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Mental Training for Padel

Published: December 26, 20171 Comment

Mental preparation is a big factor in padel matches. Here are some tips to prepare yourself in the best way for your next padel matches.

Use Affirmations and Internal Dialogue

Practice these techniques during training as well as during competitive matches. During the tough moments of a match, encourage yourself with internal Diageo such as “I can do it!”. Don’t allow thoughts such as “My adversary seems to be better than I am” to enter your head. If you serve a bad ball or make a silly mistake in a volley, keep calm and move forward. Select a phrase that you can go back to during tough moments.

Utilize Breathing Routines

Regularly practice full breathing exercises. Before a match it’s very helpful to listen to music that aids in calming you down and breathe deeply. You can also select a visual image to go with this breathing routine. For example, you can imagine yourself returning a ball in spectacular fashion. This will ensure that you enter the match fully focused and confident in your abilities, while at the same time getting rid of debilitating states such as anxiety and stress.

Relax

After tough training sessions practice progressive relaxation to rid your muscles of the tension that naturally builds up. Keep in mind that while playing and training you are also using your brain and that is also a resource that gets depleted, just like your legs. You need to sleep well and enjoy periods of relaxation so that your mental status returns back to the very best before you approach your next training session or match.

Practice Visualisation

The top athletes of any sport make heavy use of visualisation. Basically this consists of visualising yourself playing in a match and going through the motions. Imagine you are serving in a particular way, and how your opponent will return the ball and where you will place the next shot. This will help internalise certain tactics and they will come out naturally during the actual match.

Under this heading we can also put watching top players in their matches. On YouTube you will find the recordings of the finals of the World Padel Tour, and you can also watch them live if you wish. I like to pick a side during matches so that I will feel all the pressure that they would feel if they are on the losing end, and also keep the concentration when they are winning. A very common mistake is that of having different levels of concentration during matches, and watching other matches while making the effort to maintain full concentration of each ball will help you in your own matches.

Consider Your Opponents

Try to obtain as much information about your opponents as possible. You can watch videoclips of them playing, or watch them playing in previous matches of the tournament that you are playing in. If none of those opportunities present themselves, make sure you use the warming up time of your match to observe how your opponent hits the ball and what are his weak and strong shots. Make sure you exchange information with your partner, as he will be warming up in parallel with the other opponent.

Use Video Recordings

Try to record your matches and later analyse them to see what your weaknesses are. Many times we think we are doing something one way, but when we see ourselves on video we realise that our image doesn’t match at all with our actual behaviour. That is a sure indication that something is off and needs correcting. Your coach will also help you in identifying these weaknesses and help you correct them.

Create Your Winning Imagery

Imagine yourself winning the match and how you would behave, and feel the happiness that comes with it. Go into your match with a definite expectation that your visualisation is a future reality, and the rest of the match is just the journey that will take you there.

Create a Pre-Match Routine

Anticipate distractions, prepare for them and minimise them. Familiarise yourself with the court you will be playing at, check out the weather and the sounds. Thirty minutes before the match, make sure you start your routine and enter your zone of maximum focus. Use whatever tools you prefer, such as a breathing exercise, listening to a particular tune, etc.

Hope you will find these tips on mental preparation for padel matches useful. Do you use any other techniques? Let me know!

6 Principles to Influence and Persuade People

Published: December 21, 2017Leave a Comment

Here’s another post from my old blog (originally published in 2008), that I thought would be good to re-publish here.

A couple of years back Dr Robert Cialdini, an expert psychologist came up with a set of principles that can be applied in order to harness the power of persuasion and thus influence people. In today’s article I will talk about these six principles and how they can be used.

Principle No. 1 – Liking
People like those who are like them and who create bonds with them. It is important to create early bonds with new acquaintances by informally discovering common interests. This will make them more comfortable and increase their willingness to trust you. Praising other people will also generate more willing compliance.

Principle No. 2 – Reciprocity
People repay in kind, therefore you should develop a habit of giving what you want to receive. Help someone in need and it will be much more likely that he will help you back later.

Principle No. 3 – Social Proof
People follow the lead of similar others. Harness the power of peer power by getting one person from a group to approve your new initiative, the others will most likely follow.

Principle No. 4 – Consistency
People fulfill written, public, and voluntary commitments. Get things down in writing and publicise commitments, then it is more likely that people will fulfill those commitments.

Principle No. 5 – Authority
People believe experts who provide shortcuts to decisions requiring specialised information. The key here is to establish your expertise beforehand by for example describing how you solved a problem similar to the one at hand, or talking about your qualifications and experience, without being boastful.

