Transcription
In this video, I'm going to give you five simple tips that can improve your pickle ball game overnight. Sometimes in pickle ball, improvement takes tons of hours of practice or thousands of reps. But this video is going to be a little bit different. Sometimes there's things that just a simple mindset shift or looking at something a different way or thinking it from a different perspective can give you a quick result. So, in this video, I'm going to give you my top five [music] tips that I think can help your game right away.
The first tip that I want to talk about is called the target fix. And you've probably heard the saying before, aim small, miss small. So, one of the common things that I get with working with kind of more amateur level players is they'll hit a shot and when I ask them, "Where were you trying to hit that?" They'll say, "I don't know. I was just trying to get it somewhere in the court." So that is a major problem because if you don't have specific intention with every single shot that you hit, then we really can't have good control over the ball. So what I want you to do is I want you every single shot you hit to have three intentions. Number one, you're going to try to control the spin so you know what type of spin you're hitting. Number two, we're going to try to control trajectory. And number three, we're going to try to control pace. If you can control all three of those things, then what we're going to end up is with a specific landing spot where we want the ball. So, every time I touch the ball, I'm visualizing, do I want it top spin or under spin? How high do I want it? How hard do I want it? And then ultimately, that's going to end up in exactly where do I want the ball to land. Now, the importance of this is if you're doing this, you're giving yourself something to judge. You can judge success or nonsuccess based on, oh, I hit that one a little bit too high, or I intended top spin, but it came off a little bit flat, or I was aiming for a spot, but I hit it too hard. Okay? So, the more information you're kind of giving your brain, the better you can judge your results.
The second tip that I have for you that I think can get you some immediate results is called the elbow push. So, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on our hitting elbow. And I have this term that I refer to as flipping. So that anytime we hit a shot and we're kind of rolling the paddle across the body, this elbow is going to end up flipping out. Okay? And that is a major recipe for inconsistency in your game. So we're going to try to get rid of that. So for the elbow push, it's pretty simple. We're going to focus on where we want to hit the ball, whatever your target line is, and we're going to try to get our hitting elbow to move exactly in that direction. So, if I want to hit it right there straight in front of me, my elbow moves that way. If I want to hit it crosscourt, my elbow moves that way. So, a common example of doing this incorrectly, and you'll probably see this if you really look a lot at your local rec play courts, is a crosscourt shot that looks like this. Okay, trying to hit the ball that way. My elbow is moving that way. That is not what we want. It's going to give us inconsistency, net misses, high misses. So, get that elbow pushed, get it lined up, and try to get your elbow going wherever you want the ball to go.
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The next tip I have for you that I think will get you some immediate results is called the wrist set. Okay? In order to be consistent, we need to be controlling what this paddle is doing. Every little movement, open, closed, left, right, is going to impact where the ball goes. So, we need to be very controlled and aware of what our paddle positions are. What's most in control of the paddle position or the closest thing to it? That's the wrist. And we need a steady, consistent wrist position to get consistent results. Okay. So, here's how this works. You're going to start in a ready position with what I would call neutral wrist position. Everybody's ready position is a little bit different, but you got to figure out kind of where your neutral is. There's different wrist positions for every shot, but we're just going to look at a simple forehand and backhand. Okay. So, the way that I do this is if I were going to hit a forehand dink, I'd take my starting position, I'd move my wrist to set my wrist position for a forehand dink. And now, once I get there, that's the first thing that happens. That's going to lock out. Okay? Once I'm in this kind of forehand wrist position, that locks out. And now I can execute my shot. And what I really want you to feel is that whatever you're setting is your wrist position, it feels exactly the same when you finish your swing. Okay? So you set it, start the swing, you finish the swing, it's exactly the same. Now then we can go back to a neutral wrist position. If you're going to do a backhand, this is a different wrist position, right? Forehand, backhand. So I still got to set this wrist position. Then I lock it in. Then I execute and make sure it feels the same when I finish and then I can go back to neutral. So give that a try.
The next tip I have for you that I think is going to give you immediate results and if you've watched any of my past videos or any of my content, this is going to sound like a broken record, but it is the split step. I talk about this so much because it is that important. The split step is what allows you to be ready to react to anything that's going to happen on a pickle ball court. So, when I hit a shot, the ball travels over to my opponents and they're getting ready to hit. I don't know where they're going to hit it. It could go forehand, it could go backhand, it could go left, it could go right, it could go hard, it could go soft. Okay? So, I have to be ready for anything. And the way that we do that is by timing our split step, getting our legs and our body ready to react. Okay? So, what we're going to do for this is right as the ball is about to touch our opponent's paddle, we're going to get in a nice wide base. We're gonna get low. We're going to get our body posture nice and upright and solid. And we're going to get our legs, most importantly, what I would refer to as loaded. That means these leg muscles are are bending and they're getting ready to explode and push me wherever I need to go. So, timing is key in the split step, wide base, and getting those legs ready to push you off to that next shot.
The last tip I have for you that I think is going to help you immediately is learning to get more behind the ball when you're hitting. And in order to do this, I want to talk about a concept called feel versus real. So, I've been coaching for probably 20 years now, and I see this concept all the time where what somebody thinks they're doing is not what's actually happening. So, anytime you're trying to make kind of an improvement or an adjustment in your game, you always need to exaggerate. So, here's an example. I was working with my 10-year-old daughter recently. We were working on our top spin or our tip down dink. And she likes to hit the ball off to the side of her. Okay? And so I was telling her, try to get the ball more like lined up with with the outside of your foot. Okay? So she was hitting it here and she wore that she was doing that, right? She felt like she was doing that. So what we had to do is we had to exaggerate the feel. So, I told her, "Okay, for the next shot, I want you to have the ball coming right at the middle of your stance." So, imagine that you're you're lining up the ball to come right in between your two legs. And then you're going to hit a forehand dank. And almost instantly, she started hitting the ball better. She felt like she was here, but she was actually probably about here. And now she was moving her feet. She was shuffling. She was getting behind every ball. she was hitting nice simple push dings rather than being a little bit lazy and kind of allowing herself to reach out to the side. So the big takeaway, the big tip here is try a couple both both forehand and backhand where you imagine the ball is coming right down the middle of your stance. You hit a forehand dink from there or you hit a backhand dink from there and you're going to notice a lot more control when you're right behind the ball.
Thanks for watching guys. If you like this type of content, make sure you subscribe to see more. And do me a favor in the comments below. Tell me what is the number one struggle that you face in pickle ball. And hopefully I can help you out in a future video.