The BIGGEST Different Between 3.5 and 4.0 DUPR... (Why you're stuck!)

If you're stuck at a 3-5, I'm going to tell you something that's going to be really annoying to hear. Your shots are fine. I've coached hundreds of players that have hit this exact same wall and none of them had a problem with hitting a third shot drop, a reset, or a dink. They kept hitting this wall because they kept hitting the wrong shot at the wrong time. And no amount of drilling fixes that. At 3-5, we're losing points. At 4-0, we stopped losing those same balls because we're actively in the right position and the right spot to hit the right shot every time. And that's the whole gap. It's not shots that you can't hit. It's shots that you shouldn't have hit. So today we're going to walk through a point and we're going to discuss the return, the transition zone, the speed ups, and the kitchen. And I'm going to show you exactly where 3-5s give up the point. Let's get into it right now. Quick context why you should trust me over the thousands of pickleball gurus out there. I'm a 6'1 duper. I'm a top 100 PPA pro. And when I'm not playing against other professional pickleball players, I'm teaching 3-5s just like yourself. And the reason I'm so confident about making this video is that when I coach 3-5s, I don't often change their technique. I change their strategy. And what happens next is their duper starts to go up. One of the most underrated and undercoached shots in pickleball is the return of serve. We start the point with the serve. And a typical 3-5 is just making the ball. It's not out. It's not wide. It's not into the net. It's just hitting finally in the center middle of the court. And the player hitting that thinks it's fine and starts to trot up to the kitchen line, but it's not fine. And here's why. A short return gives our opponent the advantage for two reasons. A, if that ball sits up, it's an easy ball for them to drive and start the offensive attack. Or they have an easier drop, which pretty much just gives them a free pass up to the kitchen, making it a 50-50 ball game, giving away our advantage of giving up to the kitchen first. However, the secret here, and what I want to work on with you is hitting a deep return that not only keeps your opponents back, but actively pushes them back, making them have their first step step off the baseline, which is going to make it not only a harder shot for them to hit, but a harder for them to move forward and get up to the kitchen themselves. So the two fixes I want to make for a 3-5 is I want them to actively be aggressive with their returns. No more, Mr. Nice guys. I want you to think of your return as a weapon and make that four shot easy for you. The second fix is going to be after we hit this nice deep return is I want you to sprint up to the kitchen, no walking, no jogging. You are going to hurry your feetsies up to that kitchen line. It is mandatory coach Troy mandatory, not rules mandatory. You get up to the kitchen after you hit your return of serve. So as you can see, I left that return short allowing my opponent to turn into offense immediately and I'm just stuck in the transition zone here. So I've got an orange cone deep back there. That's my goal back there is to hit it past the orange cone and have her take a step back. If she takes a step back, it's a mini win for me. So let's try it. Good. So that's a good example. If she refused to take a step back, she had to short hop that ball and put herself in a terrible position. Good. So as you can see, I got that ball nice and deep again. She had to short hop it and lift up, which just gave me such an easy fourth. I sprinted up to the kitchen and had an easy overhead that the return of serve set all of that up. If you miss one or two reserves, returns of serve a game, I'm okay with that. As long as you're going for it, you start missing three, four, five, six. Maybe we need to bring it down a little bit, but if you're not missing any returns, that means you're not hitting the return hard enough here. Just want to take a quick second to shout out ecosports.com. Everything they do is the lowest impact sporting goods that they can find while making sure that performance is at the forefront from pickleballs to clothes, to shoes, check out the link below and make sure that you're doing your part through sports as no planet, no pickleball. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm not too worried about a three fives third shot drop. I believe they're pretty consistent, but where I do get worried is this transition zone. Oftentimes they rush out of the transition zone, hurrying up to the kitchen. When a four oh plus thinks of the transition zone as a journey, they're happy to hit one, two, three balls and earn their way up to a kitchen where a classic three fives sprints up, hits the transition zone off balance, out of position for a pop up for the other team. So let's break that down. So after we hit this wonderful third shot drop, which I know you can do, we have to move from baseline to kitchen. So that's what this transition zone is here. What I would love to see is for you to get balanced in split step when that next ball is about to come over so that we can hit this next reset with firm, low, strong feet here. Too many times I see people will hit a third shot drop and run and then have to hit their next ball off balance. One thing I heard that's always stuck for me is that you don't advance on the hard ball. You advance on the ball after that. So when my opponent hits a hard ball to me, I'm going to hit that ball softly back to them and start advancing on that soft ball moving forward. So I hit that one soft. That's where I advanced split step softball. And now I'm into the kitchen here starting the rally. So the three fixes I want to make when we're getting out of this transition zone here is just because we're moving forward doesn't give us the right to attack. If she keeps this ball to my feet here, I want to just keep it low and slow so that I can get up to the kitchen here. The second tip that's going to help tremendously with the fundamentals here is no backswing here. A lot of times people will come all the way back and it's really hard to hit a soft reset drop shot with a big backswing. So I want to focus on keeping that paddle in front of us and keep it simple and compact and really use the legs to get up and reset here. See how he's using the legs to generate all that power or absorb her power. No swing here. And the last pro tip is keep