Improve Your Reflexes & Win More Volley Battles (crucial pickleball tips)

what if I told you that by the end of this video you'll immediately have better reflexes and win more hands battles well if you implement these tips I'm about to go through you will so make sure you're paying close attention you don't want to just watch this video then forget everything there's probably going to be two to three things in here that you're not doing so try your best to find them [Music] so you're probably aware that having fast reflexes is one of the most important skills to win in pickleball especially at the higher level the main reason you need these fast reflexes is to win hands battles that generally arise from dinking situations like this looking at our technique in these situations there's a few main things to consider that will make the world of difference the number one technical thing to consider to do well in a hands battle and increase your reaction time is your ready position so when I say ready position I'm talking about how you're waiting when you're standing for the ball okay most people consider it their upper body when they think about ready position but your legs are actually equally as important starting with the upper body though whenever you're at the kitchen waiting for a volley or a dink you want to be expecting the ball to get hit very hard at around this level right so when you're waiting you want to have your hands up and out in front okay you never want to be waiting like this with your hands down so if you're down here you can consider yourself toast so hands up like this and while you have your hands up you want to make sure that you're actually leaning your paddle over slightly to your back end the reason for this is that with your backhand you can cover a lot more of your body than you can with your forehand if you try to cover your body with your forehand you'll get jammed like this okay so you want to lean it slightly to the backhand because you're actually going to hit more backhands than forehands and these sorts of fast exchanges so this is the position with your arms that you want to go back to after every single shot looking at our legs what you don't want to do is stand straight up like this this position makes it very hard to explode in either direction try to have at least shoulder width with your feet okay you want to be on your toes and have slightly bent knees here if my opponent hits it out to my side I can simply take a lunge step like this and I'm on balanced to come back to my neutral position so every time Drew hits a dink after I hit my ball I go right back to my optimal ready position and when he accelerates I'm ready to counter attack the next thing to keep in mind is that you need to stay on balance after each shot within hands exchange so it doesn't help if you're only really ready for your first shot right you want to be in this position before every shot right so one important thing to keep in mind to make sure that happens is that you don't take too big of a backswing and you don't lose your balance with your feet okay so looking at your backswing when I'm doing these volley rallies everything should stay out in front and I shouldn't be getting too much power from my shoulders or my arm like this so if I'm turning my shoulders and taking a big back swing behind me there's a very high chance that I'm going to lose my balance and not be ready for the next shot so remember everything out in front in compact Strokes your power can come from your wrist when it comes to staying on balance with your legs you want to make sure that if you ever need to move out to the side you're very low and you're on balance and you generally just want to take one big step in either direction so if I'm fed a ball over here I'll take my step out and then I'm immediately back to my neutral stance here the last thing you need technically to be successful in these situations is that you cannot have any holes in your reflexes and this is something that I haven't heard many people on YouTube talk about what I mean is that depending on where your opponent hits the ball to you whether it's here here here here here you need to have an automatic response to every situation so what you see in a lot of lower level players is that they have holes in their reflexes but where are those holes usually so generally I would say most players favor their backhand volley right because like I said you can cover your body with it it's generally easy to reach out like this and you're usually actually leaning your paddle towards that direction so you're generally going to have an easier time you know hitting volleys in your body with your backhand where a lot of players struggle is where it comes right at their body towards their forehand so this would be the right shoulder right hip region okay so good players know this and they'll actually try to Target this region so if you don't have an automatic response to counter this shot you're gonna have a very difficult time as you get to the higher levels the moral of the story is that to become an elite baller you need to be comfortable with every sort of shot that you're going to get the only way to do that is practice the most common way to do this is with head-to-head volleys drills like this where we're slowly increasing the pace and aiming for each other's weak points if you don't have a drilling partner you can essentially do the exact same thing on the dinkmaster like this so how do you take these skills and use them to win hands battles that's where strategy comes into play so every time you're in a dinky rally I want you to have two things on the top of your mind the first is that while you have this ready position the center of your ready position should always be facing towards the ball okay so if I hit my dink down the line and the ball is in front of me I'm going to be facing like this if I hit my dick across court and it's to the side of me I'm actually going to turn my body and my paddle and face towards it like this so I'm always in the optimum position to react to any shot the next thing is that after every time I hit a dink I'm always expecting a speed up to come back to me so I'm never going to be expecting a dink right I'm not gonna have my paddle down here waiting to hit a dink because the dinks come very slow I need to be ready for a speed up I'm not just talking about my technique of having my paddle apart right you won't mentally be ready for the person to hit the ball right at you the most important strategic thing to consider though to win hands battles is where you're hitting the ball when I first started playing I knew nothing about pickleball strategy when I got in hand battle I would try to win by going right through the person so to be effective in hands battles at a higher level you need to make sure that you're targeting your opponent's weak points so now we're going to do some real-time examples so you can see what this strategy and everything looks like so there Drew sped up pretty high directly in my strikes into my backhand where I said you shouldn't hit it which made it really easy for me to counter there I got Drew jammed in that nice right shoulder right hip region which made it really hard for him to do anything one more great thing to consider guys is that if you're ever losing in a hands battle your best bet is to just drop the ball straight into the kitchen okay you don't want to just go down fighting as if you're going to win the point on your back foot it's almost always better if you're in a bad situation in a hands battle to reset the ball into the kitchen so that you go back to a neutral dinking situation so I'll show you what that looks like in real time Drew's gonna speed up at me get me on my back foot and I reset the ball into the kitchen which gets me back into a neutral situation like this think to yourself now of all the things we just went through which do you think you could improve upon there's probably one or two things that stood out to you so make sure you have these on the top of your mind next time you go to the courts I guarantee this will make a big difference and if you want to see 10 more tips to reach your highest level in 2023 watch this [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Enhance Pickleball

Views: 43,425

Keywords: Pickleball, Pickleball for beginners, Pickleball lessons, How to play pickleball, Pickleball strategy, Pickleball tips and tricks, Pickleball instruction, Pickleball rules, Pickleball techniques, Pickleball drills, Advanced pickleball, Pickleball doubles strategy, Pickleball singles strategy, Improve your pickleball game, Pickleball training, Pickleball tutorials, Pickleball court, Pickleball grip, Winning pickleball strategies, enhance pickleball, Reaction time and volleys

Id: hKzdzEWspPs

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023