do you want to hit your roll volleys like the pro players do we all do today in this video I'm going to give you all of my little tips and tricks and secrets and show you how to do it and here's a little hint it's different than I see most people teaching it let's get it [Music] okay so we got three things we're going to cover today number one technique the way that I see the roll volley being commonly taught I think is not the best way to do it I'm going to tell you why
I think there's a better way in a more efficient way to be hitting your roll volleys next I'm going to show you exactly how to do it I'm going to give you some easy tips and drills that you can try so hopefully you can feel what I feel in the roll Valley and last we're going to talk about when do we use the shot hopefully today we're going to build our roll volley to be effective in tons of different situations and I'm going to show you when all those are and how exactly we're going to
use them to be more effective pickleball players don't forget to share some love to my sponsors we've got Selkirk paddles making the best paddles on the market right now they've got everything you need from entry level paddles and their SLK line all the way up to Cutting Edge technology from their project Labs paddles like this zero zero two and we got spin shot ball machine which we're going to use today for some of the drills if you're in the market for a ball machine definitely check this out this is by far the best on the
market so many things you can do with it so check out those links in the description below okay so let's talk roll volley technique here's some common themes that I keep seeing over and over again from other coaches or watching videos one would be we want the shoulder to do most of the Swing so we want to lock our wrist and swing from the shoulder two would be that we want to use our legs to drive up through the shot so we're going to drop down low and then we're going to use our legs to
drive up and help lift that ball over the net so you can see me on screen right now in slow motion kind of swinging using that model when you watch me swing like this what could you see as potential problems that I might run into in a point so let's talk about two standards that I use to build every swing in my game one would be I want every swing to be as efficient as possible no wasted movement at all second would be that I try to make every swing finish back fairly close to my
ready position or in front of my body so I'm not exposed for the next shot I would make the argument that this swing you're watching right now is accomplishing neither of those things you can see that I'm finishing pretty big pretty extended in a way which leaves me exposed if a ball were to come back quickly I also think that the length of this swing is very inefficient and that there's a better way to create speed in the paddle so here's what I think that better way is there's going to be two main differences first
let's talk about the legs we're going to use the legs as a form of stabilization for the shot and not for adding power so rather than stand up out of the shot we're gonna stay in our lowered stance and use our legs to really stabilize the swing and keep the body nice and still next we're going to look at the swing so rather than swinging from the shoulder and using the whole arm as the main source of power we're going to focus on using the wrist and actually more specifically a rotation of the forearm so
we're going to rotate the paddle around our forearm almost like you're turning a doorknob because the wrist is a shorter lever than the shoulder and it's closer to the paddle we can use that to get the paddle moving quicker and more efficiently the main benefit here is I can get more paddle speed with less overall movement which means a more efficient swing which leads to a more compact finish more overall body control therefore more overall shock control foreign okay so let's talk about how we're actually going to get the feel for this shot now first
a few things I want to lay out number one I'm sure you've heard we don't want to be risky why would we do it this way we don't want to be risky we've heard from coaches that you're supposed to lock your wrist yeah that's kind of true typically we say that because what the wrist does being the joint that's closest to the paddle is the risk is the joint that can make the paddle move the most or the quickest and most times we don't want that if we're dinking I don't want a lot of wrist
movement especially as beginner or intermediate player however if my goal is to get paddle speed and to get it quickly and get it efficiently and get it instantly the risk can be a good way to achieve that now the second part of this is I can make the argument that we're not actually using our wrist here okay so if I were to go like this this would be using my wrist now if I show you the back of my hand and put my fingers down and then I roll my forearm to where my fingers point
up I'm not actually breaking my wrists I'm just rolling my forearm so this is actually the movement that we're doing for this shot this is a forearm rotation and not movement of the wrist so this could be the first drill that you try put your hand straight out in front of you put your fingers straight down we're just going to take our fingers and we're going to go fingers down without moving anything else fingers up fingers down fingers up and now kind of see if you can kind of Pop That movement make it happen quick
relax pop up so that's going to be part one Next Step maybe don't try this at home or at least if you do have a Selkirk paddle that has a lifetime warranty or go do it in the grass okay what we're going to do is we're going to let our paddle relax and then we're gonna flip it and toss it up in the air I'll do this from farther so you can see relax flip it up so if I just toss my paddle and make it spin like that that's basically the motion that we're going
to be using to do this so you kind of get the feel for that third way that I like to teach or get people to feel this is we're going to feel relax and then some tension that's how we're going to get the wrist to pop okay so I have our paddle we're going to let it relax just let it basically fall let the weight of the paddle fall so that it's almost straight down okay your hand is super loose on the grip if we tense up if you squeeze it in tense you're going to
notice the paddle kind of on its own pops up about halfway we're just going to take that and kind of run with it we're going to take that tension and we're going to pop it all the way until it's vertical so relax pop relax tense now if you notice in any of those movements there wasn't a lot of this but there wasn't a lot of arm movement there's not a lot of leg movement we're simply using a rotation of the forearm to make the Pedal Go From Below to above one quick note I want to
make everything I've shown so far has been me doing it on the backhand side but all of the concepts apply to the forehand you would just basically reverse everything we talked about so we're going to look at three main in-game situations where you would use this shot the first and by far the most common one is the fourth shot so your opponent's hitting a third shot drop you're reaching in and getting the ball out of the air and trying to roll that ball back to their feet to maintain an advantage in the point and maintain
pressure so in this point we're going to see exactly that we're going to focus on J.W Johnson Far Side black shirt Zane hits a drive JW handles it with a volley and now he's going to see that Andres hit a soft reply back so because that incoming ball is going to have a little arc on it and he's going to be able to get it out of the air JW's got a chance at his role volley here so you can see that Movement we talked about still body mostly wrist and you can see how quickly
JW is able to recoil and get back to ready position again same thing on the forehand drops the paddle roll of the wrist and almost immediately he's back to ready again okay for this next situation we're going to look at how you can use this shot to attack the ball out of the air when all four players at the kitchen line so all four players are dinking JW is going to get a look at a ball that he thinks he can attack out of the air so he's going to reach in and this is where
shortening That Swing becomes really critical you can see again how quickly he's able to get back into ready position sane's able to fight it off they go back into dinking and now you're gonna see that Andre gets the same look so now he's going to give it right back to him reach in roll the wrist pops it quickly recovers and he gets to miss for the last example here we're going to focus on Dylan Fraser in the red and how you can use this shot on what we call a dead dink off the bound so
if you get a dink that sits up a little bit like this one you can use the exact same motion relax the paddle drop the wrist roll it up this is a very difficult shot to read and you can see as this ball is flying by Dylan was ready to go he was back in his ready position so let's check that out one more time there's the roll and already Dylan's back to where he could be ready for that ball if it came back again that's it for today guys hope you liked the video don't
forget to subscribe like and comment and I'll see you next time thanks
