BIG Overhead Smash Power | The #1 mistake that may be killing your overheads and how to fix it

Hi, welcome to Primetime Pickleball. My name is Nicole Havlicek. Today we're going to be talking about the main problem we see on the overhead. Okay, so there's a key move that we need to do on our overheads that we're seeing in a lot of cases not happen and it's called pronating. Okay, so it looks like this and one of the reasons that what we see going wrong is we're we see people coming in with a grip that is kind of looks like this which is called an eastern grip where your index knuckle is on the side of the grip. So to have a correct overhead grip what you want is to to have your to approach your paddle with the with the pad of your hand a little bit lower than the fingers so you're not coming at the pad at the paddle like this you're coming at it with your fingers a bit higher than your palm okay and then the other thing is where do you put it so left to right so you don't want it on the eastern part which is your index knuckle on the side like this okay you want your index knuckle to be more on the 45 degree angle so this is the top okay because the edges are up and down of the paddle if this is if this is number one we're going to say the side is number three and in the middle of that would be number two so we're going to put our index knuckle on two with the fingers slightly up and that's the ideal position to hit an overhead all right so now we're going to talk now that we have the grip locked in we're going to talk about the motion so with the grip that we don't want which is that eastern grip we see a lot of overheads we see the ball go up and we see the overhead looking a lot like this okay the problem with that is that it limits you to only being able to use your wrist and that's not going to be create generate as much speed and power as if you could use your forearm and your wrist and turn it over like this that continental grip that we just talked about is what's going to allow you to do that all right so that's all we're talking about here is how to pronate we're not going into the full move sometimes they'll pop it up here nice and short and you just need to snap it over okay if for the full overhead you will come into this pronating part as well but there's a bit extra happening but we're just talking about this pronation today so we have the grip locked in now when the ball comes up when and when we come in we're leading with the edge of our paddle with our continental grip and then we reach up turn it over flatten it to to meet the ball if we're going cross court it's going to look like that down the line to look like this and then we're going to flip out so but at the end our paddle is going to be facing out okay so we come in with the pinky edge turn it over and face is facing the other side flip it over to now we're leading with the thumb okay pinky face out thumb leading with the pinky face thumb so that's the that's called pronating okay and that's what we want to do so this is how it's going to look so you'll see that i'm really able to generate a lot of racket head speed which is the key to hitting the ball with power because i'm effectively using my forearm and my wrist with this continental grip not just my wrist with this eastern grip that's a little more to the side all right thanks for joining us today i hope that was helpful and we'll see you in the next video if you enjoyed this video please give it a like thanks for watching for more pro player pickleball secrets to help you play your best game please visit primetime pickleball.com you'll find a clickable direct link in the video description below but before you head on over there please be sure to subscribe to our channel so that you don't miss out on any of our future videos