Principle No. 6 – Scarcity
People value what’s scarce. This is a fact that can be observed in all areas of human behaviour eg. relationships, buying trends etc. You can also use it to your advantage by using exclusive information to persuade. Arouse their curiosity and attention by offering them something nobody knows about eg. “Very few people have heard about this technique…”

Apply these 6 principles in your relationships and you will see that your persuasion power will be better than ever before. Do you have any of your own tips on how to persuade and influence people?

🛒 Best Online Shops that Ship to Malta

Last updated: January 12, 202335 Comments

With Malta being a small island, local shopping is pretty limited compared to what you find abroad. This has led to the Maltese quickly getting hooked on online shopping. While a few years back only a few websites offered to ship to Malta, nowadays there are many sites that offer European-wide shipping, in some cases even offering free shipping and returns.

Here are some of my favorite sites:

How to Buy Cheap Electronics Online in Malta

Malta has the most expensive consumer electronics in the EU. However, you don’t need to be paying the high prices at local shops for your laptops, sound equipment, hardware, etc.

The solution is, of course, to shop online.

Shopping for Electronics in Malta at Amazon

I highly recommend using Amazon for all your online shopping needs. You can not only buy books and electronics from Amazon, but pretty much anything else. Many Maltese buy clothes from Amazon too, for example. There’s much more choice than the local shops, and you can easily send the stuff you don’t like back.

Amazon has the most amazing support and customer service I ever encountered. Say for example you order a book and it’s received slightly damaged because the postman didn’t take good care of it, or it just got damaged during the shipping process. All you need to do is file an issue with Amazon and they’ll either give you a refund or send you another copy. It happened to me more than once and Amazon staff have always been super helpful in finding a resolution.

On another occasion, I ordered a piece of hardware that never got delivered, even though it was sent via courier. Again, all I had to do was contact Amazon, and it was them who dealt with the courier. In the meantime, they just sent me the hardware once again and apologised profusely for the inconvenience.

I hope that convinces you that there is absolutely no problem with shopping online at Amazon. If anything, you’ll get better support and customer service than you would at your local shop.

Which Amazon site to use

Now Amazon doesn’t have a site specifically for the Maltese islands, so you will need to choose a site dedicated to one the bigger countries in Europe. There are several options, but most people will drift to the Amazon.co.uk website, simply because it is in English and has the biggest range of products.

Beware that the prices on Amazon.co.uk are in GBP, and since the exchange rate between GBP and EUR is always fluctuating, you might not be getting a great deal. On the other hand, you might be lucky and profit from a weak British pound. The easiest way to check whether you’re losing or gaining from the exchange rate is to search for the same product on Amazon.es or Amazon.de (Spanish and German Amazon sites). It will take the same time to arrive to Malta and postage rates are the same for most products. However, since the Spanish and German sites sell their items in Euro you will be able to compare and see whether it make sense to buy in GBP from the Amazon.co.uk site or to buy in Euro from Spain or Germany.

Hope that helps. I have used Amazon for over 10 years now and I get all my electronics from there, including expensive items like photographic equipment and laptops.

If you have any questions about shopping online at Amazon just leave a question below, I’ll be happy to help out.

Visit Amazon.co.uk

🛒 A Simple Trick to Save Money When Buying From Amazon UK

When buying from Amazon UK and shipping to Malta (or any other country except the UK itself), you will be given the option to pay in GBP or your local currency (EUR in Malta’s case).

By default EUR will be selected, so make sure you switch that to GBP. Amazon uses an exchange rate that is worse than the one offered by your local bank, and you would, therefore, be losing money if you pay in EUR.

I then make the payment using my TransferWise Borderless Mastercard debit card, as it automatically takes my Euros and converts them to GBP to make the payment at the best rates. Not only that, but I can also convert Euro to GBP at any point in time and store them in the Borderless account. Then when I pay on Amazon UK it will use the funds in the GBP account I have.

See also: N26 vs Revolut

When traveling abroad you will encounter this choice when paying at shops and restaurants as well, and even in those cases, you should always pay in the currency of that country by using a card like N26 or Revolut. The amount saved really adds up over time especially if you are making larger purchases from Amazon.

Other Sites for Getting Electronics to Malta on the Cheap

Apart from Amazon, there are other sites that can be ideal for particular niches. I tend to use Amazon for any kind of purchase, be it electronics, shoes, clothes, or household goods.

When it comes to electronics, though, in addition to Amazon I also check the following websites:

These are Chinese websites, although they have a limited supply of their stock available in European warehouses. Shipping tends to be slower than Amazon, but you can use expedited shipping to get your items within 5 business days. Note that you will usually have to pay VAT on the products’ arrival to Malta. This applies mostly to the higher-priced items; on smaller items they just let them through usually. In the case that you’ll need to pay VAT, the delivery person will collect the VAT in cash when he delivers the item to you.

