8 super common pickleball mistakes and how to fix them

hey guys barrett here welcome back to another video today we're talking about the top eight most common mistakes that we see in pickleball i'm gonna give you all of the juicy details on these mistakes i'm gonna tell you how to fix them so let's get started okay the first mistake that comes up quite a bit are pop-ups now we all do the whole pop-up thing all the time and really the most important thing to understand about pop-ups is that it's all about pace okay so if you have a lot of pace coming in to you so someone hits a hard shot at you you can't then return with the same amount of pace unless you're doing an aggressive shot so if you're trying to be defensive as an example someone hits a really hard shot at you you have to let the ball come in and try to take pace off of the shot okay so if i'm dinking back and forth here do you see how what just happened right there she hit a nice little drive at me and instead of trying to hit a shot i let it sink into my paddle and i let the paddle do the rest of the work for me it's kind of nice because you can have you can let the paddle kind of do its own own thing here so like that see that i hardly even moved the paddle okay that's how you get pace off the ball it's all about letting the paddle do the work when a hard shot is hit at you now if she were to hit some uh harder shots at me here's what happens look at that hardly even moving my paddle now that was a pop-up i mean it's going to happen but that's an example of of what it looks like here so let's keep going here [Music] now see i'm being totally defensive in this case okay i can tell that she's winding up for a hard shot so the last thing i can do is to try to hit a hard shot back unless i'm just trying to be aggressive now obviously this is for demonstration purposes i would hit those those balls hard back right but the other thing here though is top spin you have to be careful of the top spin if you see your opponent doing stuff like this where they're brushing up on the ball like that or they're getting a lot of whip on it they're breaking their wrists a lot there's probably going to be a lot of top spin on it and what happens is that top spin when it hits your paddle it'll bounce up off the paddle okay so let me just show you what this what this looks like here so you notice how her volley went up real high that's the top spin so if you see your opponent getting a lot of tosser on your ball or maybe they're like a tennis player or something like that gotta be careful and try to get those balls going a little bit lower that'll really help with pop-ups okay here's another really good one number two patience or lack of patience boy this is a big one and we hear it all the time right so here's a little mantra that i have when it comes to patience live to fight another day what that means is that if you if you really want to go for a shot but it's borderline like you think you're gonna mess up on it it's best just to play defensive so that you can live to fight another day okay so let me just show you here okay so if we're just thinking back and forth here the last thing i want to do is be impatient like that okay i really want to attack and i really want to make that shot happen the ball was way too low and it's just not going to happen live to fight another day just dink that ball over instead and let your opponent make the mistake for you the thing like that the thing about lack of patience is that if you're the one that's that's making all the mistakes then you're not letting your opponent your opponent doesn't have to do anything you're not making your opponent work for their point you're just doing it for them you're working for them okay patience is all about being a little bit more defensive with these shots and understanding that the net is way more powerful than you think it is and it's not just the net it's the sidelines as well and the baseline be more defensive with these shots and wait for that ball to get a little bit too high patiently that's the key to this sort of stuff try to elongate the points and you'll be more patient in the long run okay number three here and something that's kind of on the opposite spectrum as patients is not committing to the shot fully now this is kind of interesting because a lot of mistakes come from doing kind of a half shot or a half intention shot let me show you what this looks like so if linda kind of hits one high to me my instinct is to try to smash the ball but if i think to myself oh i don't know this may not work what i'm gonna end up doing is i'm gonna end up doing this weird little pop-up thing i see this all the time so like that where the ball just kind of goes up high and i i think i want to kill the ball but nothing ends up happening here like that okay i see that a lot commit if you're gonna hit the ball okay assuming you've got the patient stuff going do it commit to the shot and go for it okay a lot of the stuff has to do with being timid okay being sort of kind of frozen loosen yourself up and go for these shots okay that's really the key to doing this stuff is to try to get rid of that timid sort of frozen feeling okay number four something that comes up a lot is not paying attention to spin now we touched on this a little bit earlier with topspin but basically here's how it works okay it's really simple top spin the ball is revolving this way when it hits your paddle it climbs up and it goes high if it's coming in like this it doesn't go right back out like that it goes up okay backspin revolves like this when it hits your paddle it goes down all right so if you notice that your opponent is doing these slices like let's say on a return their return is coming over it's a slice you're about to do your third the ball is naturally going to go down so you have to feel like you're going to hit higher than you're usually used to doing okay same thing with topspin if they hit a topspin shot you gotta hit it a little bit lower have confidence with this when you do it for the first time and it works it is like revolutionary it feels so good so pay attention to that spin don't let yourself get tricked up by that stuff so as an example here if we're going cross court and i'm doing like my back sun slice eventually she might like that there was a ton of backspin on that shot and she wasn't quite ready for it and it just went into the net now she did a pretty darn good job of getting all those slices up higher she did exactly what she should have done it was just that last one that tricked her up so try to watch the body language of your opponent if you see your opponent just wail down on it slice like this there's gonna be a lot of spin on it and you're gonna have to hit it higher okay number six is trying to do something with a tough shot there's this concept in pickleball called tempo when your opponents have tempo they essentially have the advantage they can hit harder shots like hit faster shots stuff like that so if that's the case and