The Single Change That Gives Pros 100% More Control in Pickleball

Pickleball is a game of control. The players who can place the ball where they want to are the ones that usually win. So we're going to break down the top seven pickleball tips for control so you can start placing the ball exactly where you want and ultimately win more points. But before we get into it, let me tell you about NordVPN who sponsored this video. Shay and I travel all the time for pickleball, whether it's tournaments, events or different facilities that we're filming at, we are constantly on the move, which means we're connecting to lots of different Wi-Fi networks that probably aren't safe, like in airports or a hotel or somewhere else that's public. So having NordVPN on our computer helps us stay safe no matter where we are. Literally just one click and your connection is encrypted. So no one on that sketchy airport Wi-Fi can see what we're doing. They also have a feature called threat protection. It blocks malware and sketchy sites before they even load. So if you're clicking through some tournament bracket side or some random registration link, it's already working in the background. We've had it running for months in the background on our computer. And honestly, we forget it's even there protecting us. So if you want to up your computer safety right now is the best time because Nord is offering a huge discount to new subscribers. You get four extra months for free when you grab a two year plan. Just go to NordVPN.com slash crack pickleball or use our code pickleball at checkout. And if you decide it's not for you, don't worry. They've got a 30 day money back guarantee. So you get a full refund with no hassle. Check it out for yourself in the link in the description or the pinned comments. And let's get back to the video. The first way to instantly get more control is to keep your paddle out in front of you. Let me show you what I mean. It's important to keep your paddle in your field of vision. When your paddle goes behind your field of vision, you increase the variance between where your paddle actually is and where your brain thinks it is. To illustrate this, I want you to close your eyes and try to touch the tips of your fingers together five times in a row like this. As you can probably see here, it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. And I will be missing a few times. However, if you open your eyes and then look at them, you can easily touch them together every single time. While it's not a perfect illustration, the same concept does apply. When you can't see where something is in space, your brain makes an educated guess about where it is using all the information it has through a sense that we have called proprioception. All of that is to say, when you can visually see something, you have a better sense of where it is in space versus when you can't see something. Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to have your paddle out in front of you. Therefore, you know where it is in relation to the ball that you're about to hit. So practically, what this means is that whenever you're hitting strokes, try not to let your paddle go out of your field of vision in your backswing. If you find yourself hitting these controlled shots like drops or resets or dinks, and your paddle is going outside of your field of vision, all that means is that your backswing is just too large and you need to hone it in just a bit. The second biggest and honestly most underrated way to improve your consistency on the court is also probably the simplest tip we have on this list. Keep your eye on the ball all the way through contact. That may seem extremely obvious, but we find this is one of the hardest to execute tips on the list because people naturally like to pick their head up and scan what's going on with the court rather than actually focus on the shot that's right in front of them. It's an extremely common habit and it's only natural, but I'm going to teach you how to fight that instinct a little bit better. The most common mistake we see when it comes to this is when the ball is coming over the net, we do a decent job looking at the ball. But before contact, we go ahead and pick up our eyes and our head because we want to see where the ball ended up rather than focusing on actually hitting the ball instead. We're so ready for the next shot and we want to know what our opponents are up to that we actually forget to take the extra half second to watch the ball all the way through our paddle and properly hit the ball so that it is consistent. If you watch any professional pickleball player or even tennis player, you'll notice something pretty specific. Their eyes don't just follow the ball, their head also tracks the ball at the point of contact. By turning my head with the ball before I make contact, I actually eliminate the peripheral vision from my opponents, so I'm pretty much forced to only think about the ball and the paddle at the same time. And this is the biggest tip I find that helps players the most. Instead of just tracking the ball with your eyes and trying to make contact, use your actual head to bring your attention towards the paddle, allowing you to hit it almost perfect every single time. The reason why this is so essential is because a paddle is designed to work properly only from the center of the face. Even with advancements in paddle designs, we find that when you hit most paddles on the edge, you're just not going to get a consistent bounce off of the face because of the way the weight is distributed and the way paddles are designed. So we need to be making center face contact almost every single time in order to properly utilize