6 Common Pickleball Mistakes New Players Make (And How to Avoid Them)

it's never easy being a beginner in pickleball you have a lot of helpful people who sometimes annotate you with advice unfortunately not all of it is good advice today i'm going to talk about some of the things that are hurting your play the most that i rarely hear mentioned on the courts and it's not just hurting play for beginners [Music] hey everybody i'm cj johnson welcome to better pickleball this channel is dedicated to helping players over 50 live their best lives on and off the courts if you want to stay in the know make sure

you hit the subscribe and then the bell notification when i was planning this video i wrote down the mistakes that i see made most often out on the courts i sorted through them to pick the ones that i thought were causing people the most amount of problems and i'm talking about problems in terms of getting better and moving up in levels they're not just causing beginner players problems the things i'm going to talk about today are causing people problems after they move up in levels then it becomes even harder to change by the way make

sure you stick around to the end i have some additional videos that will help you to eliminate these mistakes one of the first mistakes that i see is a bad grip and when i say bad grip i say a grip that's more in the palm of your hand versus in the fingers when you are in the fingers you have control when you have the grip in the palm the tendency is to come underneath the ball to begin with right which is an upward high upward motion and then we have an extremely open paddle face so

this is the problem that it causes when you have a grip that's too much in the palm [Music] what i recommend is a continental grip so that your hand looks like this it's more in the fingers if you happen to look down and you have a grip that looks like this so it's laying more across the center of your palm make sure you hang out and at the end of this video i've got something just for you mistake number two that i see is a poor footwork and i think there's a lot of ways that

there's poor footwork it's movement up here at the line it's being flat-footed but the most common problem i see is either not using a split stump or not knowing when to split steps so i'm gonna go to the back try and show you what i see and then show you what it is i'd like you to do so i'm still running as the ball comes back to me what i need to do is the minute i see the person on the other side of the net ready to hit the ball i need to split step

so i stop i split step i'm on the balls of my feet that allows me to move in either direction so we're going to play that again and this time i'm going to use the split step sorry that's okay let's do it again now i'm up and i'm ready to play by using the split step another problem that i see is controlling the height of the ball which i think in most cases comes from an inability to control the speed of the ball when a pickleball is losing speed it doesn't bounce as high newer players

tend to make strokes that are very long the longer the stroke the more speed that you can add to the shot conversely the higher the shot you may get one of my favorite drills to shorten the paddle stroke is to have somebody stand where there's a fence it works if somebody is have it takes too big a backswing in the ground stroke as you come back to get prepared for a ground stroke the fence is here it only allows me to go back just a little bit behind my leg and then i have to swing

through so i'm back and through back and through so if you think that long stroke is giving you some problems a fence can be your best friend the next thing i see is trying to do too much too soon meaning when you first start out if you can focus on the serve the return and the third shot and making those consistent you're probably going to win more points as well as more games what i see too often is people as they start to either learn how to dink or learn how to hit returns they try

to put a lot of spin on it or try to hit it extremely hard doing more than they're capable of which causes them to make a mistake even if you haven't played pickleball long you have heard or probably have heard that you want to hit the return deep now you may not know why you want to hit the return deep so that it causes the serving team difficulty with the third shot now what may surprise you is this mark renison did some unofficial statistics back in 2018 at the nationals and what he found is professional

players hit 79 percent of their returns towards the baseline care to guess how many on the non-professional side 29 so less than 30 percent of the returns were actually hit deep and that's in tournament play you'd be better served by trying to hit a deep return versus trying to put a lot of spin on the ball or a lot of pace on the ball hit it a little higher if you need to that allows you some time to get to the net as well so work on that part of the game before trying to get

too fancy one of the next problems that i see is trying to attack shots that are not attackable not being patient enough so what do i mean by shots that are unattackable shots that are below the net you have to do something typically top spin it up to get it up and over the net you'd be better off waiting for a shot that comes above the net to attack so let's run through jeannie and i are going to dink a little bit and you'll get a chance to see the ball bouncing when the balls apex

of the bounce is below the net that's much less attackable than when it comes up above the net so we want to be patient on those what you'll notice is as jeannie and i dink here these shots the apex of the bones is below the net what i see people tend to do here is to wait for a shot below the neck and try real hard to attack on it so you're better off waiting for a shot where the apex of the bounce is slightly above the men to attack so genie i'm going to have

you hit me a high one here you see that ball was up above the net and it's attackable now i can attack it genie i cut that ball about right here if i take it over to that it's two or three feet above the net i have a better chance of attacking that shot than i do of rolling something up from underneath so spend some time working on this looking at the apex of the bounce and think about shots that are attackable versus unattackable now this one i hear discussed a lot this one is staying

at the baseline and i'm not just convinced that people don't know why that's a problem and yes there are some instances there are some single players who can play a great baseline game and that's good for them but for the most part in doubles you want to play up at the net and the reason why is time when you are at the net you are taking away your opponent's time to react you have closed the distance between the two of them when you stay back at the baseline and take your time away so here's an

example of what that looks like so genie's at the net i'm at the baseline i am not going to move in i'm going to stay back here what you're going to see is she has all the time in the world to react or to plan and i'm reacting i'm just simply trying to keep the ball in place she is offensive i'm defensive go ahead genie i'm at her mercy this whole time she can drop it short she can hit it deep she has plenty of time to look at what i'm doing and choose the shot

all i'm simply doing is reacting and keeping the ball in play i'm defensive she's offensive and that's a difficult point or a difficult situation to score any points now that you understand the mistakes here's a playlist that will help you to fix the things that plague you the most you got value from this video give it a thumbs up and share it with your pickleball playing friends together we can train smart live bold and age well