These two websites are also not limited to electronics, but you won’t find the same range as Amazon. On the other hand, if you know that the product you want is manufactured in China, the chances are that you’ll find it at a lower price on Banggood or Gearbest rather than Amazon, since you’re cutting out the middleman in Europe.

On Peak Performance

Last updated: April 05, 20243 Comments

This year I’ve been really challenging myself to improve at something specific: padel. This involved lots of training, practice matches and competition. Throughout this journey, I have, perhaps inevitably, become very interested in peak performance and how to achieve it.

We usually associate peak performance with top athletes, musicians or even successful business people. The first question is whether these successful people have completely different genetic makeups than the rest of the population. In short, are they uniquely gifted? Are they so different from the rest of us that we stand no chance?

As I dug into literature and observed the best athletes in padel as well as speaking to various top coaches, the surprising discovery is that in most cases, it’s not a case of superior genetics that leads to peak performance. Hence, we can all reach a state of peak performance.

Here are some of the most important realizations I’ve made this year.

The people who do extraordinary things have figured out ways to be very progressive about improvement and structure their life around getting better. No matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles that can be termed “deliberate practice”.

Psychology is a key element in achieving success in any discipline. I had mostly been focusing on the physical, tactical and technical aspects of improving my padel game, before I realized that the way I think was perhaps a bigger factor in determining whether I win or lose any given game. Apart from being aware of the mind’s importance and training it, you need to get the right guidance from sports psychologists who can identify your blocks and point you in the right direction.

To achieve peak performance in sport you need to achieve a state of flow. Those who practice mindfulness have an increased attention and concentration, enhanced performance in hostile contexts, respond better to stress, have better parenting skills, improved sleep, enhanced mood, decrease in fatigue, and so on. These effects are all proven through various studies. The practice of mindfulness can help in achieving the laser focus needed for peak performance. The minimum effective dose is around 8 minutes a day and an optimal dose is 20 minutes a day. I’ve dabbled in meditation at various stages of my life, but I can’t say I’ve done it that rigorously on a daily basis. I’ll definitely be adding this as one of my goals for 2018.

I’ve also learned that success in any discipline is not something you can achieve alone. You need a team behind you. That might be the support of your spouse, friends and family at amateur levels, and involve a whole team (technical, physical, tactical coaches and psychologist, physio) for the elite athletes.

It is very important to write down your guiding principles or philosophy for life. What are you doing? This is a question you need to answer alone and be very clear about. This will be your guiding principle every day and will give you the right framework to be able to make short-term objectives and be able to evaluate your progress.

You also need to set aside time (15-20 minutes a day) to visualize and experience yourself performing at the highest level. You also need to split the visualization exercise in this way: 85% kicking ass and 15% of the time being in compromised positions and figuring out how to get out of that. That will help you overcome bad situations where your competitor has an upper edge in competition and you have to dig yourself out of a hole.

In padel, I’ve seen clearly that we kind of have two inner selves. One, the “I,” seems to give instructions; the other, “myself,” seems to perform the action. Then “I” returns with an evaluation of the action. For clarity let’s call the “teller” Self 1 and the “doer” Self 2. Within each player, the kind of relationship that exists between Self 1 and Self 2 is the prime factor in determining one’s ability to translate his knowledge of technique into effective action. In other words, the key to better tennis – or better anything – lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the unconscious, automatic doer, Self 2.

Another important element that we tend to overlook is proper recovery after training or competition. It’s very important to get your sleep patterns right, have the right nutrition and top that off with a proper psychological state of mind.

These are the best resources I’ve found and totally recommend if you’re interested in learning about peak performance:

What is clear from my experience in life so far, is that we have incredible resources inside of us and it’s just a matter of accessing those resources in order to achieve the best version of ourselves. Practicing this is a life’s work and is one of the most important reasons why I wake up enthusiastic about life every morning.

Hope that helps you achieve peak performance in whatever you want to focus on. If you have any experiences or resources to share, please leave a comment below.

Padel Courts in Malta

Last updated: December 27, 201912 Comments

Padel and tennis players frequently ask me if there are any padel courts in Malta.

Good news! There are two different clubs/courts that are open now with more opening soon.

I have created a site for all padel players in Malta, you can subscribe there to be put in Whatsapp groups and join matches of your level.

Join Malta Padel Club

~~Unfortunately, the sport has not yet been introduced in Malta, although I hope this will be rectified in the near future.~~

If anyone reading this is interested in launching padel in Malta and wants to partner up, I’d be happy to cooperate in the initiative. I think Malta could be a great location for padel and it would be pretty straightforward to bring over some tournaments like International Padel. Moreover, I think the local population will take on to the sport very quickly, also helped by the fact that there are many Spanish people in Malta, most of whom are already familiar with the sport and have played it before.

~~So once again, if anyone is interested in bringing this sport to Malta, get in touch.~~