HOW TO Fine Tune Your Pickleball Paddle Like a Pro

Learn how to adjust your pickleball paddle playing characteristics just like PROs do with Keith Valentine aka The Pickleball Pirate. Watch today pickleball TIP in our Instructional series. Stay tuned for more pickleball lessons!

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Today we're going to be talking about paddle modifications: ways that you can take a paddle, and make it play differently. A lot of people tell me they “hey you know, pirate, I love my paddle, but I wish it just did this” or “this is the one thing I don't like about it”. What if I told you there was a way that you could make your paddle not do some of those tendencies to a degree. What I’m talking about is lead tape. With lead tape you can put lead tape on your paddle. They've been doing this in in sports for years in golf, in tennis, and just about every racquet sport. Every hitting sport you can use lead tape to counterbalance or balance something a certain way. First way I'm going to talk about is tail weighting. Tail waiting would be you're doing anything with the handle. I've taken off my grips and my leather grip and my over grip just like I showed on a video earlier about how to take and replace your leather grip. I got these down to the wood or the plastic underneath it, and what I’m going to show you is just you can just wrap lead tape around your handle. Ben Johns and Simone Jardim, they play their paddles at about nine ounces. You have to find an ounce weight that feels good to you. That doesn't feel too heavy. What I'll tell you is if you put weight in the handle, it doesn't feel heavier in your hands. It'll feel heavier in your arm and in the swing. You will have more pop but it doesn't feel head heavy. It doesn't therefore in your mind register that it's super heavy. It's one way to test it. It gives you a lot more control takes a lot of pop off the paddle. So, you want to do it. If you want to increase control and decrease a little bit of pop off the face of the paddle, this is where you do it. Strictly in the handle. Speaking of Ben and Simone, they play it this way at nine ounces, and what they do is they weight their paddles this way. You can see right here across the white it is across the ridge here and all the way up past the corner. What it does is it gives me some balance in my hand, so it counterbalances this a little bit right here in the middle. I'm counter balancing it towards the handle, so it doesn't feel as head heavy. What this does is these gives me the ability to move as a unit and have it block and stabilize when I'm hitting a single hand or backhand. It gives you a lot of strength because it's basically strengthening the frame up to this section. It's moving the kick point down a little bit towards that, so you have a little bit more control. That's a really great way to weight it. Another way to weight it is some people like to have a little bit more pop, little bit more whip. They'll add tape on the corners, just the top two corners up here. This allows you the head in your trailing arm when you're swinging, it allows the head to lag a little bit and then whip. When it whips it's going to whip with a lot more force. But it when you figure out the timing, you'll be able to whip the paddle through there more with giving it a lot of velocity from the top. Because then you're moving the kick point out on the paddle, a little bit more towards the end. What it'll also do is stabilize any of your shots that you're hitting on the rim way up here. It'll stabilize those because you have weight behind it. It's another way that you can play it. Another way to weight it would be sideways, just to stabilize the paddle. I want a little bit more head heavy, but I want to just stabilize the paddle in my hands. When I hit here or here it doesn't turn in my hands, and I don't have to over grip because you don't want to over grip in racket sport. You want to hold lightly and only grip hard when you're wanting to hit the ball. The last one I'm going to show you is this black area here. You put tape in this black section here. Only here and here. That's going to give you a little bit more speed in the paddle. It's going to support the sweet spot. You're basically putting a band of strength across this sweet spot. You're going to get a lot of throughput on it as well. But the big thing you're going to get is stabilization. When you hit the ball here or here, it's going to be stable in your hands.