Drills Pickleball Pros NEVER SKIP!

Hey guys, I'm here with my good buddy, Johnson Cola. He's one of the best instructors on YouTube and we actually played a ton of pickleball together before we moved to Austin, Texas. And over the years, we've developed a bunch of different great drills together. And so we're actually going to take you through five different drills that we came up with together that can help you in your pickleball game. So the first drill that we came up with together is the slice to topspin drill. So many players have a slice come at them and they don't know how to deal with it. So this drill, John is going to slice everything and I'm going to topspin everything as a result. And the idea is to help me figure out how to deal with those slices. So one of the reasons I really like this drill is because it forces you into shots that you may not be super comfortable with. So for example, for me, I prefer to hit topspin on my forehand side and slice on my backhand. So when we're doing this, I've got to work on that forehand slice. And then when I switch, I've got to work on my backhand topspin. So it forces you into shots that may not be your favorite shots to hit. So one of the reasons why I really like this drill is it forces you to hit upwards on those shots. If you don't brush up a little bit more when your opponent has sliced to you, you're going to miss in the net just like that. And that's because when a slice hits your paddle, it kicks downwards off of the face of it. And so this is a great way to get accustomed to a lot of slices and feel out what you have to do slightly differently as a result. So you should also do this cross court because we do hit a vast majority of our shots cross court. There's a little bit more space, a little bit more margin. So get accustomed to this slice versus topspin drill on the diagonals as well. The next drill we want to show you guys, we call it long hands. So you've probably seen the drill where you step into the kitchen line and you do hands from a little bit closer together. And that's to work on compacting your swing and tighten things up, making things quicker. This is actually the opposite of that. And we don't see many people work on this. So now we're actually going to take a couple steps back. So the way this drill works is Zane and I are going to be about five, six feet off the kitchen line, and we're going to feed a ball in and we're basically just trying to do a normal fast hands drill. But the main difference is we're going to be taking bigger swings because there's more time and space between each ball. This also is really good for simulating poaching, right? A lot of times we are in this transition zone getting a higher ball and needing to generate all of the pace. So we get to do a bunch of quick reps on that here. Something else that you'll notice is we are stepping into these shots, right? Because if we are ever counterattacking from this transition zone area, we want to make sure that we do have our weight behind us. And you should also feel out, Hey, does this feel really awkward to actually try to generate pace on? Maybe that's where in a real game you might work that reset. So anyway, this is a great drill for your put away power. It's also a great drill for your transition zone poaches as well. So this one is probably our favorite. It's called protect the line. I teach this all the time and it's a drill that we actually do relatively frequently as well. But something that we noticed among amateur players and even some pro players is a little bit of a hesitancy to actually take the ball out of the air from the kitchen. And we've got to remember, that's why we play from the kitchen. It's to try and take these shots out of the air when we can. Rules here are we're dinking is dink only, but is John gets something to land on or behind my kitchen line here like that ball bounced right here. That's a point for John because I didn't effectively protect my line. So one thing you want to think about strategically here is if we're playing this game and Zane is just in the middle of the court in perfect position, it's going to be hard for me to find space where he can't just cut it off. So this is where you have to use your dinks to open up the court a little bit. If I can get Zane off the court with the dink, then I've opened up space that I can push that next ball a little bit deeper and maybe go past his kitchen line. So this is a great drill to help you find your range. And not everybody plays directly up online, right? Some of the guys do. Some of the ladies do drop a little bit back off of the line, but whatever line they do play from, they protect it. Maybe it's a few feet off the kitchen. Maybe that's their range. And that's what this drill is designed to help you with figuring out your range for what to take out of the air. So once you get accustomed to this, you can make it a little bit more difficult by going cross court. You'll find that that's way more difficult. You can also add in speed ups on top of the protect the line game. So a couple of ways to make this a little bit more difficult, a little bit more fun. The next drill we have for you, we call this the dink 70 drill. And so basically what we've done is we've cut the box in half and we've put cones in each side of the box. So we're doing this backhands. So you go all the way over to the other side, but cones right down the middle and then cones right down the middle on the other side. So what we're going to do is we're going to dink backhand to backhand corner, but we're covering more space now. So you can see we call it 70% because I'm not only covering my half plus another 20 to 25% of my partner's box. So what this is going to help with is just learning to be extended, learning to be uncomfortable, maybe reaching, having to cover more ground and still being able to control those dinks when you're under a little more pressure. So this is also a great drill for understanding patterns. When you're out of position, where should you dump that ball? You notice a lot of times if John and I were really pushed out of position over to the backhand side, John was aiming right in here. I was aiming a little bit more towards John's forehand side at the great spots to bail out. Once we feel comfortable with this, we can add in speed ups on this as well. So we're going to actually turn it into a game. And so we don't get 75% of the court through the entire court. What we're doing is we're going to play 75% of the kitchen, but if I want to speed it up, I still have to go through John's part of the court. I can't just speed it up straight ahead, right in here. And so just take a look at what this looks like. Yep. So the last drill that we created together is a phenomenal mid court drill. We get caught in the transition zone very, very frequently and most players don't have a plan from here. You need to be able to move forward, move backwards. You need to be able to get out of the transition zone one way or another. So the way that this drill is going to work is I'm going to position myself right in the middle of the box. I'm going to feed John a mediocre drive. And from there, we're just going to play out the point and nothing is actually keeping me in this transition zone. If I hit a good reset, I'm going to approach the kitchen and try and win the point. If I had a bad one, I'm going to retreat and try and defend and then eventually work my way up back towards the kitchen line. So working this spot is super important in this drill too, because we need to realize when we can apply pressure, when we have to back off a little bit. My mindset is that I want to try to find offense as much as possible. So I'm going to try to reach in and take it out of the air when I can. If he gives me a floatier ball, I may step back and take it off the bounce. But if that ball gets too low and Zane starts to creep forward on me, then I got to know when I just got to conceive the kitchen and I don't have offense anymore. So those are five great drills that you can add to your pickleball game. Those are drills that John and I came up with together. And if you want more drills, obviously John has an incredible instructional YouTube channel as well. Definitely recommend checking him out. Anything else that you got, John? No, those are some great drills. Um, hopefully we gave you lots of different variations. So no matter what level you are, you can find something that works for you. So go give them a try.