Everything to Know About "Speed Ups" In Pickleball

So, when should you speed the ball up? Well, the short answer is... It was actually harder to counter than normal because I was like afraid of like, when is it coming? You're at 3-0, 3-5, 4-0, 4-5. So the higher level I start to play, the more you have to earn the speed up. By the end of this video, you're going to learn the art of the speed up. Now, let's set some context for a moment. Yes, you can win the point by hitting a third shot drive and they miss. You can win the point by getting up to the kitchen and they miss a dink. Those are things that can happen, but it's not what this video is about. This video is about when you get up to the kitchen, all four players are in a neutral position. How do you attack and get more aggressive so you can ultimately win more points? Teleportation. So, just as a reminder, many of you already know, these are called dinks. Dinks are soft shots hit around the kitchen. We're trying to keep these unattackable, but the reason we're dinking is we're looking for an opportunity to speed it up and gain an advantage. And so, when I see a ball I can do that on, which is one that I feel like I can handle, I'm on balance, right? Maybe it's a little bit dead. And what's a dead dink? That's a dead dink. That's a dead dink, okay? That's a speed up. An aggressive dink would be like that. All they can do is get defensive, okay? That's an aggressive dink. That's a dead dink, okay? And Tyler just got eaten up. Let's go. If I'm just dinking to dink, I'm not remembering the outcome I want, which is win the point. And how do I do that? I play a ball that's maybe unexpected. I play a ball that makes him fearful of standing in front of me. And that's what we're going to talk more in depth about right now. So when should you speed the ball up? Well, the short answer is I don't really know. There's a lot of different times I should speed a ball up. I'm going to speed up a different ball than Tyler probably would. But if I'm going with Zach, let's just play it out a couple of times. Here's a couple of examples. Okay, I just did that. Tyler knows it's coming. It's coming at some point, okay? I just did it again. Here we go again. Okay, good spot. That ball was pretty low. So when someone says, don't speed it up if it's too low, I mean, maybe, but who are you playing? Does he have good hands? Do I have a great speed up? You might speed up a really low ball if it's unexpected. Maybe he didn't see it coming. That's the same thing. Here we go. Quick note. Yes, I'm teaching on the right side as a right-hander against right-handed players. So if you're a lefty or you play more on the left side, some of these things will be different. However, the principles I'm sharing apply to both sides. One of the main differences in playing the right and the left or being a righty and a lefty is just where do you attack your opponent? But for now, I'm going to talk specifically from here. It's nuanced. If you have more specific questions, go into the comments below and I'll answer those directly with you there. It was actually harder to counter than normal because I was afraid of when is it coming as opposed to being in the aggressive mode. Yeah, that's the point though. If you ever watch somebody like Riley Newman, Riley Newman's arguably the second best player in the world. You know that he's going to speed up just about every ball, right? Especially at early rounds of a tournament. He'll speed every, you know it's coming, but you don't know where it's going to go. You don't know the pace it's going to come at. And you also don't realize, especially watching on TV, how good, and this is a point my friend Zach here made a second ago, when he speeds it up, he is so ready for the next ball that it doesn't even really matter if you get your paddle on the first one. He's probably going to win 60, 70, 80% of those shots because he knows when he speeds it up to a certain spot, which we're going to get to in a moment, he knows where the counter's coming to. Quick interruption, this video is sponsored by Selkirk. I'm using the Invicta Power Air, the sick colorway. Go to selkirk.com, use my code, get a digital gift card toward a future purchase. Back to the video. I'm not saying that there's not validity to the height of the ball. I'm going to look to speed balls up, especially at a higher level where the ball does bounce a little bit higher, and it is somewhat dead, where I have a little bit more time to consider my options. If I'm playing against a really good counterer, which are most guys at the top level, and I speed up a ball that's a little bit more risky, maybe it's a little lower, and I haven't set it up well enough, doing something prior to that point that would cause an unexpected reaction, they're going to eat my lunch. But for you right now, wherever you're at, you're at 3-0, 3-5, 4-0, 4-5, even some 5-0, I would actually look to turn my aggression meter up a little bit because we say this in basketball all the time, at a lower level, aggression wins. As you get to higher and higher levels, people make you pay, but I've watched Tyler JT play a ton of matches. They're playing about 4-0 right now, 4-5, where if they just get aggressive more than the other team, the odds they win that match are actually a lot higher. Now, they both understand the importance of slowing it down because some teams are going to handle it really well. But if you're a banger, just blasting through teams, you're someone that does get up to the kitchen and looks to speed it up quick, and that's working, don't