Why your tennis fix keeps creeping back (and how to stop it)

You take a lesson.

Your coach changes something small. For the last twenty minutes, it works. The ball goes where you want it to go, and you walk off the court feeling sharp.

A week later, you’re hitting the same shot the old way. Nobody told you to go back to it. It just quietly crept in again.

For me, it always was finishing short balls with my forehand. For some reason, as soon as the match started, my fast-swing forehand would abandon me and I would have to try and close points with a chokey and slower stroke.

If you’ve played tennis for a while, you probably recognize this. And you start asking yourself questions:

For a long time, I thought the answer was in the fix itself. But when I looked at how people actually learn a movement, something clicked. The problem is rarely the correction. It’s what happens around it.

Here are four reasons why fixes tend not to last.

1. Performance: it looks like learning, but it isn’t

Performance is how well you hit right now. Learning is a lasting change that is still there next week.

Those two can come apart. In their review, Soderstrom and Bjork (2015) argue that how well you perform during practice is often an unreliable sign of how much you have actually learned. A fix can look perfect at the end of a session and be gone a few days later.

Most lessons are built to make you look better during the lesson. Same feed, same movement, again and again, until it clicks. That feels like progress. And to be fair, part of it is. But repeating a change right after being told about it says little about whether you’ll still have it on match day.

2. Internal focus: the way a tip is worded matters

Tips like “keep your elbow in” or “bend your knees” tell you to think about your body. Tips like “brush up the back of the ball” or “finish toward the target” point at what the movement does.

Researchers call these an internal focus and an external focus. Wulf’s (2013) review of 15 years of research concluded that an external focus improves both performance and learning compared with an internal one. A later meta-analysis found the same advantage across age groups, health conditions, and skill levels (Chua et al., 2021).

The same correction can stick or fade, depending on how it is phrased. And “more topspin” or “stay low” doesn’t tell you where to look at all.

3. Easy practice: comfortable now, gone later

Hitting the same ball over and over feels great. It also makes the session look great.

But Schmidt and Bjork (1992) showed that practice conditions that boost performance during training can reduce what you retain and what you can carry over to new situations. Giving learners more frequent information about their errors during practice, for example, improved performance in training but could hurt later retention and transfer. Adding variation made practice look worse in the moment and helped later.

On court, this means a fix that works in a tidy drill can disappear in a rally, where every ball is different and you have no time to think. It’s also why problems return under match pressure, even if you had them “fixed” in training.

4. The blind spot: you can’t see what you’re doing

I guess this last one is easy to miss. What you feel you do is often not what you actually do.

You think you took the racket back early, and on video it’s late. You think you turned your shoulders, and they barely moved.

And the mistake you notice is usually the end of a chain. In my experience, a late forehand often starts with the first step or with how you load your legs, not with the backswing. So you fix the symptom, the cause stays where it was, and the old habit pulls you back.

Together, these four make a fix feel much more solid than it is.