Ep. 290 - Find Your Intensity Goldilocks Zone

Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement.

I hope you have a great week.

My name is Tony Roy.

I'm your host of this weekly podcast bringing you tips and helpful information to get you

not just general pickable improvement that we do that sometimes, but oftentimes we find

ourselves talking about the mental aspects of Pickleball, the mind, such a powerful part

of our experience and our engagement with the sport.

I just finished a recording of a podcast with my friend Natasha Linton and my new friend

Neely Steinberg from the Real Housewives of Pickleball.

We talked about a whole bunch of stuff.

I highly recommend you check out that episode when it drops.

But one of the things that I was that they had discussed in a prior episode of their podcast

was about a comment that was made by Leah Janssen, a professional player about intensity.

In other words, about the idea of intensity and being too intense when you were in a practice.

Basically, when something like this were, Leah was on the Picklepod podcast, the one by

Zayn Navratil and Nico Volefte, and she was talking about players who say, come on when

they're in what she calls a practice session, which is just a right game or a non-sanction,

like a non-tornament game.

Basically, she'll show me your an amateur without telling me your an amateur by saying, come

on during a right game.

Her take was that you shouldn't act like you just won Wimbledon or something during a

right game.

That got me thinking about this concept of intensity.

I'm going to dive into the concept of intensity in this podcast.

We're going to talk about levels of intensity and how to maintain it while you're playing.

This will help you while you're out there on the court.

Before we dive into that, I wanted to address the comment by Leah about saying, come on

when you're in a right game.

I think the issue there actually has to do with context.

Leah is a professional player.

The highest expression of the game for her is a championship Sunday match at the PPA.

That's the highest expression.

Obviously, any PPA tournament game would be a high expression of the game for her.

For the average player, when's the morning at the local facility or at the YMCA or on

the local courts?

Probably going to be the highest expression of the game for us.

I think I would disagree with Leah on her framing of it.

She's saying that as a pro player, she's not going to say, come on in a right game.

I respect that.

That's perfectly fine.

That's her right to do that.

But I think as a rec player, if you're in your Wimbledon, you're playing in your Wimbledon

and you're excited about it, I think it's perfectly fine to share that excitement with

your emotions, with your statements.

I'm on and things like that are perfectly fine.

I'll be playing both tournaments and rec.

There's rec times when I'm playing with my group and we're having a fun time and then

there's a really nice shot and we'll hoot and holler and do whatever.

Just having a good time and enjoying the sport and enjoying this activity.

Let's talk about intensity in terms of our playing.

How can we navigate that?

How can we manage our intensity a little better?

intensity is the idea of, you can think about it being like a same as focus, intensity,

focus, drive, being in the moment, if you will, while you're playing, being locked in

in terms of what's going on on the court.

I think what Leo was talking about was the expression of that intensity through a

come on and things like that.

That's just really like a safety, not a safety, but a release valve.

You have the pressure cooker, you know, a little thing that goes on, let's go to the

pressure.

Oftentimes those commands and things like that are those types of things.

Let's talk about how we sometimes intensity and being too intense actually can't hamper

our play and then talk a little bit about the ebb and flow of focus, the ebb and flow

of intensity while we're playing out there.

I want to start with this idea of redlining.

There's something that I've been looking at for a while now.

As I study this game, as I study players to do it.

In the pro game, there's a couple of players on the women's side.

Kate Fahey is pretty well known for being redlining, screaming directly at their opponent

in their face kind of a thing.

In the men's side, recently last year, it was Federico Staxrude was doing a lot of that

where he wasn't yelling at his opponent, but he was letting out these huge, almost

like, were we'll transforming in the middle of the night kind of house after rallies.

What I've found is, and more in Federico than on Kate, because I've studied more Federico's

matches towards the end of tournaments when I do my breakdowns, is I've noticed when

he was doing it, you could see a negative effect based on what would happen next.

You see, like, uncharacteristic misses and things like that.

Shortly after the big outburst, the big release, my sense of that is that, I think, I

think that what was happening was it was just too much release.

It was almost like letting out too much steam from the pressure cooker, if you will,

and then you don't have enough pressure left to keep focusing, to keep going.

That's something I think it's worth considering right when you're playing out there, is if you're

letting off a lot of emotion while you're playing, whether it's commands, whether it's

other things like that, you're mindful of letting too much steam out of the pressure cooker,

because just like in a pressure cooker, you actually do want pressure in there, right?

