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WIMBLEDON, England — As defending champion Iga Swiatek won 16 of the first 17 points in her match with Karolina Pliskova at Wimbledon on Thursday, last year’s final must have flashed into Swiatek’s mind.
Similar to 12 months ago, when she blitzed Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 to win the title for the first time, Swiatek was seemingly “in the zone.”
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It’s a state that every tennis player wants to achieve — that blissful sensation where everything seems to be working to perfection. But when they try to find it, it invariably doesn’t happen.
For top athletes in any sport, it’s a frustrating paradox.
“Try to imagine how difficult it is [for players] that, in order to achieve something, you need to get rid of your desire to achieve,” Daria Abramowicz, the longtime sports psychologist of Swiatek, told ESPN.
“This is a paradox because they’ve been taught all their lives that if they train enough, they will achieve anything that they want.”
In psychological terms, being “in the zone” is “a complex state of processes of cognition coming from the learned and controlled part to more of an automatic part,” Abramowicz stated. “That’s the sensation that it gives the athletes.”
Essentially, it’s a feeling that the body is doing what it needs to do, without the mind getting in the way and with the minimum of conscious effort. Players feel they are performing perfectly, almost without thinking.
If anyone knows what it’s like to be in the zone, it’s Swiatek, who has won so many 6-0 or 6-1 sets in the past few years that a website popped up calling itself Iga’s Bakery, charting the number of bagels and breadsticks she was dishing out.
In last year’s final at Wimbledon, while Anisimova seemed frozen with nerves, Swiatek barely missed.
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“For sure, it felt great. I know in my mind I can be focused. I’m not going to waste points and let them go for free,” she stated after last year’s final.
The golfer, Ernie Els, once stated that to be great at sports, it was beneficial not to be overly intelligent. Much easier, he surmised, if your mind is blank when you’re standing over a crucial putt.
“I hear that a lot, from old coaches,” Abramowicz stated. “It’s probably connected to the idea of not trying to control things that you can’t control, no overthinking, no second-guessing, because overthinking and second-guessing are the cognitive traps that our mind goes into.
“But in my line of work, it’s very challenging because when athletes experience this state, they really want to repeat it and it’s difficult; the more you try to repeat that, you try to understand the formula like it’s a mathematic problem to solve in a way, cause-and-effect situation, the less likely this will happen.”
When Swiatek lost in the fourth round of the French Open last month, she talked about an inner dialogue, not being able to quiet her mind when she needed to. Getting into the zone, when her mind is cluttered, is not possible.
Abramowicz stated, in moments like that, it’s the physical tennis training that can pull an athlete through, and hopefully into the zone they wish to be in. But it’s not easy — or an exact process.
“It’s years of training … in order to be able to even give yourself a chance to have these moments where this control will go down a little bit and you will use more automatic processes, so your brain will remember more, so your brain will be able to to kind of recreate what you’ve learned for so many years.”
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