Rafa Nadal has spoken in public again a week after becoming the player with the most Grand Slam titles in tennis history. The new champion of the Australian Open has participated in a health talk held at his academy in which he has talked about the importance of being humble to succeed, his famous rituals on the court or how he has become a player more methodical over the years. These are his reflections:
The importance of being humble
«Athletes before anything else are normal and ordinary people and there are all mornings when it is more difficult for us to go to work . You have had a bad night, or you wake up more tired and the motivation is not there. Normally the people who succeed and who have continuity in success is because they have the necessary attitude to go to training. Not every day of your life you can give your best, there are days that your body only leaves you 60%, and that day you have to give 60%, not just 20%. It is important to live with the imperfection of things and from this basic principle, failures are better accepted. Many people tolerate failure more and I never consider that when you strive for one goal and the other has been better, it has never been a failure. The real risk is how to tolerate bad times. Real inner humility is necessary to accept that things will not always go well . One of the keys to continuing to play tennis is that I have tolerated both success and failure in a similar way. Nothing is so fantastic and nothing is so bad.
His famous rituals on the track
“I don’t think there is an absolute way to focus or a ritual that is going to help you perform better. I think that the less strange things you need to do to focus and be comfortable, the better. When I play I have very marked rituals and I would like not to have to do so many. But tennis is a mentally aggressive sport that demands you at all times because the slightest mistake sends you home. One has to find a way to be focused on what one is doing 100% without internal distractions. As a general rule I am a concentrated and intense person to try to achieve my goal. When I train I don’t have any rituals, but competing gives me that security and isolates me from things that can distract me.
Increasingly methodical without forgetting the “art”
Contrary to what many people may think, I have been a very unmethodical person in my life. The only thing that I have always been very constant is in the intensity at work. When I’m training I usually push myself to the max. That is what has gotten me where it has gotten me. There are people who do it too and they haven’t had the luck that I’ve had, that’s why I always say that I’m lucky in life. With age you need to take more and more care of food, rest periods, calendars… Over the years I have had to order myself in every way. I don’t believe that in the perfection of things or in becoming a robot, there has to be some art and fantasy because that’s how I understand the sport.
