1. They prolong the mental stress. When you are preparing to play a match (especially if it is very important to you), you are under a lot of stress.
There are possibilities of losing the match and that can mean a lot of different things to different players.
For some players this can be very painful – either only emotionally or in reality – not earning the prize money for the flight home.
And this prolonged mental stress takes its toll on the mental fitness of players.
Eventually their mental toughness becomes not so tough and they are much more vulnerable to distractions and reacting emotionally to unwanted events on or off the court.
2. It’s hard to activate yourself 100% many times in a short time. When you start the match for the first time, you are ready to go, you have a clear game plan and hopefully you are in a fighting mode – to grind it out to the end.
After one or two rain delays it’s much harder to get pumped up again and be 100% focused on the match.
You need extra mental effort to activate yourself and artificially raise your activation level which at the start of the match was already there because of the exciting situation – playing an important match.
3. Players don’t relax enough in the rain break. And thus they keep expending their mental energy and eventually “run out of steam”.
The key to dealing with rain delays is to:
1. Be able to relax when the rain delay comes and save physical and mental energy
2. Be able to activate yourself to the same state of motivation and determination that you had at the start of the match
3. Accept them as part of the challenges of playing professional tennis. IT IS that difficult.
“Just got to be prepared to do it,” Hewitt said. “This is how you win majors. Whatever hand you’re dealt, you got to deal with it.”
Article from http://www.tennisthoughts.com/
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