TOP 5 PADDLE DRILLS TO DO FROM HOME | ft. Topspin Pro! | Beginner to Advanced Difficulty

so i'm rolling the ball from my forehand side to my backhand side and vice versa and i'm trying to really get it so that it's just rolling okay if you can make this completely silent you are a master at ball control hey everyone ed here with davis pickleball today i'm going to share with you my top five drills that you can do from home now when i first started playing pickleball i was obsessed with getting better as fast as possible and i didn't come from a tennis background so i always felt like i had a lot to catch up on well i spent a considerable amount of time doing these drills from home and today i'm going to share with you all my drills i'm formatting this video so you can actually drill along with me i'll put a little timer right here so that you know exactly how long to do each drill all right let's hop right into it all right so for the first thing i'm going to show you is how to grip your paddle correctly these drills really you want to be refining a good technique so i'm going to teach you the continental grip which gives me access to both my forehand side and my backhand side and when i first started playing pickleball i held my paddle like a ping pong grip i held it like this so i was phenomenal at punching balls like this but i got as soon as i started playing better players they started hitting to my right side and i would still be doing this and i was really severely limited in my options so i'm going to teach you the continental grip really quickly you're going to put your your hand like this here against your paddle here and then you're just going to slide down so that your middle finger is in line here rotate it a little bit and just hold very lightly okay so that's going to be a continental grip one way you can check that you have it down just stick your paddle right in front of you it should be fairly straight on like this here you're not going to have a paddle like this or you're not going to have a paddle like this it's going to be right in the middle here so again this gives me access to my forehand and backhand side and these drills are going to be working both okay i decided to add this part in too um because i know a lot of people have an issue finding their grip so we talked about the continental grip here if you're still having an issue finding your continental grip the hesikore grip is actually a grip that's contoured so it can actually help you find where your fingers are supposed to land these little grooves here you can just put your hand over it and each finger lines up with each groove i made a lot of videos talking about this grip that i really like i'll put a link in the description below so you can learn more about it okay so first drill we're going to do very simple these are going to get progressively harder so in the beginning you might find these easier and then later on they're going to be a bit more challenging so for 30 seconds i want you to do this just bounce the ball right on your forehand side here and what i'm really working on here is my hand eye coordination my consistency and i'm aiming for the sweet spot of my paddle right in the center of my paddle notice how it sounds when i'm hitting the sweet spot it sounds nice and full if i start hitting the edges of my paddle listen y'all hear that difference in that sound if you're hitting the edges of your paddle the ball is not going to really bounce as well you can have a great stroke and you think you hit it really nicely but if you're hitting here it's not going to go anywhere and better and a lot of paddles are just going to have huge miships okay so 30 seconds here once you got that down i want you to flip your paddle over to your backhand side now some people may have a bit more struggle with their backhand side that's very important to practice both your forehand and your backhand side forehand and backhand 30 seconds with your backhand okay so once you got that backhand side down now i want you to advance to the next thing is you're going to alternate back and forth okay now this is going to be a bit trickier for some people but when you're alternating back and forth here you really want to keep your movements very compact you don't want to be moving your whole body around like this too much otherwise your balls are going to start moving around a lot too and when you're moving around your head and your whole body this is a lot of information for your eyeballs to take in and it's not going to be easy to be precise and compact so forehand and backhand side just like that i want you to do this for about 30 seconds here okay this is the first time you've done something like this your forearms might actually get a little bit tired make sure to take some breaks don't strain yourself but i promise you if you keep practicing this it will get easier and easier and it translates directly on the court because as you're playing you're not really stressed out about missing your sweet spot you've done this a bunch of times at home and you're going to feel very comfortable on the court okay so this is paddle control i'm learning how to maneuver my paddle back and forth being precise and consistent hitting my sweet spot every time okay i'm going to weave this one in for some of the more advanced players if this is like yawn this is too easy try to weave in some edge hits all right so you're going to go back and forth hit some edge hits in there i have some uh lead tape on my paddle so sometimes i'll hit a little bit weird but this is really working on your hand-eye coordination and your precision because you're hitting on the edge which is definitely a lot smaller it's going to be a lot you're going to have to focus a little bit more and sometimes it might bounce a little bit weird but i want you to quickly adapt to those those bounces while still being compact okay so try this for about 30 seconds and hey guys don't worry if you're messing up a lot this is just messing up as part of the growth you know when you're doing this when i first started i couldn't keep this down and i watched those people on youtube doing it i'm like how are they doing this that i'm no i i'll never get there but just keep practicing it eventually it'll get easier and easier i guarantee it okay okay so that's do that for about 30 seconds now next thing we're going to do is we're going to do something that's going to work more on our touch okay so when i say touch that's just regarding how soft that ball can land on your paddle and how much control you have okay so if i'm holding my paddle really tightly which i do not recommend i want you to soften that your hands so that your paddle has better touch it's not going to ricochet and fly off really fast i'll show you what i mean so i'm death gripping my paddle right now you can see all the veins in my forehand popping out okay if i bounce this off my paddle you see how much it bounces off because it's really stiff now if i want better touch i need to soften these hands a little bit so now watch what happens you see how that ball could kind of kind of settle on my paddle that's because i have softer hands now and that's going to be absolutely critical when you're