THE TOP 5 WALL DRILLS TO DO AT HOME | Pickleball Drills 101

How's it going everyone? Ed here with Davis Pickleball. Today I'm going to share with you my favorite solo drills that you can do by yourself from home. Now if you follow me on social media you'll know that I love doing wall drills on my blue wall but I've been getting a lot of comments from people saying they don't have access to a wall. Well my friends from Enhanced Pickleball sent me this Dink Master so we're going to use this today to drill from home. I'm right in front of my garage and I'm just going to keep this pretty candid and show you what I personally do. So I always like to start off with a few warm-up dinks here. The nice thing about this wall is it has some targets for you already. There's a right target, middle target, left target. And what I'm really working on here is being active with my stance, soft with my hands, and just getting my dinks warmed up here. I'm not really working on any speedy shots or fast reaction times. I'm just working on the fundamentals. And to be honest, these fundamentals is really what brought my level higher and higher. Until I really focused on the soft part of the game, I wasn't really able to progress to the advanced parts of the game. So notice that when I'm hitting these dinks here, because I really want to be controlled with my dinks, I'm not really punching through the ball that much. My paddle is nice and controlled. And look at my paddle, it only moves about six inches, six inches, six inches, six inches. And I could pretty much hit my targets every single time. Now one thing you might notice that I'm doing with my backhand, which I'll do occasionally in my games, is I'll switch to a two-handed. So my forehand, but when it comes to my backhand, I'll just put my other hand behind my paddle just for a little bit of extra stability. That is totally optional. It is very possible that you could just do this one-handed like this. But sometimes if you want to get a little bit more stability and a little bit more lift, that extra two-handed backhand really helps. And something I've been working on is with my two-handed, I've been working on a little flick like that because that could sometimes catch your opponent off guard. If they think you're just going for a dink here and you speed it up at them like that, that's something I've been working on just to have an extra tool in my kit. So that is the warm-up dink drill that I like to do. And then after that, I'll go into volley dinks. Volley dinks is when you don't let it bounce. So it looks like this, just like that. Now this is highly underrated. It looks very lackluster. It doesn't look like anything special. But in games, when I hit these volley dinks, it cuts off half of the time my opponents have to react. And again, I'm still hitting my targets. I'm still hitting right over the net, backhand and forehand. And in a game, these would all go just over the net and my opponents won't be able to react very fast to it because they just hit this ball to me and I'm taking it out of the air. Notice how I'm really reaching in. This would be the kitchen if I was playing a real game. I'm reaching out of the air, cutting it off just like that, keeping it nice and low like that. Okay, so I'll do this for about a couple minutes or so. Notice how my butt is really sticking out. Because my butt is sticking out, I can reach in a little bit more. So that will be our volley dink drill here. Now something I like to do to spice things up a little bit is what I call a crisscross drill. This will work on your touch. You might have seen this blow up on Instagram. Well, this is what it looks like. Bump, touch. You see that? Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. Bump, catch. That's the forehand side. Let's do the backhand side now. People have asked me what that bump is for. The bump is to help you get that control down. That bump, if you can keep it on your paddle, it tells me that you have soft hands and you have good control. If that bump is flinging off your paddle, then I know that you're gripping your paddle too tightly and you are not in control of the ball. So forehand, backhand, now we mix it together and that becomes the crisscross drill. Here we go. I'm not going to talk as much because this one requires a little bit more focus. Oh, that was the garage. Okay, that's the crisscross drill. I love that drill. It's a great warm-up and it really works on your hand-eye coordination and touch. Okay, so next thing I'll move on to are volleys. So these will be strictly out of the air. I might even take a step closer to my wall just to get it a little bit faster, but here's what the volley drill looks like. We're going to do just forehand. Okay, these are different than my volley dinks because these ones I'm punching. I'm still keeping it nice and low, but I'm punching through a little bit more. But notice how extended my hand is. My arm is reaching in front of me. I'm making contact in front of me. After I hit about 30 or so on my forehand side, I'm going to switch to my backhand. The backhand is much easier. I would say most of your volleys should be your backhand and the reason is your backhand is covering the center of your body and it's covering the left side of your body if you're right-handed. So it's actually covering like 75% of what you're able to cover. The forehand just covers the right side of your body if you're right-handed. So a couple more on my backhand side. Don't worry if this feels tough for you at first. I remember when I first started wall drilling, I could not keep the ball in play and I had to chase down balls everywhere. You will get better at this and when you get better at this, you will get better at pickleball. I promise you, I guarantee it. So now that I got my forehand, backhand, now I'm going to stitch them together and do alternations here. I was wondering when I was going to mess up. Okay, so that is the forehand backhand drill. I'm cutting it short for this video but I typically will do this for about 10 minutes or so. I'll do it for about 30 or 50 reps and then I'll take a break, maybe get some water, shake out the lactic acid in my arm, and then I'll go back at it again. But we're going to move on to the next thing for this video. So after that one, we're going to incorporate some speed ups. So we're stitching the two things together, volleys and dinking. So here's what it looks like. Stand about seven feet away from the wall here, hit a few dinks, and then you're going to speed up. Hit a few dinks and then flick that ball. Hit a few dinks, flick that ball. Now when you flick the ball, the ball is going to come fast at you. That's when you have to block. So we're working on two new things here. We're working on a flick immediately followed by a block. This is a very very common pattern in pickleball, especially against good players. When you speed a ball against them, a good player is going to hit that back at you, which means you better be ready for that next shot. I always tell my students, if you're going to speed up, if you're going to speed up the ball, if you're going to start the fight, you better finish the fight. So this is what it looks like. Dink, dink, speed up, block. Dink, dink, speed up, block. Dink, dink, speed up, block. Okay, this is a fantastic drill. I probably have sunk hundreds, no, dozens of hours into this drill, this dink, dink, speed up, reset drill. And something I've been working on now is actually, instead of resetting that third ball, I'm going to actually counter that ball. Now this is a very tough drill. I won't spend too much on this in this video because this video is just meant to be an introduction to wall drills, but here's kind of what it looks like. Dink, dink, speed up, counter. Dink, dink, speed up, counter. Dink, dink, speed up, counter. Okay, as you can see, that goes pretty fast. And something that I like to do if I do have a lot of balls on me is I will go full out and I will try to beat the wall. And that's kind of a silly statement because I'm never going to beat a wall, but it teaches you how to be faster and get that next ball. And that's what matters in pickleball, is making that next ball. So I'll try my best. Some balls are going to fly around, but we'll see what it looks like. Ooh, it was not fast enough against the wall. One more time. Okay, I think that's my sign to stop. But as you can see, if I'm trying to beat the wall, it's coming back faster and faster and faster, which means I need to be more compact, keep my strokes a little bit more compact and quick right in front out of me here. So guys, thanks for watching. Let me know in the comments below if this was helpful for you. I've been meaning to make a YouTube format wall drill series for a long time. Now that I have the Dink Master, I can do this straight out of the comfort of my garage. So if you like this video, make sure to let me know in the comments below. Give me your feedback. And yeah, this was fun. I'll see you guys next time.