Why your tennis level feels stuck (and what actually moves it)

You play every week.

You rally, you play matches, maybe you take a lesson now and then. And somewhere along the way, you stopped getting better.

The same strokes, the same unforced errors, the same level you had two years ago.

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

I feel like the answer is hiding in a place most players don’t look. When I read about how skills develop, something clicked. A plateau isn’t a verdict on you. It’s what a well-learned skill looks like when nothing asks more of it.

Here are four reasons why.

1. Automation: your game became comfortable

Ericsson (2006) describes how everyday skills develop in three phases. In the first two, you think about what you do. In the third, the skill becomes automatic. For everyday activities such as typing, driving, and playing tennis, an acceptable level is typically reached in less than 50 hours.

Once a skill is automated, performance reaches a stable plateau. Ericsson (2006) writes that when behaviors are automatized, mere additional experience will not lead to increased levels of performance. He also notes that many people, such as amateur tennis players and golfers, are satisfied with an acceptable level and then maintain it with little effort for years.

That is not a flaw. For most of us, tennis is a game, not a job. But it does explain why another hour on court doesn’t move you.

2. Playing is not practicing

A match shows you the score. It doesn’t show you the cause.

If you keep playing at the same difficulty, you maintain your level. Improving, in Ericsson’s (2006) description, means setting specific goals for particular aspects of performance and designing practice that lets you refine them, with feedback and repetition.

So an hour of matches and an hour of practice can feel the same and do very different things. I wrote more about why drills and matches differ in another article.

3. Difficulty: aim between too easy and too hard

Guadagnoli and Lee (2004) proposed that learning depends on the information that comes out of your performance. That information should be tuned to two things: the difficulty of the task, and the skill level of the performer. A task that is a challenge for a beginner is a different task for someone who has played for years.

In tennis terms, that is my reading: if every ball is easy, there is little to learn from. If every ball is too hard, you can’t tell what went wrong. The useful zone is in between, where you miss sometimes and can still tell why.

4. The blind spot: you can’t see what holds you back

Ericsson (2006) describes how people who keep improving rely on teachers and coaches to provide demanding tasks and specific goals. Over time, they learn to self-monitor and evaluate their own performance, and so become less dependent on their teachers’ feedback.

That second part takes a long time. In the meantime, what you feel you do is often not what you actually do. The mistake you notice is usually the end of a chain, and I wrote about that in my article on fixes that creep back.

Together, these four make a plateau feel like a ceiling. It’s usually not a ceiling.

And to be fair, practice isn’t everything. In a meta-analysis, deliberate practice explained 18% of the differences in sports performance (Macnamara et al., 2014). The authors concluded that it is important, but not as important as has been argued. Your body, your time, and your starting point all matter too.