4 Amateur Pickleball Habits That Are Absolutely KILLING Your Game

There are four amateur habits that are totally killing your pickleball game. The third one is probably the most common and you're going to want to clean up right away. By the end of this video, we're going to show you how to fix all of them so that you can take your game to the next level. All right, the first amateur mistake that I see all the time on the courts is attacking a ball from a very low position and aiming it kind of right at the chest of your opponent. So at lower levels that may work from time to time but as soon as you play better players, those players have very strong counters especially with balls that are coming right at their chest. This could be from a dink or maybe you're getting the ball in front of you that you can easily attack but if you're going to just hit the ball right to the opponent in front of you that counter will come back really fast at your feet and you're going to be at a disadvantage on the very next shot. All right, so just like you saw in those examples if we're attacking from a really low position or if we're off the non-volley zone line and we're attacking right at the body against good players that's not a good play. So the fix is dink those balls because they're really low or if we are going to attack them we have to find a spot that is more uncomfortable maybe like a chicken wing or have them reaching to their left towards their backhand. So the second common mistake at the amateur level that we see a lot is when players bail out when they feel pressured. So whether you get pushed side to side or back maybe there's a dink that gets pushed at your feet we tend to just feel that pressure and we have no specific intent of where we're putting our shot. We're just panicked and we go into panic mode and shove that ball wherever we choose. So now that you've seen what not to do the change that we have to fix instead of bailing out and moving back or to the side and just slapping the ball across the net we want to make sure we're calming ourselves down split stepping and hitting a dink rather than just slapping the ball to our opponents where they can put more pressure on us. Really quick if you're gaining value from this video we'd really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button. Doing that helps us make more videos like this. Also if you'd like to learn every shot in the game the right way scan the QR code here or click in the link in the description. All right so now let's jump into the third thing that I see amateur players struggling with all the time and that is popping up their dinks. Whether they're popping it up off of the bounce or they're popping up their volley dinks either way they just don't have good control and they're popping it up for their opponent to put away or to apply offense on them. One of the most important things when you're up at the non-boys online dinking is controlling the depth on your dinks. Obviously if your dinks go too far like you just saw your opponent is going to be attacking you every single time. So I call this the 3S method and these are three S's that you must remember and this is going to help you control your depth on your dinks so that your opponent can't just attack the ball out of the air every time. The very first thing that we need to remember is we have to create space on our dinks. If the ball is bouncing close to our feet and we're not taking it out of the air we have to step back and create that space. We either will use a drop step where I just move one foot back or I'm going to take more of a shuffle step off of the line to create that necessary space that I need to control my shot. If I don't create space then I'm forced half balling the ball and I'm feeling a lot of pressure and it's hard to control the ball to land in the non-boy zone. All right now let's jump into the second S. Now that we know that we have to create space we also have to make sure that we control our swing speed. The speed of your swing directly affects how far that ball is going to go. So if I have a really fast swing on my dinks that is going to push that dink a lot further than I want and now my opponents are going to be attacking it. So when I'm practicing here so Sammy and I are going to dink you'll notice all my dinks are fairly slow so I'm creating that space and whether I'm hitting topspin or just lifting you're going to notice that my swing is very very slow. Okay so that's how I control my depth. A lot of you out there are dinking like this and you're actually creating space but your swing is very fast. Very fast and now your balls are carrying past the non-boy zone which is what we don't want. All right the third S let's jump into it and that is the size of your swing. It's really important that we also know another thing that affects how far we hit the ball is our size. Okay so if I have a very long follow-through high follow-through that is going to actually push that ball a lot further. Okay so what's really important that I make sure that I watch my backswing so that it's very minimal or in front of me and then I'm just lifting towards my target. Okay so me and Sammy are going to dink here again on the forehand side the size of my swing is small to medium. Right if I'm doing this then now my ball's carrying really really far past the non-boy zone but if I create that space I control my swing speed and I control the size of my swing now I can actually get the ball to land exactly where I want and I could put pressure on my opponent that way. All right so the fourth amateur common habit that we see a lot on the court is not applying enough pressure when your opponents are trying to make their way to the kitchen line. Whenever our opponents are trying to make their way through transition I want to think of doing two things either one taking the ball out of the air to limit the time that my opponents have to react or two taking the ball off of the apex off of the bounce. The one thing that I do not want to do and that I want to avoid is short hopping the ball. Okay I always like to say whenever we're hitting our fourth shot or when our opponents are making their way up to the line never short hop the ball because what that does is it doesn't allow me to put any top spin or pressure on my opponent and once my opponent sees my paddle head drop down here and I'm half volleying that ball it's a free pass to the line for my opponents making it way too easy for them. All right so just like you saw in those examples the most important thing that you want to try and find first is to try and take that ball out of the air to limit the time your opponent has. If you can't take it out of the air we're then working to create space and taking it off of the apex. Now the most important thing when I'm trying to hit this shot is to try my best to find my opponent's feet.