How to Practice Hands Like a Pro 💥

There are a few different ways that you can improve your hands in practice. For a warmup, it is fine to hit back and forth with a parter for a few minutes. This may help when you are just starting out your pickleball journey, but as you get better and better, this form of practice becomes unrealistic.  We’ll give you a few different ways that you can practice hands in a more realistic way.

1. Bad Dink -> Speedup

   • In this drill, you feed your partner a “high” dink (one that they would normally speed up) and your job is to practice making the counter. This will help with your reaction time and holding the line. It is important to remember that you SHOULD NOT be cheating one way or the other in this drill. Make sure your elbow is TUCKED in and that you are maintaining a neutral ready position. If you don’t, the chicken wing will show itself.

2. The Wall

   • The wall is a great place to practice hands if you don’t have someone to drill with. There are a few different drills you can do with the wall that will improve reaction time and comfortability at the line. To start, you can simply try to switch between backhand and forehand volleys repeatedly. This will help you understand the concept of the “triangle” in pickleball. It will also help you flip from forehand to backhand consistently. Another drill that can be done with the wall is (dink, speedup, reset). This is more of an advanced drill, but with this drill you are able to work on multiple shots along with your ability to control your paddle is speedup situations.

Bangers 101

JW Johnson Advanced Reset Breakdown 🧠

JW Johnson Slice Mid-Court Reset

• Let’s get really technical right now. Most people when hitting their resets will stick their paddle tip down and use the pace of their opponent in order to get the ball back over the net. The higher levels you go, the less motion you will see in the technique of the reset. This is because when you’re hitting a reset you are most likely behind in the rally, the opponent is hitting down on the ball and you are hitting a neutralizing shot in order to get back in the point.

• Now let’s discuss what JW can do. If you ever watch Pro pickleball you’ll know that JW is an extremely soft player. He can get into the kitchen with absolute ease. One shot in particular that nobody else really has is his slice reset out of the air. Instead of “blocking” the ball back, JW will impart slice on the ball from an out of the air attack, and perfectly drop it in the kitchen. You may ask why is this any better than a flat reset?  Think about the different between an aggressive slice dink vs. a “dead” dink. One has backspin and drops while the other has no spin and sits.  There is a reason most people don’t do this shot though, and that is because it takes a ridiculous about of feel to pull it off.

• Sometimes even top ranked pros don’t understand how other players hit certain shots.  The game is still unsolved. Maybe go try this shot for fun and see if you can do it. James can’t, but that’s not saying much.