Does this ever happen to you?
Let's fix it.
Hey, everybody. I'm CJ.
Johnson from Better Pickleball and VI Pickleball, where we are dedicated to
helping people over 50 live their best lives on and off the pickleball courts.
Me and my VIPickleball partner, Tony Roig,
who you might recognize from our other YouTube channel In2Pickle spend a lot of
time talking about the things that plague your game the most.
One of the things we talk about a lot is to serve.
That's what you tell us plagues you the most.
So we've created a special series of
videos devoted entirely to solving your serving woes.
In this video, we're going to focus on the
pull serve or the serve that moves away from your dominant hand.
So for me, I'm a right hander.
So it would be a serve that I would miss t
o my left, there are three pillars of learning in pickleball.
There's a mechanical pillar.
There's a thinking or a strategic pillar.
And then lastly, there's an athletic pillar.
Missing a serve could be one or all three of those.
But we're going to focus on today is going
to be the mechanical pillar, and specifically for the pull serve.
What's happening generally in your serving arm
when you're pulling a serve mechanically, what's happening is your dominant
hand, or your paddle hand is pulling the paddle across your body,
which pulls the serve in an opposite direction of that dominant hand.
What we need to focus on is making that
paddle follow through to our intended target.
One of the other things I like to do is pull comparisons from other sports.
And certainly, as a golf professional,
follow through in golf is extremely important.
When I am following through in golf, I am following through down the target line.
So if you were to be here and I were a
golfer, I'm following through down the target line.
If I take the club and I swing my arms
to the left of the target, that ball is gonna go to the left of the target.
The other one that comes to mind is bowling.
I'm from the Midwest.
How many of you from the Midwest?
I'm from the Midwest, and we bowled a lot when we were kids.
And one of the things that we were always
taught was you really didn't look at the pins.
You looked at the arrows on the bowling alley, and as you were delivering
the ball, the thought was to throw your arm
out towards those arrows that ultimately would deliver the ball towards those pins.
So let's take that same concept and let's bring it to the pickleball court.
So again, let's take a look at what the
motion looks like when I'm hitting that pull serve.
When I'm hitting that pull serve, what I
want you to notice is that my paddle is moving, I'm a righty so my paddle is
moving across my body, so it looks something like this.
That was pretty extreme.
I missed that probably by about 2ft to the opposite side of my paddle hand right.
So for me to the left side, I missed out about 2ft to the left of the court.
That's because that's where my arm swung the paddle.
Let's change that up and let's think about
the paddle following through to the center of the box.
So instead of coming this way with my
shoulders, you see all that rotation that happens as well on my arm swings that way.
So instead of that way, I want to feel
like my paddle literally, almost like I'm so throwing my paddle.
No, don't throw it.
But like I'm throwing my paddle
towards my target on the other side of the
net. Let's see what that looks like here.
What I want you to notice is that as I do
this, my paddle is traveling down my target line, and
there's not as much rotation from the body.
If you are struggling with the wide serve,
I don't care if you hit the first few serves long.
I want you to feel
like you you're taking the paddle and keeping it on a relatively straight line.
At least think about four balls.
We're going to talk about that concept in
a future video to think about four balls coming off of your paddle and you're
throwing the paddle through those four balls so that
if you're struggling with that pull serve, put the target mentally in the center of
your box and feel like you're throwing the paddle at that target.
If you're struggling with another part of
your serve, make sure that you click on this playlist right over here, because
together we can train smart, live bold and age well.