The Only Pickleball Drills You NEED To Become a 5.0

I'm Ava Ignatovich and I'm a pro pickleball player on the PPA Tour. Today I will be showing you the only pickleball practice routine you will ever need. If you don't start your pickleball practices dinking straight, you need to be studied. This is the first thing you should always do when you step on a court. Straight ahead dinking is the hardest dink in pickleball. You're hitting over the highest part of the net with less margin and no cross-court bailout. If you can dink straight with margin and patience, cross-court dinks feel massive, resets feel easier, and you can create dinking patterns with a lot more variety. Number two is forehand cross-court dinking. Forehand cross-court dinking is the shot I take the most seriously in my warm-up. If it doesn't feel on, I'll stay here as long as it takes. I play primarily on the right side, so this is the shot I end up hitting more than anything else in my matches. When I'm practicing dinking cross-court, I work on keeping my dinks low across the net and moving the ball around. Some dinks I'll hit wide and other dinks I'll go to Little disclaimer here, I'm filming this video with my boyfriend who is a beginner intermediate player, so if you see him do anything and you're like, oh that doesn't look like a pro, that's because he is not a pro, just a really handsome regular guy. Number three is backhand cross-court dinking or left side cross-court dinking. Doesn't matter, just switch sides. When I'm dinking on the left side, the number one thing I'm practicing is recovering to the middle. On the left side, you want to cover as much court as possible because you want to take the majority of middle balls since that is your forehand and the best way to practice doing this for matches is to recover to the middle when you cross-court dink on the left. We're also working on taking balls out of the air since this can be trickier with backhands. Taking balls out of the air takes time away from your opponents and is something every 4.0 to 5.0 player should be working on. Next is straight ahead drops. This is where we lock in our mechanics, height, and depth control so that we don't pop these up during our games and matches. Start at the baseline and lift every ball from low to high, visualizing the ball landing at your opponent's feet in the kitchen. Use a short smooth swing with a relaxed grip and the key is here to let the ball peak before it crosses the net so the height of the ball is at its highest before crossing the net and have it fall down softly as it crosses. Your focus is height over pace. Clear the net with margin and let gravity do the work. If you miss, adjust the height of the ball that you are hitting, not your swing speed. Doing this trains accuracy and touch so your drops hold up under match pressure. If you can control a straight ahead drop, the rest of your drops get way easier. Instead of making this video super long, I put together an in-depth guide to my pickleball warm-up and injury prevention checklist. You can download it in the description or in the pinned comment. Next we've got forehand cross-court drops. When I'm hitting my forehand cross-court drops, I'm always aiming pretty close to the middle. This gives me a lot of margin for error so on windy days I know my forehand cross-court drops are staying consistent. Notice how I am always finishing with my paddle on the same side of my body. This is different from a serve or a drive where you want to finish over your opposite shoulder. I make contact slightly in front of my body so I can guide the ball. If you are catching drops late, that's usually when we make mistakes and pop them up. I also always try and move forward through my drops as I never want to drop the ball with my weight shifting backwards. Next thing on the list is cross-court drops from the other side. Backhand cross-court drops. Every time I practice cross-court backhand drops, I make sure to work on both my slice and topspin drops. Ideally you should have the ability to do both. I like hitting my backhand topspin drop when I am balanced and want to hit a more aggressive shot and I like hitting my backhand slice drop when I'm returning a faster and lower ball or I'm stretched and on the run. Next thing I like to work on is resets. In my opinion the most effective way to practice resets is to have your practice partner hit the ball down towards your feet while you are in the transition zone. This is a better simulation of what happens in real points than just resetting the ball from the middle of the court while your partner cooperatively feeds it back to you. What I'm trying to do here is have my paddle dropped down towards the floor and I'm also trying to catch the ball in front of me. I like to think of it as less of a shot and more of a block or an absorption of pace. Don't be mistaken it is super important to practice resets out of the air as well. I would change it up depending on the day because you will need to practice mid-court resets out of the air for games. However today I am focusing on practicing my mid-court resets off of the bounce. Next thing is hands. When I practice hands, I focus on seeing the ball into the sweet spot of my paddle and hitting the ball out in front of me. I try to keep a compact swing and a stable paddle face. We usually practice hands for 25 to 30 minutes every day. Anything longer will just tire out your arm and you'll end up using improper technique in my professional opinion as a super serious professional. I always practice hands before we practice speed ups and counters because it helps you get into a good rhythm and it's a good little warm-up to wake up your reaction time before you Next thing we practice is speed ups and counters. When we practice speed ups and counters, we will always start off with a dink rally. Then we will wait until one of us decides to hit a speed up off of a dink and the other person will counter it. After this we play the point out in a hands battle. This is a good way to practice speed ups and counters because it simulates what happens in a real point so you're practicing these shots in a realistic situation. When we practice our speed ups off the bounce, we try and disguise them as best as possible. The key here is to drop your paddle as if you're hitting a regular dink and then accelerate through the contact point. When we practice our counters, we try and make sure we hit them as out in front as possible and hit down on the ball we're countering. Sometimes when we do this, we'll keep score and turn it into a competitive game and it's a really fun time. Next up we've got drives. Starting with the forehand drive. Spend a good amount of time working on this. Once you have this shot dialed, you'll be able to be super aggressive with your thirds and the better this shot is, the better your serve will be as well. Here I'm working on my rotation and staying low throughout the shot. I'm also working on keeping the drive lower and hitting a little bit flatter than normal because sometimes I use a little too much spin and that sacrifices pace. After the forehand drive, we work on the backhand drive. I love this shot because I'm always able to get a little bit more power on it than my forehand. When you work on the backhand drive, remember to keep your swing compact and by that I mean shorten your backswing. There's no need for a huge backswing to generate power. Get power from your legs and your rotation. Your feeling should come 90% from the left hand. I like to teach people to pretend they are hitting a lefty forehand with their right hand just there to guide it. Finish over your shoulder ideally and finish the shot with your chest open towards the court. The two-handed backhand is super trendy right now in pickleball so make sure you're practicing this shot if you want to be a pickleball cool kid. The next thing on the list is serves. Practice serving to different targets. I like to mix things up and hit a variety of different serves. For me, it's just more fun that way. If you want to check some of them out, go watch my most recent video where I teach you five different kinds of pickleball serves. The next thing is serve returns. This might be the most important thing on this list to practice. The majority of free points given away in pickleball is from missed returns. Make sure to take your time with it. At the end of your practice, go ahead and do any drill of your liking. Think about what it is you need to work on and spend some time on it. You don't need a fancy intricate drill to get better, you just need to pick a shot and work on it. Here, I'm working on my forehand down the line for singles. I'm doing this by serving, having my partner return to my forehand, and then hitting it down the line. If you enjoyed this video, remember to subscribe and turn on notifications. Also, don't forget I put a super in-depth guide together on my dynamic warm-up and injury prevention checklist. It's down below in the description and pinned comment.