You want to finish cooking the beans or whatever you have cooking in there.

If you release too much pressure, then they're not going to cook, which doesn't get the

job done.

When you're playing pickleball, it's natural to feel pressure, right?

I think I like Billie Jean King, the tennis great quote on this, where she said, pressure

is a good thing because pressure lets you know that you care, right?

Feeling pressure lets you know that you care about the activity.

Pressure itself isn't bad.

Too much pressure can be bad.

Letting off too much pressure can be bad.

So it's finding like a nice balance of pressure like the pressure cooker and keeping that going.

And I think redlining or going too far on the either letting out too much pressure or

expressing too much pressure, I think can be troubling.

And likewise, you can also, you can have too low, right?

You can go too low on the focus or on the intensity side.

And that happens, right?

Sometimes what happens is you're out there and maybe you're feeling some negative energy

from your partner and things like that so that can then affect you the other way, right?

The intensity can go too low.

So what can you do to find this balance of intensity, right?

That's going to get you through the match in the best way possible.

One thing would be, we each need to know ourselves, okay?

For some players, you're more chill.

Other players, you're less chill, right?

That's just for personality.

That's just how you are.

And what you want to do is find the Goldilocks zone that works for you, right?

Find the balance of intensity, right?

Without redlining, without going too far, that allows you to then stay in the moment, focus

on what's going on.

Focus allows your brain clarity, right?

To be able to do the job out there.

And again, it's going to be different for you.

I don't have a one size fits all here in terms of get to intensity level number five for

you.

But one way to think about it would be using a scale, right?

So you could say, okay, on a 10 would be completely out of my mind out there, right?

Intensity, it's too much.

I'm going to get crushed under the amount of pressure that I'm feeling right now.

And then a 1 would be like, I don't care less about what happens right now.

I would say for most of us, if you can get to like six to seven intensity, right?

And keep it there the whole time, you're going to be good.

That's where like, you know, these outbursts of like come on and stuff like that, can potentially

be detrimental.

I'm not saying not to do it, right?

But say like you're trying to stay within a six or seven, right?

And you're like right at a seven or seven point one.

And you say come on or a big high five of your partner or a chest bump or something like

that.

Probably going to stay around there.

If you're around a six to seven and all of a sudden you're like screaming like a crazy

person out there and letting go everything, what happens is you go from a six to seven,

maybe you're down to a three next time, right?

Because you've released so much energy.

And one way to think about this piece that might help you is think about like when you

finish the game.

So you have a game that's a pressure game, right?

So you're in one of these pressure games and it's just you feeling all the tension.

And then the game ends, right?

There's a cathartic release, right?

It's very natural.

You have this cathartic release that happens.

After the cathartic release, you're not going to be able to perform the same thing.

You're going to be able to perform like you did two minutes ago while you were in the middle

of the 10th match.

There's a really interesting story that happened to a tennis player, Brad Gilbert.

He wrote things called winning ugly.

And you know, he was a top tennis player back in the day, but he, you know, he was very

good player, but he never really got to the ranks of like a Mac and Rowe or Conners.

He was just like right underneath that level of notoriety and success.

But there was a match where he was playing Jimmy Conners.

I think about him in the open, but he's playing Jimmy Conners and he hadn't been Jimmy

Conners.

And so Jimmy Conners hits on match point, hits an overhead.

It goes, it's long or out of bounds.

I don't know as long or wide, but it's out.

It's called out.

Jimmy comes up, I'm sorry, Brad comes up to the net to shake Jimmy's hands, you know,

and basically when it, when the ball is out, called out, Brad releases everything.

It's just all out, right?

And Jimmy decides to challenge a call with a ref.

This is back before all the videos and stuff like that.

And the way Brad tells the story after like three or four minutes, the ref over rules

the call and calls it in.

And what Brad said, right?

And in his, in his description of what happened was he was toast, but he was done.

He had already released all of that energy, all of that intensity, all of that pressure

right inside the pressure cooker was gone.

He'd opened the lid basically.

And so now he just didn't have anything left to give and then Jimmy ended up beating

him in that match.

