Hey, Tony, what's one of the more common
mistakes that we see beginning players make?
A lot of players make the mistake.
They're going to hit the ball, and they
take that off the ball, resulting in a mishit.
Or sometimes you wiff completely on the ball.
We've got some exercises for you.
Stay tuned.
Hey, everybody. I'm CJ.
Johnson from Better Pickleball and one half of VI Pickleball.
And who are you?
I am Tony Roig from Into2Pickle and the other half of the appicable.
Together, we're committed to helping
players over 50 live their best lives on and off the pickleball courts.
One of the things that you can do before you come to play.
Before you get started.
To help you to learn to keep your eye on
the ball is just simply start by tossing the ball.
So Tony and I are about 7ft apart or so, and we're just going to toss the ball.
And you want to catch this in your paddle hand.
So he's catching in his left hand.
I'm catching in my right hand.
And as you're doing this, you want to
follow the holes on the ball, follow it all the way into your hand.
Now, we did that pretty easily. Correct.
Well, let's start moving it around,
because in pickleball, the ball goes all over this time.
Now I'm going to start tossing high to Tony on each side of his body.
And as you get comfortable again, you're
gonna watch the ball coming all the way to your hands.
So as you get comfortable with this, start speeding it up just a little bit.
Catch and throw, catch and throw, catch and throw.
All right.
Now they not only come high, they come very low.
So let's first work on going low.
So now we're gonna go low and down here and again.
As you do this, you're catching in your
paddle hand, and you're moving your body down to a low position.
Watch the holes on the ball.
Okay, we've done middle, high and low.
Now we're going to put it all together. Anything goes.
And as we do this, we want to pick up the pace just a little bit.
Okay, I like it.
Any bet on who drops at first?
No, I don't want to take your money.
Oh, listen to that.
He doesn't want to take my money.
All right.
Oh, behind the backer.
See, you gotta watch when you're playing with one of these fancy guys.
Well, there's money on it.
But, you know, this is what's gonna help you.
Well, he tried.
I went super low, so low. That was really good catch.
This drill will definitely help you keep your eye on the ball.
And it's fun.
Another one that we both really like is the paddle bounce.
So just put a ball, center your paddle, and you can just start fairly slow.
Watch the ball and the holes on the ball all the way to your paddle.
Now, let's stop.
Let's turn that around and let's do the backhand side.
Kind of cheated earlier, I did one on the backhand side.
Oh, you did that's okay.
I always got to keep my eye on you don't I?
Alright.
Now you got the backhand side.
Now let's flip both sides.
So one on the front, one on the backhand. Ready.
Let's go back. Front, back.
See, I think this is such an underrated exercise.
Not enough players do this while you're waiting to play and stuff like that.
I think it's just so valuable.
And essentiall y, you see the best players do this.
You watch Ben Johns and those guys, they're doing. The gals too.
They're doing this to everybody's doing this.
And if you get really good at it, you can do it on the edge right.
Whoa. One more.
I can kinda do it on the edge. I got it.
See I finally don't have that other paddle.
Oh, you don't have an edge. Yours is way thinner.
Yeah, that's much harder.
So start by bouncing the ball on the paddle and you can go high.
You can go low.
It's also gonna help, not just with you seeing a ball.
It's a hand eye coordination
and get used to you making contact with the ball more solidly when you play.
Okay, so as we're getting ready to shoot this, Tony told me about an exercise
that a certain pro uses and that he has tried before.
So my whole thing was okay.
I want to see this.
Let's do it as I got a credit to
Marcin Rozedpinski a r eally good player and coach.
He does this drill where basical ly you hit the ball on this part of the paddle.
The idea is you're tracking the ball in to the contact zone.
I think sometimes we had two bogged down and can I see the ball hit the paddle.
That's not the issue.
What you want to do is follow the ball into the contact zone.
And this drill really helps.
CJ I'm going to toss you some balls and
you're going to hit the ball touch it with the butt of your paddle.
Okay. Just stay right there.
And all I'm going to do here, toss me that ball.
So here you go. So you're just going to track it in.
Yeah, and just kind of tap it with the end of your paddle.
Just tap it. That's all you want to do.
Try and tap it with the butt.
It's good don't worry about it.
But there you go. It's better, right?
You can see here when you hit the butt, there you go.
Clean butt on that one. That's a good
one. You know I don't have my glasses on too.
Oh, you don't? There you go. This is pretty good.
It's excellent. There you go.
There you go. So she hit it on the butt.
That's what you want to do.
You hit a few like that.
And what happens is you're really tracking that ball into that contact zone.
And then what happens is when you bring
the paddle around you ready to smash those balls down!
Another thing we recommend is an eye training program called Vizual Edge.
It's helped me, Tony and several of VIPickleball members to get
faster reactions because we see the ball better.
When your eyes are working and they're
working well, you're going to be fast on the court and let's face it as we age
and sometimes for a variety of other reasons, even when we're younger, our eyes
just don't work as efficiently as they possibly could.
Think of this program like taking your eyes to the gym.
Your eyes have muscles.
And if you exercise them, they are going
to perform differently, just like every other muscle in your body.
If you want to check it out, there's a
link down in the show notes, if you commit just a couple of minutes a week to those
exercises that we showed you, you're going to become a better pickleball player.
What else can they do, Tony?
Well, if you want to keep learning, we've put together a playlist up here.
Check out the playlist and keep on learning how to play your best pickable.