Have you ever had a case of the service,
yes, no matter what you do, you can't get the ball in to save your life.
Stay tuned.
Everybody is C.J. Johnson, welcome to
Better Pickleball, where we're focused on helping pickleball players over 50 live
their best lives on and off the pickleball courts, one of our Vij pickleball members
said that when you have a case of the service.
Yipes, it's like trying to hit the
pickleball to a postage stamp is exactly right.
I had a case of the service. Yipes.
When I first started playing pickleball, you get the ball in to save my life.
We know it's frustrating and try and I did
a webinar on the serve a couple of weeks back for our VA pickleball members and we
talked about the service, Yepes Consistent Service and the drop serve.
Now, if you'd like to see the consistent
or the drops or videos, stick around to the end and will give you a link.
Here's what you can do if you've got a case of the Servicios.
So are we ready to get into the
dreaded part of the survey?
Are we ready to talk about that? Let's do it.
Man, I don't know that I'm ready to talk about this.
I've had this Tony Harris has told me that he has never had this yet.
You've never had this. OK, so we're going to talk about the yips.
And it really kind of like that monster under the bed, right, man?
Sometimes it just comes up and it happens.
And I have I've had this experience and I just think I'm up in the chat.
Bob said to find the yips.
The yips means that box is absolutely
incredibly big and I can't get the darn thing in the box.
That's the yips.
No matter what I do, that serve is going left of left or right of right,
anywhere but where it's supposed to be going.
OK, and somebody said they have the hips right now.
So hopefully we can we can talk you out of that because
unfortunately, it does seem to plague most people
at some point in time or the other in the games.
And I think, you know, I've shared this story before with with many of you.
Laura Fenton Kobana, a senior pro player for TIME U.S. Open champion.
She told a story about when she got the yips in a singles match.
Let's talk about not a good time to get the yips during a singles match.
Right. You don't have a partner to rely on.
So, Tony, why don't you take it over and tell us a little bit more about the yips?
All right. And great definition, S.J.
Great, great laying it out.
So, yes, the yips is basically you just can't get the servant.
Right. And so really, I'm going to show you some
better in a second to break it down for you so you can visualize it.
But really, the the yips happen for two main reasons, right?
One is timing.
So your timing gets off. Basically, you're in.
You'll see at the beginning, the second,
but you're hitting the ball too, too quick.
Right. So you hit the ball too quick, meaning
you're bending your arm, your arms, getting up into your body.
And so the motion isn't isn't fluid the way it should be.
And so that's coliseums.
And the other reason that you get the yips
is your your paddle isn't traveling in the direction you want the ball to go.
I know this sounds like really super basic and it sort of is, but it's you have to
conceptualize it, which is if the pedal travels in this direction, right.
Then the ball is going to go in that direction.
If the paddle travels like this. Right.
If I'm pulling it, then the ball's going to travel in that direction.
That's the same in pickleball, golf, tennis, anything.
Right. Any time you make contact with it.
If I push the paddle towards my direction, the direction I want it to go into two,
then then that's definitely going to work better.
So let me share my screen again and I'm
going to show you we're going to show you a few.
I am, T.J., seeing that, all right, I am seeing that just fine.
All right, so let's fix those service. Yipes.
Here we go. All right.
So we're the first we're going to look at.
Let's deal first with timing.
OK, so this, this and let me be clear.
When we show you these, those are pros.
I don't worry about them, but their feelings can get hurt.
But these are not pro players.
And so I want to be clear that we're using
video to break down and show you things we do not mean.
Any criticism of any of the players in these videos.
We actually we really appreciate their play.
We appreciate being able to use this video to use the educational.
OK, so let's let's let's break down this serve here.
You're going to see this serve.
Here goes it's the net and trickles over.
So we're going to break it down for you.
So you're going to see here that the ball hasn't dropped.
Right.
So this player now, this is pre dropped serve.
Right.
So he's he's serving the traditional in error or toss serve.
You know, you have to hit it before it hits the ground.
So you can see that the ball's almost at
his hand height when he when he's going to go hit it.
What happens there is, as I mentioned, see
how his shoulder is hunched up into his ear and his and he has to bend his elbow.
Right.
So he has to bring his paddle up to meet the ball.
And I'll show you in a second.
The proper technique would be for would be
for him to let that ball drop and hit the hit the ball with the arm extended.
OK, so here what happens is he has it hunched up like this and then you can see
it's just it's too, too high and stuff like this.
And he can't get enough power and it goes
into the net or clipped over the net and out in the NBC.
Right. So here a similar situation.
You're going to see
the female server on the other side.
I do want to plot her prep preparation.
I think that this is something that we don't do enough.
