The Only 6 Pickleball Drills You’ll Ever Need

These are the only six pickleball drills you'll ever need. Drill number one is called Openers. And one person is going to be serving. And we're calling it Openers because serving is the opening of the point for the one team. And then returns are the opening of the point for the other team. So the organization for the drill is one person is going to be serving the whole time. The other person is going to be returning the whole time. What are they thinking about? First, sometimes I just get up and I hit a serve with no target. And that leads to errors or soft serves. So like actually having a target, a target that's deep is what's really opened up a lot more aggressive serving for me. And you want to have a deep target because if you serve it deep into the court, you keep your opponent back further longer. And they can't then come up to the net, which is the thing they want. So most people never practice their serves or their returns. And you know what happens every single point? A serve and a return. Yeah, amen. Then on the return, it would be the same focus. It would be have a target for where you want to hit your return. And make your target somewhere, like wherever it's going to be, middle, right, or left. Make your target deep into the court. Again, so the person who hit the serve and then you hit the return deep has to handle a ball farther into the court that's closer to them rather than hitting it short where they can just run up to the ball and have an easier time either pounding one at you or coming to the net, which is an advantageous place to be. One thing to keep in mind throughout all these drills is, and you're going to see Tyler do it right here. Instead of just hitting a return and staying stationary, try to make all these things as game-like as possible. In a game, you want to return and run to the kitchen. So as you see here, Tyler hits his returns and then starts taking two or three steps forward toward the kitchen area to make it more realistic. Quick interruption. I'm curious how well, whether you're a beginner or an advanced player, you really know the game. That's why I put together the Pickleball IQ Test. 10 questions. Very few people ever get 10 out of 10. I dare you to try. And after you take it, I will tell you the answers and give you a video breakdown of why those answers were the correct answers. Give it a shot. The link is in the description below. Now, back to the video. Okay, the second drill you need to know. It's called the... Charmin. I gotta poop. Charmin drill. You know why? No. It's called the Charmin drill because we're working on our third shot drops and we want our third shot drops to be soft. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I like it. So on the third shot drop, this is one of the most important shots in the game and you want to be able to rep it out and you want to, again, make it as realistic as possible. So one thing you can do is to have one person at the kitchen line and the other person can be at the baseline and they're just going to hit drop after drop with the intent to make it land in the kitchen or make their opponent, their partner here, hit up on the ball. As you'll see here, I actually hit my drops from four different locations. Number one, I hit it straight on from the left. Then I hit it cross court from the right. Then I hit it straight on from the right. And then I go back and I hit it cross court from the left. Those are all different scenarios. Again, about being game-like that will help you take this and transfer it into the actual game that you play. Here's drill number three. It's called Space Invaders. Space Invaders. That's a fun name. Here's what's happening in this drill. Tyler's going to be at the kitchen line. I'm going to be in the mid-court area. A very common scenario. No man's land is an okay place to be. You don't want to stay there long, but you're often going to end up being there, which is what you're seeing in this drill right now as you move up toward the kitchen line. So that's the space you're trying to invade. That's the space you're trying to invade. So the space between where I'm standing right now and the kitchen is my space to invade. Tyler wants to own that space and keep me away from that space because that means he's in the advantage. So progression one, I'm just going to hit reset shots from Tyler from the mid-court just to start repping it out. But then let's go to progression two. You're going to hit two resets in a row. You got to make two before you can invade the space. If they're not good, Tyler's going to keep you back and not allow you to invade the space. So we'll do this for, you can play with a score here. First to get seven or first to get 11. You can just play it for time and then switch. So you both get reps, but that one's called space invaders. Number four is setups. And so what you're seeing right now is setups is our cross-court dinking drill. We're going to dink cross-court backhand. We'll dink cross-court forehand. And the reason we're calling it setups is because dinking has a purpose to set up an attack. The only reason you're dinking is because you haven't attacked earlier in the point. If you're playing a team, you feel like you can just rip from the baseline and