Marginal Gains: Preparing for Competition

Start your prematch warmup with a limited number of easy rallies. In this series, we have looked in depth at the way you can use to strengths of your game in matches in ways that lead to winning that extra handful of critical points that are the difference in close matches. In this article, let's see how you can create additional marginal gains during your preparation for those matches. As the saying goes "If you fail to prepare, then prepare to fail." We could at this point delve deep into things like physical fitness, diet, and nutrition. This is not my area of expertise, and should you want to embark on a longer-term plan to make progress in these areas, there is a wealth of information elsewhere on this site and in the larger coaching world to help you do that. Instead, my focus is on ideas that you can adopt tomorrow, to be better prepared than your opponent, and achieve a marginal gain that will help boost your chances of success. Preparation before matches is almost all about your pre-match warm-up. I'm not talking about the 5 minutes you'll get with your opponent(s). To me preparation means warming up...