Most tennis players have had days when they arrive on the court feeling physically fit but mentally drained. Yet, when the match starts, routine shots can’t seem to find the court. Tactical decisions come sluggishly, and careless errors that don’t reflect expected performance pile up. This is typically characterized as an “off” day.
A recently published study in Frontiers in Psychology suggests something quite different may be happening.
Researchers recruited competitive tennis players and subjected them to three different experimental conditions before evaluating both attention and groundstroke performance. One group completed a mentally fatiguing task designed to deplete cognitive resources. The remaining participants served as placebo and control groups. All three groups then completed standardized attention testing, followed by a series of groundstroke drills to measure shot accuracy.
The results were striking. Players who had been mentally fatigued performed significantly worse on both the attention measures and the tennis drills. Their strokes were less accurate, and their ability to maintain attention declined as well.
At first glance, that conclusion sounds almost self-evident. Tired people don’t play good tennis. However, that is not actually what the study demonstrated. The players were not physically exhausted. Rather, they were cognitively fatigued. Their muscles remained fully capable of producing quality tennis. It was the mental processes responsible for attention, decision-making, and execution that were degraded.
This study has important implications for tennis players everywhere.
One recurring theme on this site is that we often misdiagnose problems by focusing on visible symptoms rather than underlying root causes. A player who is spraying their forehand may conclude that they are experiencing a breakdown in technique. This study suggests another possibility. Perhaps nothing is wrong with the stroke at all. Rather, the issue might be that the brain is simply overloaded. That negatively impacts shot selection, concentration, and execution.
Viewed from that perspective, tennis matches begin long before the on-court warm-up begins. Many adult tennis players arrive at the courts hot on the heels of making important decisions and commuting through heavy traffic, all while juggling family responsibilities. Every one of those activities consumes cognitive resources. By the time the first ball is struck, the body may be fresh enough to compete, but the brain is already operating well below its peak.
Tennis is uniquely demanding in this regard because every point requires a continuous cycle of observation, prediction, decision, execution, and adjustment. Unlike many sports where physical ability can occasionally compensate for poor decision-making, tennis repeatedly asks players to solve new problems under severe time constraints. Mental sharpness is one of the sport’s core performance requirements.
That realization also changes how we should think about match preparation. Most players devote considerable attention to preparing their equipment and bodies. Those preparations all matter, but this research suggests that our cognitive state deserves similar attention.
The encouraging aspect of this research is that it offers a more constructive explanation for those inexplicably sloppy matches that every player occasionally experiences. Instead of assuming that technique has suddenly deteriorated, perhaps the better question is whether our brains were possibly depleted long before we ever stepped onto the court.
Mental preparation matters.
- Impact of mental fatigue on tennis players’ attention and groundstroke performance, Öztürker C, Şahan A and Erman KA, Frontiers in Psychology, 01 May 2025.