our gear and also just be able to predict where our ball is going to go. So the best way to do that is simply track the ball with your head all the way through contact, and then after you've made contact, you can pick your head back up and see where it ended up. But I do need to make a notable exception to this rule. In pickleball, there's also extremely fast exchanges we like to call hands battles. So if you're at the kitchen and you're volleying, this is the one time where we don't have enough time to literally whip our head around and follow the ball the whole way. So we're going to utilize our peripheral vision in fast exchanges like hands battles or maybe when we're on defense in the transition zone. But other than that, especially at the baseline or when you have more time to actually hit the ball, like when we're dinging, I want you to track the ball with your head the entire way and I promise you'll see a noticeable improvement in your consistency and control. Now let's talk about something most people don't even think about when it comes to control. A huge cause for lack of control starts all the way at the ground. Literally everything that we do in pickleball starts at our feet. You've heard that a house not built on a solid foundation can't withstand the storm. Well, the same is true for your pickleball game. If your feet aren't solid, then you're losing a huge chunk of control. The place on the court where this is the most apparent is around here in the transition zone. So let's say you just hit your serve, they return, you hit your third shot. Now we're moving forward into this area trying to make it up to the kitchen. Well, if our feet are moving as we're hitting that night shot coming back to us, and there's a lot of factors at play here. Number one, if you have any momentum going forward, you have to take that into account when you're hitting your shot. So if I'm running forward as I hit a ball, I have to hit it less hard than I typically would because I already have momentum going forward. Additionally, if you're moving forward, it makes it way more difficult to make good contact with your paddle because it's harder again to know where your paddle is in space as you're running. The fix though is incredibly simple. You just want to get your feet planted before your opponent makes contact with the ball. Now you want to make sure this happens before they make contact, not during their contact, because it takes a little bit of time to go from moving to still. So if I wait until my opponent literally hits the ball, I'll probably still be moving a bit as I'm hitting my shot. So right before I see them make contact, let's say I just hit my shot, I move forward, they're about to make contact, I get ready, and now I have a really good foundation to move in any direction that I need to, depending on the ball they hit back to me. This will instantly give you way more control if you just have a good foundation. The next tip we have for you is also incredibly simple, but trust me, it is important. If you want to have more control and pick a ball, change what's in your hand when you play. The most common trend in pickleball right now is to get the most powerful paddle on the market. That way you can hit extremely hard and hopefully outpace your opponents. But there's one really fatal flaw with that kind of mindset. It pretty much ignores beginner and intermediate players who need to be focusing on control and getting the shape of their shots down first before they attempt to add a ton of power to their game. Because if you don't develop proper soft game on the way to working towards power, you're going to miss the biggest difference between advanced players and intermediate players, which is how they handle the transition zone, resets, and utilizing proper control in their game of pickleball. So I don't want to give you a direct paddle recommendation right now, but what I can say is we have some really great options linked down below in the description. And if you want even more resources, join our free school community and just hop in the thread for paddle recommendations so we can find the right one that fits you. We'll see you there. A great way to give yourself more control is to give yourself more time. And this happens by your ready position. A lot of players tend to keep their paddle down by their side as they're moving through the court. Maybe they start in a good ready position, but after a couple of shots, it tends to just gradually move down. I just want you to recognize it's a lot more difficult to move your paddle from low to high than it is to move your paddle from high to low, probably for several reasons. But one of the reasons is you have gravity working for you when you're going from high to low. It takes more effort to go up than it does just to simply drop down. So for that reason and several others, we want to keep our paddle out in front of us at all times if we can. A really good rule of thumb is to keep your paddle out with your elbows slightly bent and the tip of your paddle pointing towards the left side of the ball. Now, we've covered this in a lot of videos, but just here's the short of it. You can cover more of your body with your backhand than you can with your forehand. So it makes sense to kind of shade towards the outside of the ball if you're a right-handed player because then you can get to your backhand a little quicker than you can to your forehand. However, I think one of the best benefits to keeping your paddle out isn't your reaction time, but just how focused it makes you. In pickleball games, especially as you get a little bit better, there's a lot more dinking that happens. And during dinking