John Farley Spotlight WTA: Combating the Toll of the Tennis Tour - A Performance Enhancing Technology (PET)

The Toll

When you make your hopeful toasts to the New Year on the eve of January 1, the courts of Brisbane, Shenzhen, Auckland, and Perth will be set to go for the first "ready, play" of the 2018 season. Sydney and Hobart will follow, and then the first major drama of the season will unfold at Melbourne Park, an opening ceremony in Rod Laver Arena, and then we're off and running, acing, lobbing, rallying, volleying, and generally swinging with the New Year.

Very soon the players must be match-ready, hoping their bodies and minds are healed and refreshed and ready for the grind of another season. The rackets are by now back in hand and the trips to the gym more frequent. For the past few weeks the players have been resting their weary bones from the grind of the 2017 season in whatever beautiful, nourishing spots called to them or just nesting, cozily at home.

At the end of the 10-month tennis year there is a lot of healing to do - a recovery that is imperative for starting the new season strong, for going deep into the tournaments, and creating a confidence that will sustain a level of play through the year that may just result in a spot among the top 8 in Singapore in November.

Exhaustion, niggling injuries, and the need for recovery - we witness this phenomenon toward the end of every tennis season - more pounds of physio tape and wraps, more approved pain pills going down, more court-side massages, more retirements by those who were hurting but gave it a try, and more withdrawals by those who couldn't. In Zhuhai, for example this year, in matches that still mattered for pride, money, and ranking points, both Sloane Stephens, the US Open winner, and Elena Vesnina, the victor at Indian Wells, had to submit to the wills of their aching bodies and retire. And so it goes.

As I see it, the major cause of this phenomenon, at the basis of these injuries and the exhaustion, is the desynchronization of the player's physiology with the environment caused by constant travel, which happens from traversing at least 3 time zones in a short period of time multiple times. This speedy movement across time zones messes with the "body clock," the circadian rhythm that regulates many physiological processes among which are those that tell the player's body when to sleep, rise, and eat. A player's body clock is affected by environmental clues and if these clues keep changing, the player's internal rhythms get out of sync with the rhythms of its environment, which, according to research, if done chronically, can lead to a suppressed immune system, chronic fatigue, and memory issues. A disruption in this circadian rhythm can also profoundly affect body temperature, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, hormones, and state of mind.

So a player, down 0-4 first set, calls for a physio and at the next sit-down just tells her, " I don't feel right." The physio gives her two aspirins and says, "call me at the next sit-down." Maybe a doctor drops by. What are they going to do for her? Her body may be in a state of desynchronization from time-zone jumping and until the body returns to a state of homeostasis or balance she will continue to "not feel right."

This condition, of course, is not just peculiar to tennis. A recent 10-year study found that major league baseball teams that traveled through three time zones have as much as a 60% chance of losing their first game upon arrival. I am reminded of Aga Radwanska's ordeal in trying to get from the Roger's Cup in Montreal to Rio to play for Poland in the 2016 Olympics. The best she could do to get there on time was to fly from Montreal to Lisbon and then on to Rio. After 55 hours (about 2.3 days) on a 3,000 mile detour this top 10 player had so little time to adjust she was comprehensively beaten by 64th ranked Zheng Saisai of China in 99 minutes. Apparently she was a bit out of sorts, although Lisbon sounds like a nice place to visit.

A study on 62 experienced airline cabin crew members found increased secretion of the stress hormone, cortisol, and impaired nonverbal cognitive processing for cabin crew members who flew on more trans-meridian flights with fewer days off. The study found that their bodies could not adapt to the stress of "jet lag" with some participants having as much as four years experience in the field. So it's clear that experience in time-zone jumping isn't going to make you a better time-zone jumper.

To get a more quantitative feel for a player's tour-traveling experience, I took a look at the tennis itinerary of Garbine Muguruza. In 2017 she played 21 tournaments - approximately a tour average. In keeping that schedule, she went through 91 time zones which involved 16 different changes or flights. That figures out to about 5.7 time zones per change, or, approximately, for the 10-month tennis season, one 3-zone time change every 10 days or one 4-zone time change every 13 days. Tough on the body and mind as we've seen. She had, by most accounts, a stellar season but had to retire 5 times, including two at Premier Mandatory events in Miami and Beijing.

In its desperation to come up with solutions to the challenge of keeping the many women playing the 10-month tennis season free from injury, illness, and eventual exhaustion, the WTA looks futilely to the tired options of tinkering with the game and fiddling with the schedule, and Usana of course. Except for match scheduling which doesn't result in players still on court at midnight or later, neither of those options provides for changes that really get to the heart of the matter, which is to maintain balance in the player's physiology over the long haul of the tennis tour, which in turn translates into adjusting and maintaining synchrony of the rhythms of the player's physiology with the circadian rhythms of the environment.

