5 Pickleball Drills to SAVE YOUR GAME

this is five basic drills that beginners can use to help them improve fast so here's one big problem I see a lot of players say they want to improve and get you from a three five to a 4-0 or a 4-0 to a four five but the challenge is players only play wreck games and they never drill well the hack or the secret to improving faster accelerating your growth is to drill it's not always the most fun thing in the world I get that but like Kobe Bryant once said in the story in fact I'll just tell you the story Kobe Bryant was in a gym one time and another guy came in to watch him train the guy's famous for training in these crazy ways he had these unbelievable workouts and the guy walked in sat down watched Kobe train and when Kobe train hit the exact same fundamental move for two hours the guy was sitting there like this is so boring why is he doing this so when Kobe finished he came back over to the guy and the player said hey Kobe you're the best player in the world which he was at the time why are you working on that one simple move over and over and over for two hours Kobe looked at him and he said it's why I'm the best player in the world so if you want to improve fast you got to do with my friend Sam Allen always says Master the boring and start to do things that will help you improved your game faster AKA drilling here we go all right here so here's the first drill that you can do it's a simple Cross Court thinking it looks like this okay you go with the partner and you're just going to work on Cross Court dinking with them no pressure on it right now we're just trying to get the ball down and if you can take one out of the air do it okay so step number one is just doing the drill but what drills do is they provide structure for you the most important thing in any of the five drills I'm going to give you right now is that you have a focus area and an intention for what you're trying to work on so for us right now one that you might work on and one that we're going to work on right now it's balance while we dink a lot of times people get off balance and when you get off balance it causes you to Pop the ball up in the air so Zach and I are gonna be on balance we're low in a stance so after you've done this for say three to five minutes there's a level two to it which is make it a game turn it into a competition right away and so a very basic one that I see Pros do all the time is they just play a game to five or a game to seven so let's actually just play a couple points out play the game [Music] foreign [Music] point for me or playing the Five Points that's drill number one forehand Cross Court dinking good for exact pretty good for a beginner off Craigslist thank you twenty one dollars all right how'd you feel uh twenty one dollars right here you know huh you sound nervous first time on camera first time on camera bear with him it's his first time I think of well it's the first time on camera what a guy Silvernail I said I got my buddy Zach here it was actually not my buddy I actually found him on Craigslist gave him 22 dollars 21. here is drill number two what we do on one side we are also going to do on the other side so it's going to be back hand dinking so same exact thing here okay the drill is just going back and forth maybe you put a five minute timer on that's something that I've Zach and I have done quite a bit we'll go five minutes and we'll just dink we're just gonna experiment a little bit what works for us choose an intention so right now I'm focused on taking balls out of the air okay boom if I can trying to give less time to the opponent in the same thing on this side we're going to turn it into a game okay so we're gonna play just play a couple points here but you can play the five to seven I'm trying to put into practice what I just focused on during our Drlling taking balls out of the air beat up here ah you take that mister look I don't know why I just got over the net there which camera look at this camera that camera this camera okay boom all right that's two drills before I go to the third drill this video is sponsored by selker sick paddles these things freaking Cha Cha Cha Cha love these things man sell Kirk TV check it out selkirk. com check it out Selkirk paddles check it out let's keep going this is the third drill that you can do and you only need to do it for a few minutes to help you improve okay so Zach's gonna be here at the kitchen line I'm gonna be back here so this is a third shot drop drill so remember I serve it that's my first shot The Returned that's my second shot and then my third shot is a third shot drop so here's a drill you can do one person back here at the Baseline and the other person we'll be up at the kitchen line and I'm just trying to get the ball down and get it to land in the kitchen or make Zach hit up okay so I'm just going back I'm just getting reps and Zach's having a chance to work on his topspin rolls off the bouncer out of the air boom so maybe I do a few this way you can do it by time you can do it by number you can also come to the other side because you're probably going to play Both Sides okay you got one if I missed so now I'm going Cross Court and I'm just going to do this for a few minutes boom trying to get the land in the kitchen beautiful now what's the game for this one this is not a game that I made up I learned this it's a very common pickleball game it called 7-Eleven you've probably heard it if you've watched other videos you can change the scoring systems however you want but a game called 7-Eleven is the guy at the kitchen has to score 11 points or the guy or girl back here that has to try to score seven points they have the advantage they should get to 11 before we get to seven maybe but that's why we have a different score in order to equalize or neutralize the