this paddle in front of us in low. If she hits a ball above my waist, it's probably going out, right? And this is one of the biggest things I see with three fives, even four rows. We're hitting way too many out balls. That's just simply free points. So she hits this ball above my waist here. I'm just going to let it go out. I know you can't see that, but it was about a foot and a half out. So the drill Alex and I are going to do to work on getting out of the transition zone is I'm going to hit a third shot drop, which again, I know you all can do here, but she's either going to hit a ball to my feet that I'm going to reset or she's going to hit a ball to my shoulder that I'm going to attack. So like we were talking about earlier in the video, this is about decision making and hitting the right shot at the right time. I don't want to speed up a ball at my shoelaces, but I do want to speed up a ball at my shoulder. So let's drill it. Good. So as you can see there, she got that ball over to my feet. I just want to reset that claim my rightful position up at the kitchen line. As you can see now we're at the kitchen. Now we're dinking. This is where three fives give away more points than anything. It's the speed up. It's not the dinking. It's not the consistency. It's speeding up at the wrong time. And one rule of thumb that I always tell my three fives and really anybody, if that ball is below the net, I want you to hit a dink back. The reason I don't want you to speed that ball up is due to physics. We have a 36 inch net in our way that we have to hit up on the ball, which ends up just sitting into our opponent's strong counter. And that ball comes back faster to us than we hit it on the other side. A green light I would give you is if that ball sits up around your pocket or around your waist, then I do want you to attack. But if that ball is below your knee, you should be dinking. The other issue I see with three fives speed ups is they hit these speed ups too hard. What do I mean by that? The first one is generally these speed ups just go out. When I see a big windup from a less consistent player, I just step out of the way and let them hit it long. The other reason why I don't want you to hit these as hard as possible is because I want you to find spots. I want you to find gaps in the pickleball court. Let me show you what that means. As you can see, I have my magician's assistants on the other side here. The three spots that I want you to target is down the middle. Middle solves the riddle. The second spot I want you to target is the hip and the third spot I would target is down the line. I would go down the middle or hip about 80% of the time. I'd only go down the line when you're feeling confident and you know you're going to win the point. So if Alex and I are dinking, I'm going to try and take a little bit of pace off, but I'm going to try and hit that spot perfectly. So a drill I would do to practice this is Alex and I are going to play a dinking game and we're only allowed to speed up balls if it's above the net or it's out of the air here. It's going to dink here until somebody pops it up or somebody leaves the high dink. Oh, it's a good spot. Come on. Play games with seven, 11, and then I want you to do all four spots down the line, down the line, and cross court, cross court, because we got to be able to speed up and handle those counters from all spots of the court. The fourth and final shot selection that I want to work on today as a three, five is patience. Did you know that the average pickleball rally is three and a half shots, meaning that if you get to four or five, six balls, the odds that you win that point dramatically increase. So if you can make one more dink, one more reset, I like your chances of winning that point. And trust me, I know it's boring, but I'd love for you to watch my little rock PPA gold medal match. All I do is just make a hundred dinks in a row. And trust me, I know that you can make a hundred dinks in a row if you wanted to as well, but we get bored, we get impatient and we decide to speed up the wrong ball. And that's what's costing us free points out on the pickleball court. So we're going to keep this simple. We're going to make it embarrassingly simple. All we're going to do is count to a hundred. We're going to make a hundred dinks in a row. And I know that it's monotonous, but I promise it's one of the best drills I did to get better at dinking and never missing. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, one hour later, 98, 99 or a hundred. Good. Go as long as you can. But also the other note is when you get to a hundred, when you've been dinking for a couple of minutes, you get tight and nervous, which is one way to replicate tournament play and match play, which is really hard to do when you just go out and play rec with friends. Right? So when you put pressure on the line of getting to that certain number, it's replicating what it's actually like in tournaments. Okay. Let's gamify this dinking drill now. So after we make 12 dinks in a row, then you are allowed to speed up. So it preaches patience, but then allows us the opportunity to speed up after we've made our balls, trying to find the right opportunity. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. I'm trying to set her up early so that I can be ready to attack when she leaves a high one. If she leaves a high one, that's a good example of why we don't speed up right into our wheelhouse. Now going out tomorrow and trying to fix all these problems is not the answer. I want you to have a 30 day plan. Let's break it down one week at a time. Week one returns, week two transitions, week three speed ups, week four is kitchen consistency. One step at a time. We'll have huge actions day by day, week by week. And I promise you after four weeks, you'll notice a huge increase in hitting the right ball in the right spot. And that's, what's going to take us to that 4-0 duper. We broke down four awesome strategies, how to improve your duper today, but I post amazing content all the time with different strategies, different tips, different techniques. So make sure to subscribe, follow along that journey. I've got new videos coming out pretty much every week. So happy to have you to be a part of the pickleball team. And if you're wondering what goes beyond the 4-0 strategy, I want you to start thinking about anticipation. I have a great video here of what made me a 6-0 duper and anticipation is one of the biggest things. So check it out.