Hi, and welcome to Double Fault. My name is Andrew, and I'm on a journey to compete in the Pan Pacific Masters Games in November of 2024. You know, I started trying to lose some weight a few weeks ago because I was just getting ridiculously heavy. And over the last few weeks I've lost five kilos. But that process seems to have stagnated now and I'm stuck at around 102 kilos. That's down from 107. So I'm okay with that. But it's just seems to have stopped. So I'm going to take a different approach over the next few weeks. I'm going to try and with the help of my Garmin watch, burn through 3000 calories a day. That means I need to be active for for about 700 calories if that means anything. But what it actually means is doing about 12,000 walking steps a day or somewhat less in a more active fashion. So a game of tennis, for example, for an hour, if I'm just playing social, that's worth about 400 calories And you know, A5K run is worth about four and a half, 450 calories. So I need to do that much activity during the course of the day to add 700 calories to my basic metabolic rate, which brings me up to 3000 if that means anything to anyone. But the bottom line is I'm just going to try and burn more calories rather than keep a log and track of every single food item that I eat, which is what I have been doing, because it just doesn't seem to be working that well anymore.
Maybe I'm cheating on it a bit, but we'll see how it goes. So let's see how that goes over the next few weeks and hopefully I can get a few more kilos off me. So I went to a training session yesterday as a squad, like a group coaching session for an hour and a half, and then I did a five kilometer run afterwards. And this morning I woke up and my Achilles was really sore and I had a match this morning and I said to my wife on the way out, Look, I'm just normally I would bring my A-game, but I think I'm bringing my A game today. I just I just went out with a negative attitude. And I don't think that's a good attitude to take anywhere, let alone to a competitive game. The woman I played this morning I've played before and she's about an equal match to me. You know, it could come and go, but seriously, I just couldn't do a thing right? Today I was double faulting and double faulting and I had so many unforced errors, I threw the it was a fast four format. I threw the game away four, two, four, one. And it's so disappointing. I put so much work into training myself and learning to be a better tennis player to wind up on the court and playing a game as as poorly as I did today.
And I know I can do so, so much better. I threw away one game almost entirely on double faults. I did three double faults in a row. So I was just it's just disappointing and I don't want to dwell on it. I don't think I should dwell on it. I think when you have a negative experience on the court, have that hanging around in your head or dwelling on or thinking about it or dwelling on it in your mind, it's just not doing you any favors. Trouble is, I look at it, I can't even think of any positive things it did on the court. It's just disheartening. I missed easy shots. I overhit them, I hit them into the net. I moved okay, But I just couldn't play okay today. So it's just a lesson there, I guess, in attitude rather than in game play. This week I had a serving session. I brought my camera with me to the court because I wanted to focus a little bit more on getting a nice swing. You know, so often I go to the court and I've got a bag of balls, about 75 balls, and I'll just hit them one after the other and just try and hit them hard and get them into the service box on the other side without really thinking that much about form. But this week I thought, you know, I'm going to look more at my form and see if I can clean up my serve a bit and make it look a bit more like a proper serve, if you like.
So I feel myself doing a few serves and I look terrible. And then I found myself doing a few shadow swings for serves and they looked a lot better. I had a decent racket drop and a nice flowing motion and I did that for a bit. And then I threw the ball up and tried it again. And my serve just completely changes. As soon as there's a ball in the air, it just there's no racket drop. It looks like a beginner's serve. It looks awful. So what I did was I started putting some balls in my pocket and just doing a few shadow swings, one after the other. And just in the last one, after 4 or 5 shadow swings, I throw a ball up into the swing and it made such a difference. I looked at a review of the video of those of those sessions with, you know, 4 or 5 shadow swings with the last one being with the ball and they actually look heaps better. I had a racket drop. The follow through was good. Everything looked way better and the ball you know, it was actually popping off my my racket properly like a proper serve and there were even though I wasn't swinging hard at them, they were really going fast and hitting the service box and bouncing way out over the other end of the court.
So I'm going to try and focus on using that as my practice session for the next few weeks. So doing a few shadow swings and then the last one throwing the ball up into the swing and I'll be filming myself and seeing how I go with it because it just made such an enormous difference. Now, I didn't take that newfound swing with me to the court this morning. I. Unfortunately, it just wasn't working for me. But I think that there's something there that I can ingrain into myself with a little bit of practice and a little bit of filming. I think filming yourself doing activities on the court is underrated because you really can see what you're doing. I might actually next time have a session against the wall, bring the camera along to that as well and see how I'm looking on my forehand, because I get a lot of coaches saying I drop my racket, I'm dropping my racket and doing a more robotic movement, so I might take my camera to the wall next time I go there Anyway. So this morning's game was a proper match. It was a fast four format, but I played another game earlier this week on Tuesday night and it was against a big bloke and he beat me 6161. So the proper sets of six games he beat me 6161.
And I knew during the practice session, you know, you have a warm up session. Well I knew he was going to beat me. I it wasn't a I wasn't having a negative attitude moment. He was just playing better than me. He was playing high hard topspin shots that were really, really fast. His serves were really fast and everything had topspin. Everything was neatly placed and it was a lesson. And that game, you know, it was, it was. And that game was actually a lot of fun. So. So come along with me and we can review that game. Okay, so here we are at Forestville. Tennis courts, beautiful lighting and pretty cold night. It's icy, I've got to say. I'm sitting here in my shorts and my jumper not wanting to get out of the car, but here I am. I think this is one of the few times where I'm not actually in the mood for it, but a long day working. I've already played 2.5 hours of tennis this morning. I've got a mind full of spreadsheets. Woke up early this morning thinking about work, work related issues. I think all that stuff's going to get on top of me during this game. I'm just tired. There's ten minutes to go, but I'll get out there and do my best and try and brighten up a little bit. It's only a few people out there playing tennis.