rallies, it's incredibly easy to lose focus because your body gets tired hitting the same shot over and over. So to combat that, just having your paddle out in front of you and pointed at the ball gives your brain something to focus on that keeps you into the rally. And when you're in the rally and focused, you just naturally will have way more control. Try this on your next game. Our next tip for control is all about the paddle face and where you're aiming. It may sound incredibly simple to you, but it's important to remember that wherever your paddle face is directly aiming at is where the ball will go. So if I'm aiming cross-court right here, I'm simply going to hit it cross-court because my paddle face is facing that direction. The issue we find with many beginner and intermediate players, they often forget this rule and simply look where they want the ball to go rather than necessarily aim your paddle face towards the direction of the ball. They often end up making incorrect contacts by either closing their face at the point of contact, opening it up, or doing some sort of awkward motion that makes the ball not go in the expected direction. You can kind of think of this as a part two to looking at the ball tip. Instead of just looking at the ball at the point of contact, we also need to make sure our paddle face is aiming the ball in the direction of where it needs to go. If we find our paddle is really open, we're going to lost the ball up in the air, which becomes a pop-up for our opponent. Or if we're very closed, the ball's going to go almost straight down and not go the direction we want. We find most players really have a slight variance. If you grip too hard, you tend to close your face a bit, so the ball tends to go more down than expected. Or if you have a really loose grip, we find players tend to open it up and into really high balls. So the simple solution is to not only focus on the ball, but also focus on your face. So let me give you an example that the pros are doing to help fix this problem. When pros are hitting backhand dinks nowadays, they lock their wrists rather than keep a loose wrist like on the rest of the court, because they want to make sure their paddle face is going the perfect direction so the ball goes actually cross court when we dink. And that involves locking my wrist. But on the opposite side of this coin, when I'm hitting a forehand dink, I actually loosen my wrist a bit because I want the paddle face facing down slightly and then toward the targeted destination. If I were to lock my wrist and keep it really tight up here, it's going to go too far up or too far wide. So the key with all of this is it takes practice, but using your paddle face properly is one of the most effective ways to improve your control on the court. Our last tip to get more control is to simply choke up on the paddle a bit more. Now there's three reasons why you would typically want to hold the paddle a little bit lower. The first reason is because it gives you more reach. So the lower I am on this handle, the more reach I have. As you can see, as I move up, my tip of my paddle gets closer to me versus when I'm low, it gets further away. The second reason you might want your hand lower is to get more power. So the longer my paddle is, the further the tip of the paddle is away from the rest of my body that's pivoting the paddle, which means the tip of the paddle will be moving faster rather than if it was close, it won't be moving quite as fast. All that is to say, if I wanted more power, I would grip lower so I can get more whip and more paddle head speed, which will then translate into my drive to get more power on my shots. And the third reason that you might want to hold your paddle lower is if you have a two-handed backhand. You just need some room on top of the handle to get your other hand so you can effectively hit a two-handed backhand. In doubles though, the reach and the power aren't exactly necessary. You have a partner with you on the court that can cover a lot of the court with you and it's more of a controlled game than singles is. So it's totally fine if you want to choke up on your paddle, even going as extreme as like a table tennis grip if you feel like that's really helpful. All the choking up really does is just give you more control of where the paddle face is pointing. Because as we know, where the paddle face is pointing is where the ball goes. So the more control I have over where it's pointing, the more control I have over where the ball goes. It's even totally acceptable to have a hybrid approach where for your drives, your serves, you might have your hand a little bit lower and then as you move through the court, you can get your hand a little bit higher until you're at the kitchen line playing with a more table tennis grip. Now to do this, you're going to want to have your other hand on the paddle. So here I'm hitting it with my hand low. As I move forward, I can choke up a bit if I just want that little bit of extra control at the kitchen line. I have seen several people move to more of a table tennis grip at the kitchen line for control, but also just for faster hand speed. The closer your hand is to the top of the paddle, the quicker you can do these little punch volleys that are necessary in hands battles. Now you know the top seven pickleball tips for control so you can elevate your game right now. Thanks so much to Pickles at Forte in downtown Honolulu for letting us film in their awesome facility. If you're ever here, great place to play. And if you liked our content, go ahead and subscribe. It helps us out a lot. And then maybe watch this video that we made for you. Jim, Karen, this is your video.