wants to hear.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better."

Not because I'm trying to manage expectations. Not because I want to soften the blow. Because it's the truth — and because the players who can hear that truth and stay anyway are the ones who actually change.

What's Actually Happening When You "Get Worse"

Here's what nobody explains when you start working on a technical change: your body already has a swing. It has been building that swing for months or years. Every repetition, every match, every warm-up has carved a groove — and that groove runs deep. Muscle memory isn't a metaphor. It's a real neurological pattern that your body has practiced into reliability.

When I ask you to change something fundamental — the angle of your racket face, the timing of your contact, the way your wrist releases through the swing — I am asking your nervous system to interrupt a pattern it has spent years making automatic. And for a while, the new thing and the old thing are going to fight each other. The new movement feels foreign. Unreliable. Wrong. Balls go into the net that used to clear it. Errors show up in places you never missed before.

This is not regression. This is reorganization.

The player who quits at this point doesn't quit because they failed. They quit because nobody told them this is exactly what progress looks like from the inside.

Off the court, this looks like the first three months of a new job where you were excellent at your last one. Or the first weeks of a new relationship where you're trying to communicate differently than you always have. Or therapy — where things often feel harder before they feel easier, because you're finally looking at what was always there. The groove of who you've been runs just as deep as the groove of how you swing. Changing either one feels like losing ground. It isn't. It's the cost of admission to something better.

What I Actually Ask of My Players

When I take someone through a technical rebuild, I make one thing very clear before we start: I do not want back-to-back lessons to hammer something into place. I do not want you drilling the same motion for two hours until it feels right.

I want you to do the work. Feel it. Then walk away and let your body process what just happened.

Your brain is not finished learning when you leave the court. It continues working — consolidating, filing, integrating — long after you've put the racket down. Sleep is when most of that work happens. So is rest. So is the quiet space between sessions where you're not trying to force anything.

This is why I push once and then let go. Not because I'm not invested. Because I trust the process more than I trust the urgency.

Off the court, this looks like the person who reads every book on a topic but never gives themselves time to just sit with what they've learned. Or the one who has the same hard conversation with their partner over and over in the same week, wondering why nothing changes. Change needs space. It needs time that isn't filled with more input. Some of the most important work you will ever do happens when you are not actively doing anything at all.

One Word

In the middle of a lesson — when the frustration is highest and the errors are most visible — I give my players one thing to think about. Not a checklist. Not a set of corrections. One word.

BRUSH. For the player learning to generate topspin — to feel the racket head accelerate upward through contact, the wrist loose, the strings grazing the ball from low to high.

UP. For the player who keeps finishing their swing at shoulder height instead of letting it carry all the way through and over.

BREATHE. For the player whose tension lives in her chest and travels directly into her grip.

One word. Said internally, with every single shot. Not as a command — as a reminder. A place to put your attention so the rest of your mind has nowhere to spiral.

Because here is the thing about learning: you can only hold one thought at a time anyway. The players who try to fix everything at once fix nothing. The players who pick one word and commit to it — who stop trying to hit the ball in the court and start feeling every part of what they are doing — those players come back two weeks later and something has shifted.

Not because I pushed them harder. Because they listened.

Off the court, this is the person who makes a list of twelve things they want to change about themselves in January and changes none of them by March. Focus doesn't mean caring about less. It means choosing where your attention lives. One word. One intention. One thing you come back to when everything else gets loud. That's not a tennis tip — that's how human beings actually change.

Stop Trying to Hit It In

This is the hardest instruction I give. And I give it constantly.

Stop trying to hit the ball in the court.

For a competitive player — for anyone who has played long enough to care about the outcome — this instruction feels like professional malpractice. You came here to play better. To miss less. To win more. And I'm telling you not to think about where the ball goes?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm telling you.

Because the moment you make the outcome the focus, your body stops learning and starts managing. It finds the safest version of the swing you already have. It protects the groove it knows instead of building the one you need. You make the ball — and you stay exactly where you are.

Instead: feel your grip pressure. Two or three during the swing, briefly four at contact, and then release. Feel where your weight is at the moment you swing. Feel when you make the decision to go. Feel what your non-dominant hand is doing. Watch the ball — not as a target but as information, all the way to the strings.

Be here. Be aware. Pick your one word. And let the ball go where it goes.

The court will tell you the truth. Your job is just to be present enough to hear it.

Off the court, this is the meeting where you're so focused on how you're coming across that you stop actually listening to the room. The first date where you're performing instead of connecting. The job interview where you're trying so hard to say the right thing that you forget to just be the right person. Outcome focus kills presence. And presence is almost always the thing that was going to get you what you wanted anyway.

Trust and Effort. That's All I Need.

When I start working with a player on something real — something that requires unlearning before it requires relearning — I ask for two things.

Trust. And effort.

Not perfection. Not results. Not a timeline. Just: show up, do the work I ask you to do, and believe that the discomfort you're feeling is not failure. It is the feeling of your body building something new.

The players who give me those two things always get there. Not always on the schedule they imagined. Not always in the way they expected. But they get there — and when they do, the shot doesn't feel like something they fixed. It feels like something they found.

Something that was always there, underneath the old pattern, waiting for enough patience and enough trust to surface.

Off the court, the people who change — really change, not just temporarily — are almost never the ones who forced it. They're the ones who found something or someone worth trusting, committed their effort fully, and stopped grading themselves on a timeline that was never realistic to begin with. Growth is not a deadline. It's a direction.

So if you are in the middle of a technical change right now and it feels like you are getting worse — good.

If you are in the middle of any kind of change and it feels like you are getting worse — good.

That means something is actually happening.

Stay.

Niba N'tcha is a USPTA-certified tennis professional and the founder of ThinkinPoints, a coaching and performance education brand for adult players. She is the Head of Adult Racquets at The Country Club in Brookline, MA.

This is part of an ongoing series. Start from the beginning at thinkinpoints.com.