The Intuition Paradox

In 1974, Tim Gallway wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis which contains, to this day, one of the most useful models for improving in sport. His thesis was simple – if you relax, swing, and calmly observe the results, your subconscious mind will iteratively and automatically optimize your swing. Improvement occurs by harnessing your intuition, which is, broadly speaking, one of two modes of thinking that human beings use. The other is reason. (Gallway called them “self 1” and “self 2”.)

Reason is slow, deliberate, and logical. It’s great for tasks like math and coding. Intuition is fast, instinctual, and automatic. It’s what allows you to walk without being aware of every step, or block an object hurtling at your face, before you’d consciously noticed it was coming. Reason is not capable of effectively controlling your body in a fast-paced, reactive environment like tennis, but intuition is, and as such, we must primarily recruit intuition, rather than reason, to improve.

Intuition is fast, instinctual, and automatic.

Hence the model of relax, swing, and calmly observe. Our goal is not to think through why we’re missing using reason, but rather to simply provide our intuition with information about our results, and then let it go to work using that information to automatically improve our movement patterns. When we do that, intuition will slowly get us closer and closer to the results we want.

Later on, we’re going to discuss how intuition, your most powerful improvement engine, can paradoxically get you stuck, but first, we need to appreciate just how critical and irreplaceable intuition is to tennis development.

Tennis Academics on The Reason Plateau

If you’re reading this article, there’s a decent chance you fit into a certain tennis archetype: the academically inclined, perennially online tennis player, who loves watching every new video about biomechanics, and reading every new article about training techniques. That certainly describes me. This kind of player often unwittingly finds themselves at a plateau caused by an over-emphasis on reason and an under-utilization of intuition.

Reason alone cannot foster improvement. When reason is in charge, you cannot process what you’re seeing fast enough to act. If you see the serve coming in, and you must think:

“There’s the ball. It’s just bounced. About chest height contact. Prepare here. Engage the trunk. Exhale. Twist. Still gaze, neutral spine, relaxed wrist.”

Then you’re entirely doomed. That thought chain is technically fine, but it must occur in the blink of an eye, by habit, below the level of your conscious thought. For that to happen, it needs to have been habituated by intuition, not by reason.

Reason alone cannot foster improvement.

The reason-plateaued player can typically generate high-velocity swings, but not consistently. They can generate spin, but often mishit the ball. They can sometimes hit aces, and return winners, but those are intermixed with double faults and shanked sitters. They’ve successfully used their reason to get close to an efficient swing, and that’ll create flashes of brilliance that an intuition-plateaued player, like a pusher, could never dream of, and yet, because they’ve never allowed their intuition to take over and actually refine their set of movement patterns, they can’t achieve a level of execution of their game anywhere close to that of the pusher.

The solution for symptoms like this is what Tim Gallway recommended over 40 years ago: relax, swing, and calmly observe the results.

I hear you objecting right now, faithful tennis academic: but what if I have technical flaws I don’t know about? What if I take thousands of reps, and I end up habituating something I’ll have to unlearn later in order to improve?

Your concern is warranted. Continuous improvement requires a combination of intuition and reason, and intuition alone, like reason alone, will usually get you stuck, due to the manner by which intuition optimizes your swing.

Gradient Descent

To improve your tennis, your intuition employs a search algorithm that, in the software world, we call “gradient descent.” It starts with a goal, and then, each time you swing, uses the information from that swing to adjust your next swing, in order to get closer and closer to the goal.

Imagine that every point on the blue line below represents a possible way to swing at the tennis ball. As you experiment, you move left and right on the blue line, trying out different swings, and observing different miss-rates as a result. In this simplified example, our goal is to find the swing that minimizes our miss-rate.

Our goal, then, is to tweak our swing such that we move down as much as we can, and that’s exactly what your intuition does. Each observed result on the tennis court gives your intuition a small amount of information, telling it which direction to move in the search space, and it uses that information to apply small adjustments, typically below your level of awareness, to your swing.

These small adjustments occur over, and over, and over again as you practice. The process is iterative. Observation-after-observation, adjustment-by-adjustment, your intuition molds your swing into its best possible version.

By convention, we usually talk about these problems as gradient “descent,” where we try to minimize how far away our result is from our goal, but, hypothetically, we could just as easily use a convention of gradient “ascent,” where we try to maximize a variable that we want. Using descent helps visualize the search process by imagining gravity. Pretend the yellow dot – your current swing – is a marble, rolling along this landscape. It would roll down into that well, then roll around a bit, and finally settle at the green dot, your perfect swing. We should also mention this is a simplified, one-dimensional example – in actual tennis, we’re optimizing over many variables, not just miss-rate.

The Hazard of Local Minima

But… wait a minute. What if we’d started here, instead?

Gradient descent proceeds, stepping down and down with each step, but we never end up at our best possible swing! Instead, we get stuck in the little well on the left, and we can’t get out of it.

At this point, there exists no single step, in either direction, that further decreases our miss-rate. Move either right or left in the search space, and our miss-rate goes up. Intuition thinks it’s solved the puzzle, because there are no more step-wise improvements to be made, and yet we’re stuck. In order to break through the plateau and reach a new level, we’d need to climb a hill, temporarily getting much worse, before ultimately getting better, and intuition isn’t capable of seeing that.

This phenomenon, by which intuition’s gradient descent stabilizes at a local minimum, instead of at the absolute minimum, is one of the most common ways players get stuck.

Pushers on The Intuition Plateau

The pusher is an extremely common archetype of a player who has plateaued due to their gradient descent falling into a local minimum. The pusher uses intuition to optimize their game solely on the criterion of winning matches, and it works, at least for a while. Match after match, they get better, and better, and better, by simply doing whatever wins them more points in the moment.

Up until a certain level, above which they get crushed, with no real hope of ever improving to that level themselves. (From my observation, that level is UTR 8.)

The pusher uses intuition to optimize their game solely on the criterion of winning matches.

The pusher never learns to generate swing velocity, because, at any given step of the improvement process, adding swing-velocity would have made them win fewer matches, and yet, because they never developed swing velocity, their level became forever capped (barring significant effort to uncap it). Their intuition successfully drove them closer and closer to the local minimum of their loss function, and they won more and more matches as they descended, but once they arrived at the bottom, that was it. The culmination of the improvement journey. They’re stuck there, with no further direct path for improvement. Any adjustment now would make them worse, and by this point, much worse, before it would make them better.

Intuition is a Powerful, Double-Edged Sword

Intuition can get you stuck on plateaus, and yet it is also your most powerful tool, bar none, for the purpose of improving at tennis. Reason is too slow, too linear for the job. Imagine if a beginner had read the entirety of Fault Tolerant Tennis, but had yet to hit a single ball. How well would they play? Exactly.

Despite its efficacy, intuition alone will often lead you astray. Swing velocity, for example, typically won’t develop without some intentional, directed effort, because it won’t necessarily make you better right away. Volleying is similar, as are many other skills.

Improving requires synergy between your intuition and reason. Reason directs your intuition toward a goal, defining the success and failure criteria, and then intuition optimizes for it. Relax, swing, and calmly observe. As long as you’ve aimed your intuition at a wise goal, you’ll avoid frustrating plateaus, while your intuition methodically and automatically supercharges your game.

This is part 1 of a three part series explaining how to meaningfully improve in tennis, covering Intuition, Reason, and Feedback. Parts 2 and 3 coming soon!