scoring system okay so we're live Zach's trying to keep me back foreign Zach would win that point one little caveat here the way I like to play is if the person at the back gets 10 drops in a row without losing the point or the person at the kitchen doesn't win the point within 10 shots the person in the back wins a point that just means you got 10 in a row that's pretty dang good you deserve a point here is drill number four it's called blocking at beginner levels I've gotten this conversation many times with you with our friend Danny who we saw off Craigslist he's been in another video about at the very beginner levels you actually don't always dink a ton because people don't get to the kitchen so one of maybe the most important skills to learn as a new player is the ability to block a ball because everybody wants to hit the ball so hard it's probably what makes pickleball fun is hitting it hard but if you know the other team is going to try to hit it hard you got to be ready to block Zach's about to rip some balls here we go I'm at the kitchen line and here's the thing Zach go ahead and start nice sorry okay beautiful so Zach's ripping balls his whole job is to rip balls in my face my whole job is to do three things be in a stance a ready position that's number one number two is paddle position here if my paddle's down here I have to bring it all the way up which creates more motion which will lead potentially to a harder ball to deflect which could lead to a pop-up or a ball going out so number one is down number two is paddle up and number three is tight compact punches tights compact punches where we get off here go ahead and rip it is when we take big swings well shoot I actually didn't mean to hit it that hard out but when you take really big swings at the kitchen line like that with the ball coming that hard what is it every action has an equal and opposite reaction that Ball's flying back so I don't need to win the point on this all I need to do is block it back dad got me he's good at driving [Music] block it back it's a little tight contact swings cool boom that drill is specifically for the person who's at the kitchen as you just saw down in the stands paddle position High short compact punches in order to block that ball back if you do that one thing you will improve dramatically immediately because so many players of the 303540 even four five level Drve the ball so much but you got to be ready for that even at the pro level if you can't block well teams will drive through you and expose you so you have to be able to do this one skill well that's how you work at it Zach on the other hand he's also getting really good reps at driving driving is an important skill to have so Zach gets to just rip balls rip balls rip balls at my face as much as he wants and one other thing that you get to work on while you're here down paddle up punching the ball is you get to work on letting out balls go out it's so hard to actually get good at that skill so this is a time to actually practice it oh that's going out shoot it's so hard to let out balls go out oh my gosh yep way out I took 40 takes I hit the other 39.

so drill number five is putting it all together in what's called Skinny singles we're not playing singles but we are playing one-on-one on a small side of the Court which we're going to show you here in a moment you get to put all the things that we just worked on forehand thinking backhand dinking third shot drops blocking into this one-on-one game with a small side of the court it's a great game to test your skills and it's also just a great game to put it all together kind of just said that but I forgot what I was going to say so bear with me all right all we have you serve it all we have is the skinny to work with so Zach is serving cross we're playing cross all right [Music] [Music] [Music] so I'll do one zero uh actually Zach serp so that's my serve okay so I'm on the other side so Zach lost that point so technically now the ball would come to me and I would serve it from this side and we played out let's assume that I win this point okay I serve it Zach gets it into the net or something boom now I'm up 1-0 I'm Zach's gonna stay where he's at and I'm gonna come over here now I'm serving here playing again boom let's say Zach wins this point all right head into the net now Zach gets the ball back let's say Zach then serves it to me down the line boom let's say I hit the ball out right he wins the point now Zach will move over to the other side here we go foreign so I lost it right so Zach now has two points he moves back and I stay and we're going at it again down the line last point ah so Zach wins the point he'd move back so in summary you serve it cross court if you win the server moves to the other side serves it down the line if you get a stop ball goes to the other side there's an easy way to know which side you're standing on if you have zero points you're on the right side meaning this side over here okay if you ever have an even number two four six or eight you're always going to be on the right side if you have an odd number you are always going to be on the left side and the same goes for your partner if they have 1. 3 points Five Points they will be on the left side if I have one three five seven I will be on the left side so those are the five drills that you can work on to improve these are five drills that Pros use the drills for forehand thinking backhand dinking third shot drop blocking and skinnies and finally here's my challenge for you next time you go out to play and I know I understand you got to work around it a little bit depending on the chord availability how much time you might have at a court see if you can just do a few minutes of this with just one of these drills or two of them right if you get out to the courts and you're gonna play at 5 30.