Don’t think too much: Conscious processing negatively impacts tennis serve performance in competition

Thinking about how to best perform a sport skill is beneficial for novices but has been shown to negatively impact performance once a skill has been automatized. Retrieving knowledge from working memory to consciously control motor performance is known as reinvestment (Masters, 1992). Previous lab studies have documented the negative effect of reinvestment on motor performance, especially under pressure (e.g., Kinrade, Jackson & Ashford, 2010). The goal of the present study was to test the impact of a natural stressor, namely competitive pressure, on tennis serve performance. Based on reinvestment theory and a recent study on golfputting performance, we predicted that under the competitive pressure of a match the negative impact of conscious processing on tennis serve performance would be more pronounced thank in a training match. A total of 23 (Gpower: regression, f = .38 based on Malhorta et al., 2015, power = .80) tennis players participated in this field study. All of them performed two tennis matches, a training and a competition match (within-subject factor match: training vs. competition) during which their conscious processing was assessed using the movement-specific reinvestment scale (Masters et al., 2005). The results are discussed considering the explicit monitoring theory. Serve performance was scored by a trained observer. A linear regression revealed that conscious processing in a competition negatively impacted performance (b = -7.90, t(22) = 3.38, p = .003, β = -.594), explaining 35% of variance (R² = .35) in tennis serve performance. During a training match, conscious processing did not significantly predict performance (b = -5.23, t(22) = 1.53, p = .141, β = -.317, R² = .10). Therefore, results are in line with the hypothesis indicating that under competitive pressure, athletes’ tendency to engage in conscious processing had a stronger negative impact on their performance. This field study demonstrated that engaging in conscious processing during competition harmed tennis serve performance as opposed to performance in a training match that was not negatively affected. The results are in line with the results of a golf-putting study and lend support to the predictions of reinvestment theory. An explanation could be that working memory capacity was taxed by cognitively controlling how to perform the tennis serve, reducing the resources available for the performance itself. However, as this is a first field study, future research should put this mechanism to test in different sports and potentially in larger studies. For now, our study suggests that athletes should not “think too much” when performing in competition.