How to CONTROL your DINKS & VOLLEYS | Briones Pickleball

How are you? I'm Jordan Briones from Briones Pickleball. In this video, I'm going to show you some really fun and practical drills that you can do that's going to improve your ball control, your dinks, and your volley. I know a lot of you in the Philippines may still be on lockdown and also you may not have access to courts like we do here in America. So hopefully this video will inspire you and know that you can always practice your game wherever you are and improve even if you don't have a court. Alright so the first thing that I'm going to talk about is how to practice your paddle and ball control. So this is really important especially if you're just starting out and this is something that you can do to improve your hand-eye coordination and also your paddle control with the paddle in your hand. Alright so I have a ball here and I have a paddle. It doesn't matter what kind you have anything will work and the first thing that I just want to make sure is that we're in the continental grip. So how do you get in that grip? Just as you were to shake somebody's hand like I'm shaking your hand here. This is the continental grip and just just for clarification I'll show a picture of that right now. Alright so now that we got our continental grip that's really important so that when we are dinking and hitting volleys and any shot and pick a ball that we have a good grip for the forehand and the backhand side. So we're going to take our ball and the first thing that we're going to do is just easily just bounce it up and down on our paddle. Okay we want to focus on a couple key things trying to get the ball in the middle of the paddle in the sweet spot every time keeping our eye on the ball and our grip pressure we want to make sure that we're not gripping it very very tightly. We want to have a light grip pressure and this will help when you're dinking and volleying as well. Okay here we go forehand side so just you can tell my control is really good and it's easier to start off by bouncing the ball off of your paddle fairly low like this okay it's a lot easier to control than going like this a little harder when you're going higher. So just start off with a nice low bounce and my grip is very very loose keeping my eye on the ball and trying to hit my sweet spot every time. All right so now we're going to move on to the backhand side same thing focusing on the ball looking at it hit the sweet spot on my paddle every time and I'll focus on my light grip pressure. Now we'll get a little fancy if that's too easy we're going to alternate from forehand to backhand and then after that I'll show you a variation where you go forehand to the edge guard to the backhand. All right so now let's do forehand to backhand first. All right same things here I'm focusing on the ball bouncing off my paddle and I'm switching it from forehand to backhand and you'll notice here if you have the correct continental grip then it should be easy to switch back and forth so you've got to make sure you're in that grip and also concentrating on that ball and having a light grip pressure. Okay all right so now what we're going to do is a little bit more advanced we're going to bounce it off our forehand side onto the edge guard to the backhand side and then back to the edge guard to the forehand. All right here we go. All right so this is just really good for hand-eye coordination and then to step it up a level you can go on to just the edge guard bounces here. Here we go. All right so that takes a lot of practice obviously. Start with the first two exercises that I just showed you then work your way up to the edge guard bounces. All right so as for paddle control these are really good exercises that you can do. Remember you're in that continental grip you have a light grip pressure you're keeping your eye on the ball and trying to hit that sweet spot each and every time. Now let's move on to dinking. All right so now let's move on to some dinking. I'm going to show you some key fundamentals with your technique when dinking and these are something that you can practice against any wall. All right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick a spot on the wall. I'm about you know seven to ten feet back from the wall okay depending what kind of wall I have and making sure I'm in that continental grip and also I have a light grip pressure okay on a scale of one to ten it's a three or four and I'm not gripping it really tight so that I can feel and have that control. Dinking here I'm going to start with the forehand side okay I have this laid back wrist here okay so here a lot of beginner players will dink like this okay so this is something that I would not recommend okay if I were to toss a ball I just want to show you this here okay if I were just to toss a ball to you like this just just look at my hand position here okay it's just like this so if I were to actually put the paddle in my hand tossing it like that my paddle would be in this natural laid back position so when I'm dinking I kind of want to be just like this and on the backhand it's like this as I dink I'm going to be pushing from my shoulder here okay so like this all right I'm not flicking my wrist I'm not doing any of that kind of thing like that and you'll notice that my my stance is in a good athletic stance so I could be ready to move left and right and you'll see here I dink it's just like this and I'm pushing up with my legs you'll notice it's short compact all right and my contact point is always out in front so now let's start with some forehands here hopefully you can see this good getting low to the ball my laid back wrist like what I talked about and keeping my eye on the ball also don't forget that light pressure all right so now let's jump on to the backhand side we're going to do the same thing remember on the backhand side I'm pushing with my shoulder okay I have a little slight bend in my arm and I'm really controlling it from my legs and my shoulder I'm not swinging it's just a nice little upward push upward motion okay here we go some backhands here notice too that I can see it out in front I always have the most comfort seeing the ball out in front of you all right so now what we're going to do we're going to hit some forehands and then some backhands all right so if you have to move your feet to get a good contact point out in front after I hit this forehand I might slide over hit a backhand slide over and hit a forehand here we go kind of things notice my grip pressure trying to aim for the same spot okay same spot every single time and my contact point see remember I'm not this is not a swing I'm pushing from my shoulder all right so that's the basics and essentials for dinking remember this whole exercise and the whole purpose of this is to really get better ball control and feeling the now let's move on to some volleys now when we're volleying we want to make sure we're not swinging okay there's a difference between a swinging volley and more of a traditional volley right now we're going to talk about just hitting traditional volleys every player needs to be able to hit regular traditional volleys because you're going to hit a lot of volleys when you're up close to the net when I volley all I'm doing is pushing out towards my target okay that's my forehand and then my backhand is here you'll notice my paddle face is faced towards my target and you'll notice here right here it's just a push okay you can see that I don't have my paddle down like this it's up here my wrist especially on my backhand side you can tell it's kind of cocked and locked in okay so I have a stable grip here and I'm just pushing out okay this is my backhand side all right and then my forehand would be just like this all right so it's just a nice compact stroke now we're going to hop on to backhand volleys and I'll show you that now we're going to go forehands and then backhands all right so those are the exercises that you can do against a wall remember a wall is great because the ball comes back to each and every time also if you do have a partner and you have two paddles and a ball now I'm going to show you some things that you can do anywhere and all you need really is kind of something in the middle of you two and you can dink or volley over that so I'll show you a little compilation here that we made now we'll show you a couple clips here all right so hopefully you enjoyed those clips that we put together for you just know that if you don't have a court to play on you can always practice and improve your game I just want to say thank you so much for supporting us here on this channel remember if you want to stay connected and you want more tips on pickleball strategy and other pickleball tips follow us on our youtube channel youtube.com slash brionispickleball we really appreciate it and also for more pickleball content go to brionispickleball.com that's our website and that's how you can get connected with us thank you so much maraming salamat po and we will see you in the next video see you later