slow it down. Keep going. Attack where they are weak. So my point in all of this is saying there's no hard and fast rule. The answer is typically it depends on these situations of should I do it or should I not? You have to ask yourself more questions. Who are you? Who are you playing against? What's the ball I receive? So that's the general principle. Now let's get into some of the details that will help you execute this better. If you're looking to speed up on your back foot, you're going to get burned a lot, okay? Okay? I mean, even Tyler can counter those, okay? So number one thing is you don't want to be on your back foot. Instead, what you want to do is you want to get back, get on balance, and then get your weight back forward. Okay? So I get back, and I get my weight back forward so I'm ready for the next ball. Let's all just do it one time. Let's all just get back and then get our weight pushed off our right foot and pushed back forward. It's a dance move. You're like, if you put your focus on your right leg, all of a sudden you really feel like the weight shifts here to here. And if you watch some of the top players, this is what you see them do, right? So part of why you want to get back forward is so that you don't get surprised with the ball that comes back. And also, when you're on your back foot, it's hard to get whip and topspin on your back foot. So what I want to be able to do is not this, okay? That's an over-exaggerated example. So it's hard to get the ball down in that situation. So if I can get here, okay, that gives me a dink. If I can get back and I can get forward, I can create a trajectory that allows the ball to get down. Anytime you speed a ball up and it stays close to the height of the net, they're going to have a hard time doing anything too dangerous back to you. If anything that's going to happen is they're going to pop it up and I can go and put that thing down. So it starts with your feet before anything else. Here's the second thing. When I get back and I'm ready to lean forward, I want to get my paddle tip down and I want to have a really short, compact swing, okay? So my paddle tip's down, short, compact swing. I don't need a lot of power on this, like a tennis swing. I don't want to be doing this, right? Because it just doesn't require that. And it's also a tell to your opponents. If they see you take a huge swing, they're going to really prepare for the counter. So I want paddle tip down here, right? That ball didn't require me to step back, but I'm on balance. I can get my paddle swinging ready for the next ball. Paddle tip's down. And the one thing you want to do here, and I learned this from a guy who's helped coach me a bit here in Phoenix, Jim Krimble, is you want to do this windshield wiper motion, okay? So just catch this one, Tyler. Yep. A little windshield wiper. Little windshield wiper. It creates a little diagonal spin that one, allows you to lift the ball over the net and two, generate a little bit more spin than just hitting a horizontal tennis ball, okay? The other thing that getting your paddle tip down will do is it will help disguise where you're going. If I go paddle tip down, I can go down the line. That's one. I can try to make it look exactly the same or somewhat close, right? Going down up the middle. And so that's part of the unexpected that we want when we're speeding the ball up. Now, hitting the ball hard is not as important as where you hit it in the amount of spin you put on the ball. That ball landed in. I put it right over Tyler's shoulder, but I was able to generate enough whip, not too much power, but more spin that allowed the ball to dip back in. So let's simplify. There's a lot of spots you can hit on a speed up, but let's just look at two of the most common spots that I like to go to when I'm specifically on the right side. And we're going to specifically talk about the right side right now, but the principles apply on the left side of how to hit speed ups. Locations matter, but the locations on the right are the ones we're going to focus on. So if I'm looking at Tyler, zooming on Tyler right here, let's put a target right down the line. And what you see right there is a good location to hit a speed up because if I hit it there, he's going to be, oh shoot. And if Tyler is stretched out in that position, there's a very little chance he's going to counter me hard. So that's a good spot. If Tyler shifts over to his right, if I ever noticed that, I also might go line, right? Because I'm going to get a chance to stretch him out. Now, that's the first location I like to go to, especially when you're playing someone that has a one-handed backhand. Two-handed backhand counters, that can be a better counter, but he doesn't have one yet. So I'm going to go there a lot. Here's the second spot. The second spot is on the right hip and also on his right shoulder. Most people like to sit backhand like you see Tyler doing right now. So if we can get over to the right shoulder or the right hip in that area, we call that a chicken wing. Yeah, put that arm up, right? And when we get to that position, the best Tyler's going to do is be defensive or pop it up. Here we go. Boom, right? You saw him go to that chicken wing. So those are two target areas I like to go to a lot when I'm playing doubles. Try going to those spots first. Of course, there's more spots. Let's be simple right now. Try going to those two spots first before you go to what the most common spot is, which is the cross court. What I see a lot of people do is they like to speed it up cross court. And I