Andy Roddick on Tennis Superstitions, Sports Psychology & More | Q&Andy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Andy Roddick** (0:36)
Everyone, welcome to Q&Andy, the show where I don't know what's coming.
The questions are provided by you, the listener, producer Mike. What do we got?

**Mike** (0:46)
Well, first, thank you to everybody who sent in questions. A couple of ways to do it as a reminder for the future. You can find us on socials. We're at Served Podcast. You can also email them to askandyatservedpodcast.com or just go to servedpodcast.com. And right there at the top of the page, click Ask Andy, submit your question.
Because Andy, I think us ribbing everyone is actually working, because this week, every single question is a video question.

**Andy Roddick** (1:14)
Oh, I was going to ask how the videos were going. Is it still a tragic state of affairs? But we got videos.

**Mike** (1:19)
We're doing it.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:21)
So thank you. Thank you, everybody.

**Mike** (1:23)
And first, we're going to thank Scott by playing his video question, Scott. Thanks for deeming this Sean. Give it a go.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:30)
Hey Andy, this is Scott and Charlotte. Brave enough to send you a video submission for Q&Andy. I just finished up a ball machine session. It's part of my routine on days when I have matches. My question to you is on your match days, did you have certain routines, physical warmups, things that you ate that you did each match day?
I've been winning recently. So I've been a little stitious, not changing on my routine, wondering if you had any superstitions based on how you were playing to maybe get some karma, some mojo going into your matches. Thanks so much.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:59)
Bye.

**Andy Roddick** (1:59)
I like the little stitious reference. You know I'm a fan of that one. I'm not superstitious, I'm just a little stitious.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:04)
I've been getting jobs.

**Andy Roddick** (2:05)
Scott, well congrats on the apparent heater that you got rolling there.
Good job. For me, it was, match days are tough with warmup because, hopefully you're playing at a club or somewhere where you get like a set match time. So I loved a one o'clock start because then you could make sure you had eaten and you had an hour and a half or two hours to digest and everything was kind of dialed. On tour, if you're a third match after one, you're kind of just guessing as best you can along the way. But for me, I was like insane about routine. I needed to control something. I wasn't like a, oh, we'll warm up just as much as we warm up or whatever. I was like hydrated the night before, woke up, would eat right away. I knew that close to the match got the less I was going to want to eat for nerves. So I would try to pound like a big meal at night and in the morning.
But as far as the actual warm up, it also depended on weather, right? If we were in Cincinnati and it was 102 degrees, I wasn't going to go burn a 35 minute warm up, right? So if I was feeling good and I was in the semis finals or something, I would go up and warm up for 12 or 13 minutes, right? I would literally not be working on stuff, but just quite literally warming up so that your body was familiar. But it changes. If you're searching for something, maybe the warm up is a little bit longer. If you saw me warm up for 12 minutes, that meant that I felt pretty good and that you could potentially be in trouble. But for me, it was big on sleep, obviously big on diet, pounding food when I felt like I could. Maybe you don't deal with nerves, it might not be the same thing, but I did. So I knew that I was just going to be trying to like grind a bar or a banana before I went on. So I wanted that kind of, I didn't want to go into like a calorie deficit. You know, so for me, but it was the same stretching routine before I wouldn't hit.
The same sort of stuff all the time, just the length of the warm up is the only thing that kind of changed.