Thanasi Kokkinakis admits he's playing a balancing act trying to manage his body and compete for grand slams after suffering another shattering five-set US Open defeat.
In his first match at Flushing Meadows since retiring with severe cramps while locked at two sets all against French star Richard Gasquet in 2015, Kokkinakis was again injured before blowing a two-set lead against Janko Tipsarevic.
The 21-year-old was treated for an elbow injury and complained of pains all the way down his left side in his gut-wrenching 6-7 (5-7) 3-6 6-1 7-6 (7-2) 6-3 loss to Serbia's two-time quarter-finalist.
"It wasn't good. I was pretty disappointed with how I played," Kokkinakis said.
"I was a bit flat going into it and even winning the first two sets, I still didn't think that I was playing great and then, when I got down in the third, I semi-tanked in the third.
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"I tried to regroup in the fourth, played a terrible tiebreaker, but he played better than me. I was tentative. I wasn't hitting out with my shots. I was disappointed." Even a mid-match return to the locker-room to try to recompose himself didn't work.
"I haven't really regrouped. I am pretty pissed. I lied on the bench with my head up, looking at the ceiling," he said.
"It is part tennis. Some matches you play terrible and you feel like hating the sport, where as other matches you have unbelievable wins and have good emotions.
"But I tell you what, losing feels a lot worse than winning feels good."
Kokkinakis was sidelined for 18 months following shoulder surgery and a myriad of other injuries and says he hasn't sufficiently recovered enough to play regularly in his bid to boost his flagging ranking of No.222 in the world.
"I am slowly starting to work out what I can and can't do and what my limit is," he said.
"Such a big emphasis from me and my team was trying to get through the whole year healthy and then build up from there and have a red-hot crack going into the Aussie Open.
"That is still the goal, but it is tough to know what level of training (to do) because you want to go overboard with training to prepare for five sets, but that can sometimes be worse if you get hurt training that long and then have to take three to four days off after it.
"It ends up making you train less. It is a balancing act and I am always learning about my body."