think subconsciously, the reason they do it, there's probably two reasons, but one reason is they know if they hit it straight, a lot of times that ball's coming right back at me, right? And so it's a slight subconscious bailout that if I hit it here, the triangle effect is in play. So I hit it to Zach. Zach is often going to swing and counter it over to JT, and my partner's going to be the one that has to handle the rest. So it'll look a little bit something like this. Think it's me, right? And then they hit a winner. JT gets body bagged. We get put in a tough position. Start thinking, where's the best location to hit the ball? So I would go to those two spots to start. Then after you've worked them a little bit, maybe he's covering, sure, you can work to get a middle ball. You can work to hit an out wide ball. If you know Zach is countering, there's more to it than that. Let's start small. Now a quick note, attacking cross court isn't always a bad thing. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it's the most common place to attack, and there's more target locations that you can attack than just that one. When I play, I like to tell my playing partner, if I get a dead dink in the middle, be ready. I might attack cross because if I attack cross, remember the triangle effect, it's often going to go to my partner and they could clean it up. And so I'll mention that to them. What I don't want to happen is to speed it up. They get caught by surprise, which happens a lot. And they get frustrated. Like, why are you doing that? Or they get frustrated themselves. Like my hands are bad. No, they just have to understand the patterns. So prepare them by telling them you might do that and you'll win more points. Here's the final thing to think about when attacking ball. We've primarily been talking about attacking balls off the bounce. Okay, nice, Ty. There's also a lot of value in being someone who leans in, takes balls out of the air, puts a lot of psychological pressure on them. Because when you take balls out of the air and they can't get a dink to bounce, well, they're going to start to think, oh crap, right? And as you do that more and more, they're going to tighten up. And when they tighten up, they often miss slightly high. So when you're standing at the kitchen line, have a strong, wide base. Zooming on my feet. Have a good lean with an extended arm. When you see a ball that is around net height, you can give a small flick of the wrist still. It doesn't need to be a huge swing. Like you're here. It's just this. My power is here and I don't need that much power. What a lot of people do is they're here and they take this really big swing. And when they do that, they miss long. Or when they do that, they hit a high ball that they expect. So I want some deception, okay? So it looks similar to my dinks, okay? All right. And I put it in a spot that's really tricky for Tyler to handle. Now, a lot of times you start to think like, well, how do I know when to do which? That's a good question. One that I'm still working on all the time. I like to just change it up. I kind of want to know who I'm playing against. If I know this guy pops up a lot of dinks and he has shown me that, I'm going to stay here and look for opportunities to lean as much as I can. If I'm playing a better dinker, who's not doing that a lot, I'm going to put pressure on a different way. Sometimes I'm going to dink. I might back off the line. I might make them think they have space. And then I might lean in last second. I might hit a more aggressive dink to try to earn a dead dink from Zach. There it is right there, right? So part of this is actually earning the speed up. Now, again, like if I'm playing against Tyler, I'm going to speed up a lot more balls than if I'm playing up against Zach. Because I know right now, Tyler's not as good at counters. Zach is better. So the higher level I start to play, in my opinion, the more you have to earn the speed up. At lower levels, okay, you can take this too far for sure, but you can get away a little bit more with aggression because they're not going to expect it as much. They won't have as good of counters until you can do something. I would actually suggest experiment with more aggression and don't just rely on what everyone's told you. Dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. Even though dinking is important, remember the outcome is to win the point. One bonus tip, because I just can't help myself. When you speed the ball up, expect it's coming back. One of the big mistakes is we go to speed the ball up and in our brain, we think it's going to be some type of winner or they're just going to hit it into the net. And when we think that, we relax just long enough for us not to be ready for the next ball. So me and JT are hitting and I speed it up, right? It's a little bit exaggerated, but my paddle got careless for a moment. I got lazy for a moment. I wasn't ready for the put away. Remember this, adopt this mindset. The ball's always coming back. So when I'm working on speed ups, I want to be active and engaged as if the ball is always going to come back until the point is over. So like I heard once from Tyson McGuffin, speed it up, then clean it up. Don't speed it up, hope you win, and not clean it up. Speed it up, then clean it up. Did I mention that? Speed it up, then clean it up. That's a good line, Tyson. That's the art of the speed up. If you enjoyed that video, you might also enjoy this video, seven kitchen strategies to help you beat people and not get crushed at the kitchen. Enjoy. See you soon.