As you know, if you want to if you want to
get a nice consistent serve, you you need some sort of preserve routine
or you should have some sort of preserver team.
It doesn't have to be as long as this one
does have to be ball bouncing, it doesn't have to be anything in particular.
There are some players that do big motions and stuff.
That's fine.
If it works for you, it can just be taking a breath, taking a breath, taking a moment
to size up where you're going, size up the situation.
And look what take a second to yourself. Right.
So the plate is a really good job of prepping right now.
She gets ready, right.
Boom, super fast, right?
So it doesn't allow it to extend so here shown to you again.
So look where the ball is and look at the
time if you hit it, it's the same height at the moment.
She lets it go.
And the moment she hits it, it's the exact same height.
Right. And look look how hunched up she is.
It's her her shoulders almost in her ear, her arms all bent.
Right.
That's just a really hard way to do a serve, right.
Not letting her arm extend out.
So what you want to do, right, is instead of instead of letting your the hitting the
ball so quickly is and again, we pick up all the stuff we do.
So watch this. So the ball drops, right.
Boom. And you're going to hit it down here.
That's what you want to have their arms extended.
It's not tight, but it's extended. Right.
That allows nice timing on the shot boom.
That's the way you want to serve it. Right.
So that's the that's the first thing is
basically letting that ball drop into a strike zone before you hit it.
Right. The second thing that happens is now we're
talking about the paddle not going in the right direction.
This player where we're going to be
looking at the player on the right in the black with her back to us, she's serving.
She actually lets the ball drop into the zone.
So her timing is good right now.
So her timing is good.
So let me back it up a second.
So our timing is good.
She doesn't have ball drop and hitting it,
but her paddle goes to one side and I'll slow it down a second.
So ends up being out. Right.
So here you're going to see basically
she's letting the ball drop, drop hit good.
Everything's good so far. Right.
But as she brings the paddle forward, the paddle starts to go to the left right.
So the paddles moving to the left too much.
Where's the ball going to go?
As I mentioned earlier, if you paddle
moves, the left ball goes eleven, have a choice.
So that ball ends up going out to the left.
The helpful thing here is to think of a concept called the four balls.
Right.
So here again by pick a ball video looks like.
So hitting through four balls is what you want to think about here.
So you want to basically hit through these
four ball, see how my paddle extends outward towards where I want to go.
So this is these are balls one and two, right.
And then coming out three and four.
So I'm basically extending the paddle out to where I want it to go and I'll show it
to you from the the back so you can see it clearly.
So you'll see the ball follows the trajectory of the paddle.
See that. So goes there.
They're there. They're hitting out to the intended
aim or intended target or trajectory, and that's where the ball goes.
So one of the things that we do in vehicle
is we help you guys with training and stuff like that.
So this is an example of what sort of
training plan you have an issue to your serve.
You want to get serve and you hit this.
You do your serve with depth and consistency.
You work on those things.
And then this is an example of a of a drill target you can use
to basically show you the exact five feet from each side and two or so feet, two to
three feet from the baseline, depending on where you're at in the game.
So eight to fix the yips.
And we're going to get into the drop serve in the second.
Right.
But to fix the yips or to work on the hips, you can practice off their balance
so you can actually use the bouncer over the drops her to work on the timing of it.
Right. That'll help.
And you should avoid rushing your serve and use that for ball technique.
Think of hitting the actual ball, you're hitting the literal ball and then three
figurative balls in the same direction you want it to go to.
If you hit him this way,
it's going to go that way before somebody says something, because I know at some
point in time somebody certainly will in this in this exercise when when we're
saying the bounds serve here, it doesn't matter if it bounces or drops.
We're not talking about the new the legality of the new serve.
We're saying that if you're having a problem with your with yips, either let
the ball bounce or if it helps you to actually drop it or actually bounce it.
This is a practice technique for you to use.
Now, that's something, C.J., in fairness, right?
We were we were recommending this before the drop shirt was even on the radar.
You know, we were we had a video on it.
We were recommending this to fix that gap.
So it's something we've been working on for a while.
So thanks. Absolutely.
Now, one other thing.
I just want to throw one other technique out there that we like to use is
that that time to allow the ball to drop, sometimes it's hard to understand that.
And so here's a good cue that you could
use, is when you're letting that ball drop, use a word like something, something
you like, a friend, a family pet, something like that.
In fact, we had a student who who liked the tuna, right.
So used the word tuna.
Now, what we found is that's maybe a little bit too short is try and get
something that has like a one or two like ahi tuna.
Right.
So you let the ball go and it's ahi tuna, then connect with the ball.
And that would help you to resolve some of those timing issues.