Mental quickness: Net gains

By , published on January 01, 1970 - last reviewed on September 03, 2009

Tennis great Arthur Ashe once noted that a successful player needs quick hands, quick feet, and a quick brain.

But while coaches enthusiastically teach the first two, they've pretty much ignored mental quickness. Their rationale: If you're not born with it, you'll never develop it.

Not so, insists esteemed sports psychologist Robert Singer, Ph.D. In a study at the University of Florida--sacred to sports buffs as the birthplace of Gatorade--Singer and his colleagues showed that even novices can train their brains to react more quickly.

The key, says Singer, is to look for the right cues. Take hockey As an opposing player prepares to shoot, amateur goalies tend to watch the puck. Seems logical enough, but professional goaltenders focus mostly on the shooter's stick. That tells them the pucks probable speed and destination even before the shot is complete.

Then there's tennis. When a player who's serving tosses the ball a bit behind him, it's a clue the serve may have lots of spin. A forward serve, though, will probably be flat.

In the Florida study, Singer and colleagues assigned beginning tennis players to a three-week regimen of physical- or mental-quickness training. While the physical group endured agility drills, the mental group received a crash course in anticipatory cues.

At the end of the program, both groups watched videotaped matches and tried to predict the direction and type of serves and ground strokes. The mental-quickness group made more accurate predictions, on average, than their physical-training counterparts--and they did so about a tenth of a second faster, the Florida researchers report in The Sport Psychologist.

How much of an advantage that confers in an actual game is hard to measure, admits Singer. But since even a 50-mile-per-hour serve--a glacial speed in tennis--scampers seven feet during that tenth of a second, the extra time sure couldn't hurt.