your opponents have the advantage the last thing that you can do most likely in most cases is to try to hit an amazing shot off of someone else's amazing shot okay let me show you so if i'm here back at the baseline and linda were to hit a shot from the kitchen there and then where to go to my backhand the last thing i can do is run over here and do some kind of amazing shot where i hit like a two-handed backhand right down the line ton to topspin perfect shot because i'm out of position and she has the tempo so what i have to do instead is hit a much more defensive shot so i can survive okay let me show you okay i can't do that i can't run all the way over here and hit some kind of amazing shot that's gonna be very difficult to do okay let me show you again okay can't do that i hit that way too high and now obviously you don't want to be at a position like this but this is just for demonstration purposes instead i need to be much more defensive okay so i'm here again i'm not gonna go over there and do something crazy just going to do something much more defensive like that i can't do an amazing shot off an amazing shot it's very very difficult to do so i'm just going to do something a little bit more defensive instead that way you can survive longer and you give your your opponent the chance to make the mistake now along the same lines as that is attempting shots that you clearly do not have look i don't come from tennis okay i never played a racquet sport before pickleball was my first thing i do not have the two-handed backhand here you want to watch i'll show you i'll just show you that i don't have this shot oh my god went way out i just i don't have the shot okay so the last thing i can do during the game is to do that shot but the thing is though is that's a little bit more specific than that because the question is how do you actually know if you have a shot or not the key is this thing right here or your cell phone the greatest thing that you can do is to get is to take video of yourself and see to see for yourself track your shots as you're watching track your percentages that's going to give you the reality and the like basically the reality check that you need to figure out whether you have a shot or not use that patience that we talked about earlier and force yourself to do a more defensive and normal shot so you can survive longer the more points that you're going to play in pickleball the longer your points are the more practice you're going to get don't end them early if you can okay here's another really good one short returns i mean we all do this myself included the problem with short returns is that you're making one of the hardest shots in the game the third shot a little bit easier for your opponent deeper turns are brutal especially for playing singles by the way but that's another topic the key to doing a deep return is to understand depth perception okay let me show you now i know there's a bit of a lensing effect on the camera so you may not be able to see too well back there but i want you to try to guess okay i'm going to put the camera a little bit closer i want you to guess how far is the ball away from the baseline when i return it okay how far away was that shot how far was it from the baseline what do you think so try to take your guesses and now let's take a look so i had a camera set up on the baseline [Music] so what most likely happens that you probably guessed that the shot was too was was much further away from the baseline than you thought and that's very common because of the depth perception since you're on the baseline the key to hitting a deeper return serve is to actually force yourself to almost hit the ball out on the return to serve i know that sounds really awkward but it's kind of the way you do it and then you'll be surprised like oh my gosh wow that was actually in another thing you can do once again set up your camera on the baseline and record all of your return of serves it's very easy to do just get a little stand for your iphone your smartphone set up on the baseline and you're good to go that's really the key to hitting a deep returner serve okay the last point and by far the most important the biggest mistake that people make in pickleball one of the biggest is footwork bad footwork the more i play this game and the more i do these videos and stuff the more i realized that footwork is like 50 of the game and it could even be more than that footwork is essential if you don't have good footwork then the rest of your upper body and your swing and all that sort of stuff it's just not going to come together so let me show you a couple of tips here good for working pickleball is all about untangling so if you hit a shot okay what a lot of people do is when they hit a shot they stare okay so as an example if i'm digging back and forth here and i hit a shot a lot of people will do this and they'll freeze up and they'll watch their shot okay you don't need to watch your shot need to be watching the ball and watch what your opponent is doing but don't sit there and just stare at it when you hit a shot you have to untangle your feet and get back into a balanced position and you've got to do that quickly okay so watch here and then back into balanced here balanced here balanced again like that it's this this constant rhythm and sort of dance that you get into with yourself when you're at the net or anywhere else really there are a couple things you can do to not get tangled up in the first place a lot of it has to do with making sure that your balance shifts with you and doesn't lean over i've covered this in another video before but the key to balance in pickleball okay is to shift things over all right like this not lean like this and then step or anything like that it's a shift like that and you can get as low as you want as low as your body will tolerate and you can use the weight here to launch yourself back into that balance position okay let me show you shift back uh one thing that you can do is that if it's a little bit too far this lunging motion if it's too far you can allow your foot to slide with you like this that can really help not great for your shoe but it's really good for the footwork so try to focus on your footwork first and your swing later the footwork is so important when you really start to put some like priority on it it makes your swing and your technique so much better so guys those are the top eight most common pickleballs mistakes that we all make i hope that was helpful head on over to pickleballkitchen.com got a bunch more stuff on there got tons of videos on this channel so welcome to pickleball kitchen hope that you enjoy all of the videos thank you guys so much for joining me i'll see you next time

Channel: Pickleball Kitchen

Views: 25,120

Rating: 4.9137931 out of 5

Keywords: pickleball, pickleball instruction, pickleball lesson, pickleball kitchen, pickleball kitchen barrett, pickleball mistakes

Id: brSLHAajRDc

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020