I think it's too cold for the kids. Even I don't know who my hitting partner is. I don't know who my opponent is. Another one of those games where your opponent could be anyone. Your opponent could be an absolute giant out there. A quick game, a slow game is a bit higher than mine, but not hugely so. So it could be a long game for a reasonably easily matched later game this morning with a guy that we're we're really evenly matched. He actually won five games to six I think he got one serve break more off me than I got off him and he's in a higher division than me and playing against well higher ranked players. I'm not sure how I feel about that, although I've got to say, the two divisions, looking at the players, they're all pretty evenly matched. A few outliers in there. This game tonight is a six game sets, two sets and a tie break comes to it. It's an hour and a half maximum of game time. All right. I'm going to go out to the court and see what it looks like. It looks like a court that probably driving my wife's car. So I always bring a clean t shirt for after the game because after the game, you know, I sweat a lot. I don't want to sit in my wife's car with a sweaty t shirt. I love a little warm up.
This guy's going to kill me. And it was at that point there that I knew I was going to be on the losing side. It was like playing against a ball machine, like an expensive one set on a high power. Those balls came over the fence and they were high. They were deep. They had so much topspin that when they landed, they shot off so quickly I could barely catch them in so high I had to reach for them. The only thing in my favor was he had a bad hip and he kept telling me about he had some pain there and wouldn't run after the ball. So I hit some short balls here and there and managed to get a couple of points off him. And you know, the game went down 6161 and he deserved to win. It was just a player like I haven't played before and in this competition I've played some some pretty good players like the guy who beat me six love six love You know, I couldn't get a shot past him. But this guy James tonight, he was just something else. If he didn't have an injury or a bad hip, he he would have cleaned me up so much as it was. I did manage to get a couple of games off him. And looking back on it, I think that, you know, I did mention earlier in this episode that taking a negative attitude into a game isn't doing any favors, and I feel like I was intimidated a bit by his high, fast, heavy topspin balls.
And I think I didn't pay enough attention to how he was playing and the points I was winning and the points I was winning were off short balls because he didn't want to run for them because he had a bit of a sore hip. Now I've got a sore Achilles, so I can I can relate to that, but I could have hit many more short balls, make him run for it, and maybe I would have won a few more games, had a had a bit more attention and not been so intimidated by his gameplay. So there's a lesson there. I still feel that I would have lost not because it's a negative attitude or anything, it's just that I recognize a better player when I see one. But I think I let myself down by not taking the opportunity to make a few more points and maybe a few more games. I think next time it's probably a good idea to chill for a few moments after a winning point and work out what you actually did to win that point. And and if you win that point, maybe they have a weakness. Perhaps they don't run very fast to the backhand side or don't return very good on the backhand side when they're having to scramble for it. Maybe they don't like lobs or like me.
They don't like high balls. It's one of my pet hates. So I think next time having a good solid look at how the other players playing and how I'm winning points when I am winning points and not so much how I'm losing points because I recognize that I've only got two years of experience. So I'm going to throw away some unforced errors which I shouldn't throw away. I'm going to hit some balls to their favorite side at a proper height for them to get a winner. But I've also got enough experience now to place the ball a bit better and to look for those opportunities and exploit them. So this game went on, as I said, to A6161 loss, and he was very good about it, very modest about it. His serves were big and fast and his most of his first serves went in. They went in high with again, like the rest of his game with lots of topspin and they bounced really high. He wasn't aiming the ball as well as he could, and his favorite game was a baseline rally and he actually thanked me for giving him the opportunity to have a good baseline rally for a change because he said the other players were making him run a lot. I should have listened to that at the start when he first said that and taken that hint, and I should have recognized that he wanted to settle in for a baseline rally and wait for me to make a mistake because he was standing a long way behind the baseline.
And I was I was hitting those balls really deep and it wouldn't have taken much just to drop a few short on the net and make him run forward. And maybe that way I could have exploited his weakness, which was short balls. He was running side to side, but he just didn't want to run too far to net or too close to the net. I didn't have very many opportunities to try a volley because he was hitting him so high over the net. So next time I play him in round two of this competition, I'll have some thoughts to bring to the game and maybe a different style of play that I can use with him, and maybe the outcome will be a little bit better than it was this time around. But it was a good game overall and I really enjoyed it. It was a nice calm night and the opposition was social and friendly, so I'm looking forward to my next game with him and indeed with all the other competitors. I've been playing this song for about a year and the first the first term I think I lost. So that was that was my week and that was my two competition games this week. I have some more competition coming up next week. I'm going to try and have a rest day before I have the game.
I think sometimes I have a hard serving session before a game or I go for a run and when I go to the court to the next day, I'm bringing a tired body that's had a workout and not not functioning at its peak. So I'll try and have a light session the day before, maybe a bit of stretching or maybe walk rather than a run or maybe maybe a walk rather than a five kilometer run. And maybe I won't go out and hit a bag of balls and I'll see if that makes a difference. I have two games coming up this coming week, one on Tuesday night, which is my regular Tuesday night game. And then I have another one I think next Thursday. So I'll report back on those next week and hopefully I can get a win in there because I've had a few losses of late and it would be nice to get back into a bit of a winning streak. So there are now 524 days to go before the Pan Pacific Masters Games commence. So I've got a bit of time in front of me that I can use to improve myself and get fitter and hopefully by the time the games come around, I'll be a fitter, faster, more skilled player. So thanks for joining me. This is this is double fault and I'm Andrew and I'll see you next week.
