Tennis lessons, in my experience, tend to follow a depressingly predictable pattern. First, a coach will watch me hit a few balls, trying hard to suppress a grimace, then he’ll show me how I ought to be doing it, with lots of fiddly adjustments to grip, stance and swing. Result: no change.

But the European Tennis Academy has developed a new approach at its base in the Austrian Alps. It does away with all those tiresome instructions and concentrates instead on the “inner game”. The idea is to eradicate fear and self-doubt and turn middling club players such as me into ruthless match-winners.

At the academy, in the small mountain village of Brand, I and three other students were put straight on court and told to rally from the baseline. “When the ball bounces in front of you, shout ‘Ah!’, and when it hits your strings, shout ‘Eeeeee!’,” said Tom, the coach. “Nice and loud.”

This proved surprisingly difficult. Making the sounds was easy enough, but timing the ahs and eeeeees to the precise moment of impact was mentally exhausting. And it wasn’t made any easier when my fellow students started grunting and shrieking like demented Sharapovas.

After 10 minutes or so — just as I was getting the hang of it — Tom told us to stop. “So, why do you think we do this?” he asked.

Quizzical looks all round. To establish a rhythm, maybe?

“It’s to stop you thinking,” explained Tom. “We’ve all got a little voice inside our heads, telling us what to do, nagging us, pointing out our mistakes. We call him Charlie. The point of this exercise is to give Charlie something to do. Charlie’s happy, so we can get on with playing our shots.”

It might sound simplistic, but it worked for me. I was so busy concentrating on getting the noises right that I barely noticed I was hitting smooth 20-stroke rallies.

The idea of quieting the conscious mind to eradicate nerves and self-criticism has been around since the 1970s, when Tim Gallwey, a disillusioned tennis coach, wrote the seminal sports-psychology book The Inner Game of Tennis. Gallwey’s revolutionary ideas about achieving a state of relaxed concentration — playing “in the zone” — have since been adopted by sports coaches worldwide.

The European Tennis Academy, at its centres in Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Spain, has succeeded in putting these ideas into practice.

The academy’s founder, Kurt Wiederkehr, who worked in America under Gallwey, has developed a teaching method he calls Mental Match Play.

Wiederkehr emphasises the importance of breathing — the “Eeeeee!” is designed to help you breathe out through your ground strokes — and claims students learn faster when they listen to electronic dance music.

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