going for those dinks when you're dinking and pickleball you don't want pop-ups because then you get smashed on and when you're dinking and you're doing control shots and pickleball you want to be able to control this ball have it gently go over the net and land at your opponent's feet so this is the next drill you're going to toss the ball up and you're going to try to keep it on your paddle without it bouncing a bunch of times let's try that again so toss the ball up okay just like that again still working on hitting my sweet spot there and i'm softening my hands and trying to let it come to a complete stop this is what it's going to look like for your first few feeds you're going to try to keep that on it might bounce everywhere but just really try to soften those hands and keep it on your paddle for my advanced players i want you to actually try to catch it completely without it even bouncing this is a lot harder and even a bit tricky for me you're gonna toss it and try to get it to not bounce at all toss okay a little bit better there that's better eventually as you get better and better it should sound kind of like that almost just barely bouncing off your paddle now i am kind of scooping this ball down as i'm going to really get that softness to it okay and as always practice your backhand side as well so i was doing my forehand side flip that paddle over let's try with the backhand side okay not a super you know flashy drill here but this really does teach you about the pattern of how this ball is moving through the air and how you can actually shift your paddle with it maneuver your paddle with it and have good touch with it okay okay soften those hands so do that for about 30 seconds on the forehand and backhand side all right so for drill number three we're going to move on to a what i call a paddle roll now this is probably the hardest variation of these drills but this drill is really really cool here's what it looks like okay i'm going to start forehand backhand and eventually you can do something like this okay so i'm rolling the ball from my forehand side to my backhand side and vice versa and i'm trying to really get it so that it's just rolling okay if you can make this completely silent you are a master at ball control okay so i'll break it down for what's happening here so essentially it's the same thing as my catching drill here so remember how i'm doing this and catching a lot harder than it looks so here and i'm just catching here basically the same thing i'm just gently going to feed it up and i'm going to rotate i recommend trying one side at a time try that first forehand side to backhand side really just try to cradle that ball okay now try back inside the forehand side okay it's okay if it bounces for a few times eventually you'll get the hang of it and it should sound silent okay okay so that's forehand backhand now all you have to do is stitch them together now here and here here here relax that wrist a little bit relax your hand just let it flow okay okay so that's the paddle roll moving back and forth like that okay so these three drills is really the bread and butter what i do at home i'll just alternate eventually you could kind of get into a flow alternating back and forth some edge hits there okay make sure don't break any vases around the house so just try to get a flow for this when i do these i like to just put on some music make sure you know no one's home and i'm not bothering anyone but i'll just do this back and forth yeah my wife's over in the kitchen you know making sure she has her headphones in too but just get that flow going okay so i decided to add this part in because i posted these videos on instagram before and a bunch of people said oh the paddle roll isn't possible if you don't have an edgeless paddle like a lux well i will i'm here to demyth that you can do it with any paddle at all it's not about whether you have an edge guard or not here's a lab six with a edge guard with that lip here and you could do it the same way okay the point is as you're rolling over the ball just rolls over any edge edgeless or not you should be able to do this with any paddle all right so here is that just for the people on instagram saying that it's not possible with oh and a paddle with an edge so my last drill is actually something i've recently included in my training and that's a topspin drill now in the past topspin was always really tricky to actually get a lot of repetitions in and even visualize um and that was when i was introduced to the topspin pro now this device is something that now i can't live without i take this to all my clinics and it's a really great tool on how to demonstrate topspin so let me show you how this tool works here so this is what i do for my topspin training here i'm going to follow this guide right here i'm also going to create another video detailing this a little bit i'm going to be a bit brief with this just because it's going to be just a little short part of this video but essentially i'm just going to try to get this ball to spin like that without hitting the device here okay so it's going to look something like this okay should be a quite a nice satisfying feeling like hitting a pickleball and guess what guys if i am playing pickleball and i'm about to serve this is what my serve looks like here i'm going low to high and i'm getting that ball to spin as much as i can okay so this is a forehand topspin okay we'll zoom in here so you can see that ball spinning now you can do this on the forehand side and the backhand side as well so if i want to train my backhand side you can do a one-handed topspin with your backhand that's pretty tricky unless you have some sort of tennis training in the in the past i recommend just adopt the two-handed backhand that's what i use personally so two-handed backhand same thing okay i'm going to get a couple reps like this here and i have one of these guys in my office and i'll occasionally just to blow off some steam i'll just go ahead and hit a few repetitions of this get my stroke down and this tool is absolutely wow that thing is spinning so fast this tool is absolutely super cool because of this guide right here i never really quite understood what path i should be taking when i hit a topspin now there's tons of ways to get topspin in fact you know when i first started playing pickleball i thought oh topspin i'm gonna have to come over the ball to become topspin right so i would i would hit a pickleball and i would try to get topspin like this where i'm actually curving over the ball more like a ping pong topspin where you're going like this for pickleball you actually don't need to have this exaggerated arc you can just come with this line here low to high notice how i actually never came over the ball sometimes when you do that you can actually hit two over the ball and the ball just goes into the net so here i'm just going in a 45 degree low to high and slightly forward motion here and that's going to generate a butt ton of topspin okay especially have good paddles with good grit on them as always guys thanks for watching and supporting the channel if you enjoyed this video hit that like and subscribe button and i'll see you guys in the next one