But the idea here is, is, you know, you want to monitor your intensity and you want to

get it around that, you know, six to seven range for yourself and then do your best to

keep it in that six and range, avoiding like, you know, excessive outbursts.

And also avoiding, I would submit avoiding artificial bump ups.

So an artificial bump up to me and we see this a lot in the pro games when we're at the

tournaments watching matches, is you'll see the team go back to serve, right?

And the two players, they're trying to pump each other up so they're like, let's go,

you know, it's go time now.

Now, now's our time.

Let's go.

Let's go, you know, all the time.

And they just do it.

They do it incessantly, right?

Let's go.

All, let's go.

Now, let's go.

Here's the thing.

If you use that all the time, guess what?

It loses its, it's meaning, right?

It loses its, its power.

It's, its impact.

So if you want to use those kind of things like, okay, let's go or let's hunker down.

Just focus.

Use them sparingly, right?

Use them when appropriate.

Pick, you know, pull them out of your pocket and apply them, right?

Use the card, if you will, when it makes sense to do so and when you really need it.

If you use it all the time, then what are you going to use when you actually need something?

Because if you just think, let's go all the time, then what's the let's go for when

you really, really, really want to let's go, right?

So consider that idea, right?

That over utilizing tools that are intended to, to prop up your intensity.

One thing that we teach in our coaching is, in our camps and things like that is like,

you know, return to serve position is actually critical, right?

Where you're standing to return serve, being in a, in a, in a ready body position is important,

right?

In every rally.

But then the idea is when you get into like a rally that is particularly important, right?

Particularly meaningfuls like 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 8, whatever, something like that.

Something like that.

Okay, we got to get this one.

What I tell students is to crouch down a little bit more.

So wherever you're standing, you basically come down like an inch or an inch and a half

more, right?

That alerts your mind that, wait a minute, okay, there's something happening, right?

That I need to pay more attention to.

And that gets you ready to, you know, like the, the alert is up, right?

So the, the, everything's, you know, the red lights are flashing and you got to pay attention

now.

It's super effective, works very well, but it wouldn't work well if you did it all the

time.

So if you basically squat it down an extra inch and a half every rally, now that becomes

your new baseline, your new normal level of intensity, right?

And so now you're going to have to lower three inches, right?

Whatever.

So it's the kind of these techniques of let's go or hey, you know, let's, let's hunker

down now.

It's that kind of thing, use those sparingly to get you to that again, 6 to 7, I think

is a good range to think of in terms of intensity.

And then the last thing I want to leave you with on this is understand that your intensity

or your focus is going to ebb and flow.

There's no way that you can operate at 100% max focus, max intensity for an entire session.

It's just not a thing, you know, and to expect that of yourself, then just puts too much

stress on you, right?

Too much negative stress, too much like worrying about it.

Like, wow, how come I'm like, not at 100% all the time?

You know, just not not doable, guys, even even the even the pros, right?

Pro players at every sport, they have ebb and flows and their focus.

They're trying to do is maintain that 6 to 7, right?

They understand that and they might dip a little bit, my pop up a little bit, right?

But if I can kind of keep it in that operating range, that works best for me, that Goldilocks

intensity level, that's going to be the best for me and my performance.

But I do understand that there are times that like I was playing just yesterday and you

know, like there was a serve and I had some reason I had looked at something right before

the serve was hit and like off to the, in the distance, right?

And we're in a new facility.

I saw something, come I, whatever it was, come I, and then I looked down, ready to return

serve and I missed the return of serve because I was still thinking about the thing that

I had looked at, right?

And I'm going to be myself about that, not going to be like, oh my God, how did I do that?

I can't believe I did that and whatever it's just, it's okay.

It's life, part of the deal, no big deal.

And then you just come back to what's the next rally, let's get going.

Let's keep working within the six to seven range and keep your intensity around there.

The better you are at avoiding and the super highs and the super lows, the better you're

going to play, understanding that you will have some movement up and down in that process.

So hopefully this helps you.

The next time you play, you know, regulating your intensity, regulating your focus, keeping

it within a band that works.

If you have a really exciting rally and you want to let it out, don't listen to any of

us to stop you from doing that.

Enjoy the game like it's your bubble done and have fun when you're out there.

So hope you enjoyed this week's podcast.

If you enjoyed it, please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you listen to podcasts.

And as always, have a great week and I will see you next time on Pickable Therapy.

Do well.