The Technology

What it comes down to is this, (And I'm talking to you, every player on the WTA tour whether you are ranked in the top ten or climbing up out of a three-digit ranking): To be "in-the-zone" you have to handle the effects of "going-through-the-zones." You can't use a PED, but you can use a PET - a Performance Enhancing Technology (PET) and that technology is Transcendental Meditation (TM). By resetting the body's nervous system every time you do TM, you are able to adjust to the new time zone, thereby reducing or eliminating the disorienting affects of a desynchronized rhythm with your environment. This resetting of the body's nervous system from the continuing practice of TM cultures a psychophysiological resilience that spontaneously integrates the psychophysiology with the prevailing circadian environmental rhythms. This psychophysiological resilience is a direct result of the high level of brain integration from meditation. (In my September 11, 2017 blog post entitled Tennis, Peak Performance, and Transcendental Meditation I cited other research that clearly establishes the link between a higher level of brain integration and the high level, in-the-zone performance displayed by world class athletes. A blog post for your reading.)

This relationship of greater resilience from the brain integration produced from TM is well established in scientific research on world-class athletes, which has been published in scientific journals including the International Journal of Psychophysiology, among others.  The researchers found that this greater resilience translates into the following benefits - benefits important to every WTA touring professional:

• Autonomic Stability
• Rapid Recovery from Stress
• Decreased Stress Hormones
• Improved Cardiovascular Functioning
• Increased Vital Capacity
• Neurological Efficiency
• Faster Reactions
• Increased Agility
• Increased Running Speed

Besides the above mostly physical benefits, a higher level of brain integration, research shows, produces a dispositional resilience that nurtures and promotes positive outcomes and successful adaptation in the face of challenging or stressful circumstances (navigating the ups and downs, highs and lows of a tennis season or even a single tournament or match.) This level of functioning is indispensable for your success on tour.

So, what I have established here for each WTA touring professional is a Science and Technology of Maintaining Balance throughout the constant travel of the tennis season.

The Science of Maintaining Balance: A higher level of brain integration creates a higher level of psychophysiological resilience which enables the rhythms of the physiology to adjust quickly to the circadian rhythms of the environment, creating a synchrony that results in a more consistent, higher level of performance.

The Technology for Maintaining Balance: A higher level of brain integration comes about through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, a Performance Enhancing Technology (PET), which results in a level of psychophysiological resilience that spontaneously integrates the rhythms of the physiology with the prevailing circadian rhythms of the environment. It is this level of mind, body, and environmental integration which is at the basis of the elegance of movement, the ultimate expression of being in-the-zone. The practice of TM is effortless and can be done anywhere - on a plane, on a train, in a car, in a bar, on a mountain top, in the locker room, or even, if you want, on-court at a sit-down during an opponent's medical time out.

With this PET of TM you can then "handle the-going-through the zones" so you can be "in-the-zone."  Make it a part of your life for 2018, so when Australia 2019 rolls around, and the hopeful toasts for that year have been made, and you're standing on that deuce court of your first tournament, be it in Australia, China, or New Zealand, refreshed from the need for only minimal recovery, your racket in one hand and a ball in your other ready to serve, and the chair umpire says "ready, play," .... you'll be ready.


Anyway, that's how I see it.

Appendix

(While it was my goal for this blog post to keep the focus on how TM as a Performance Enhancing Technology (PET) can keep each WTA time-zone jumping tennis pro in sync with her environment as she travels, I wanted to include TM research on two conditions that usually accompany the time-zone jumping experience, insomnia and sleep deprivation, so I put them in this appendix for your review.)

I have already mentioned some of the effects of going-through-the-zones  - a suppressed immune system, chronic fatigue, and hormonal imbalances among others. Contributing factors to the effects of time-zone jumping are insomnia and sleep deprivation:

Insomnia: 

• Causes unclear thinking and poor motor performance. 
• According to research, TM reduces insomnia - reducing the time it takes to fall asleep and decreasing waking during sleep.

Sleep Deprivation:

• Exhaustion and extreme muscular weakness are among the most marked effects of sleep deprivation. This suggests a fatigue of the higher levels of the cerebral cortex - the levels that are responsible for the critical analysis of incoming impulses (like a tennis ball for example) and the elaboration of adequate responses of one's previous experience (letting go of the previous point and getting to the next, staying in the moment).
• Research has shown that TM meditators recover more quickly from sleep deprivation. TM stabilizes the sleep-dream cycle by reducing the effect of any disruption to this cycle (like time-zone jumping) thereby restoring the system to its normal level of functioning. A normalized level of functioning is critical for the "in-the-zone" experience.