win, you should. But eventually you're going to play against teams that handle that well. So you have to work on dinking cross-court to set up for an advantage. I love the term setup because it's an aggressive term. Whereas I think most people naturally dink defensively and they're not thinking about how to transfer into an attack. That's super interesting. That's why we call it setups. That's right. That's why you came up with that name. One thing to consider while you're doing this is even though you're dinking cross-court, try to move the dink around. Sometimes dink it into the person's inside foot. Sometimes dink it to their outside foot. Move them around because anytime you can get your opponent off balance, that's where the setup is happening. You move them off balance, they often will pop the ball up and then you can go for your attack. Sometimes you're going to play against people where you only have to dink it once or twice. Sometimes you're gonna have to go against people where you're gonna have to dink it five, six, seven times until you get your attacking opportunity. We're not waiting for attacks. We're setting up attacks. Number five is called tight spaces. We gave it that name because you are dinking up the line, you and your partner in a tighter space. You're not allowed here to dink it cross-court. Now in an actual game, I would encourage you to dink cross-court more often because you have more distance to work with. But to get better at dinking, let's give ourselves less distance to work with and tighter, no, no, no. And tighter angles to work with. Tighter space equals more touch. That's all I wanted to say. It doesn't even make sense though. Yeah, the tighter the space, the more you have to have gentle touch. You have less margin of error, which is why you cross-court dink in a real match. In this drill, I like to turn it into a game. So I'll often just play to seven. All attacks are good. Lobs are good. It's another way to work on your lobs. Speed-ups are good. Hands battles are good. It's a really good way, especially, like you might dink more cross-court, but often you're going to attack more in front. So it's a really good attacking game that allows you to work on fast hands because when you attack down the line and they counter it well, again, you're closer here. So we have less time to react. They have less time to respond. So we want to work on our hand speed and our attacking angles by playing in tight spaces. There's also genius by you to do setups before tight spaces because your setup sets you up for your tight space attack. Great thinking. That's why I thought of that. Drill number six. Cue the lightning. Ready? Get electrocuted. What's it called? Lightning? Lightning. This is a quick hands drill. We're calling it lightning because lightning fast is what you want your hands to be. So me and Tyler are going to be kitchen to kitchen. You could even start inside the kitchen if you'd like. And we're just going to do hands drills back and forth. This is a hand-eye coordination drill. We want to practice our hand speed, but here's the kicker. When most people start working on this, they actually work very collaboratively and they hit the ball towards each other's chests. That's not bad necessarily if you're working collaboratively to get started on hand-eye coordination, but I would encourage you to eventually move to a place where you're attempting to hit the ball down at your opponent. Because when you hit the ball down, that makes them hit up. And when they hit up, you can smash the ball down. So in hands, you don't want to keep a hands battle going. In reality, in the actual game, you want to end it by getting the ball down. I don't want to go counter-counter smash. I don't really want to have an exchange like that and then have to go chase a ball every five seconds, right? So we can still work on our down volleys by being collaborative. So we're hitting it about 70%, but our intent is to get the ball down. And then the other person has to try to flip the script if they are the one that's down to getting it back up top, right? So we'd be here. All right, so I'm trying to get it down. Boom. All right, so we went six or so balls. My whole intention is getting the ball down. I actually think this is kind of brilliant because like in hands battles, most of the time, our brains shut off. Yeah. And all we're doing is just like... We're not trying to get it down. Right? So I'm trying to get it down. He's trying to get it right. And then I would actually say that's a good miss in this drill because you're trying to get it down. Yeah. There we go. Stay on his stance. Nice, right? Then we just do that over and over. I'd recommend if you can try to have multiple balls, like have five, ten. If you can have a basket of balls, that's ideal. So that was drill number six. We have one final drill. It's a bonus drill. Throw the confetti. It's called skinny singles, but I'm not going to teach you it right here. I have a full in-depth breakdown of skinny singles. If you click right here on how to play, it puts every thing that we just worked on together into real life action. It's probably my favorite or second favorite drill. You want to know what my favorite drill is? Yes. Subscribe and I'll tell you in a future video. See you guys.