pickle ball as a sport is constantly evolving with new P technology and way more advanced players there's plenty of new ways to get advantages so today I'm going to take you through 10 tips that I've been playing around with more recently these are things that might not have been as popular or important 2 years ago but now they're becoming Staples in the game helping me today I have my sister [Music] Kimmy the first tip I'm going to take you through guys is a new shot that's getting super popular called the hybrid third so as you
probably know the third shot shot is the shot that you hit as the server right after your serve and generally your two options on that shot are the drop where I hit it into the kitchen and tried to get it to land in front of my opponent and the drive where I hit it hard at my opponent and try to win with power and the hybrid third is a mixture between the drop and the drive and when you use that is when your opponent is not getting in super fast so if I had a really
deep serve to Kimmy and she doesn't get in quickly I can sort of roll the ball at her feet with a little bit more power than a normal drop and when I do that I get the ball at her feet so let me show you how that looks again I hit a deep surf to Kimmy she's coming in slowly so I can go more at her feet more aggressively to take control of the point if I was to drop there and Kimmy's in that position she actually can just move forward through it and attack that
shot so on our hybrid third it just looks like this not hitting it super hard but if I get it right at her feet I can probably move forward so I might even get her to pop it up like that to where I can attack my next two tips though involve the serve and that's if you're going for Top Spin serves which a lot of players go for and that's generally the most important serve to know you can actually get a lot out of hitting them a little bit higher and the reason for that is
when you hit them higher the effect of the Top Spin is a little bit more dramatic off the bounds so if generally you're hitting your serves 2 feet over the net I encourage you to try hitting them 3 or 4T over the net with a little more spin maybe even a little slower it'll increase your consistency and it can actually make it tricky on your opponents and on top of that you can even add on What's called the banana serve it's a little hard but it's essentially the reverse of a screw ball so the banana
serve is essentially where I come out like this and it's kind of like Top Spin but it has a little s side spin on it so I can hit that higher serve with that crazy Spin and if you can get that to land deep that makes it really challenging for your opponents to hit a good return so you can even bend it around the net if you do it good so you see there getting a little bit of curve and if you do it really well you can actually pull your opponents away from where they're
standing there I literally got it to bend around the center line so try hitting your serves a little bit higher when you go with Top Spin maybe add on that banana Spin and you're going to make things really challenging for your opponents on the return you guys later in the video I'm going to go over how to curve your atps and your volleys too so stay tuned if you want to see that so my next tip involves the drop shot where I hit the ball really short where my opponent is back so not to be
confused with the drop where I'm hitting in the kitchen from the Baseline the Drop shots when I'm up and I I hit the ball really short so watch these two Drop shots and tell me which one looks like it'd be easier to react to this is the first one this is my second one so if you said the second one looked harder you're right because I'm doing something that I stole from tennis which is called deception so when you're going for a drop shot if it looks like you're going to hit a drop shot your
opponent has that extra Split Second they need to start moving forward but if it looks like you're about to hit the ball hard your opponent might actually start backing up and by the time they see that the ball's going short they don't have enough time to get there because as you probably know the pickall doesn't bounce very high so some of the best times to go for Drop shots are actually in times where your opponent expects you to hit really hard so if Kimmy hits me a medium high ball that's not very fast she might
be expecting me to go for a hard shot but by going for that drop shot I can take it by surprise keep in mind though normally you do want to go hard in that situation the drop shot is something you want to pull out maybe once or twice a game cuz if you do it too often your opponents are going to get used to it and they're going to start anticipating it and moving forward earlier and guys one bonus tip to think about when you're going for Drop shots is that going for angles generally is
a little more effective because you have a lot more room right you I actually hit that ball a lot harder if I was to hit that ball down the line it would have landed in the middle of the court so when you're going for an angle drop shot just makes things a little bit easier and it's easier to keep the ball farther away from your opponent so I encourage you to try that with the angle the next tip on the list though has to do with a return and it's that you should start try to
go for some Top Spin returns so generally in pickleball a few years ago almost every player that was at a high level would go for slice returns which look like this so I'm sort of chipping at the ball as I'm coming forward but more and more players these days are starting to use Top Spin which looks like this so they're very similar compact motion but I'm coming over the ball and what that does is it makes it a little more challenging for your opponent to hit a third shot because my ball is spinning towards them
so makes it harder for them to get Top Spin if you think about the way that the ball is going to be spinning off of their paddle this week I went to a 5.0 tournament and no joke I think about half the players there were using the top spner turn on every single serve so it's definitely really gaining popularity you've probably already seen players that do it in person just to show you one more example it's definitely easier to do off of the forehand side so you might need to cheat over to your forehand side
more on a backand you might need to use two hands in order to do this so if you don't have a confident twoand and backhand what you can do is just cheat a little bit over to your forehand side to where I can almost guarantee that I get a forehand because I'm staling a little bit farther over and I have that extra space so if you haven't tried the Top Spin return give it a shot and you might have a really good results with your opponent's third shots and another cool way to gain an advantage
on your return is with what's called hand signals so if you see Kim right now she's giving me a signal on Where to return and whether or not she's going to poach or stay so you see when she does that we can actually run plays on our opponent where we can switch sides and it gives us a pretty big Advantage because we can actually trick our opponents a little bit so we're going to go over that later so stay tuned if you want to see that the next tip I want to go through though is
one of my favorites and it's a trick that I've used for years and it's that before your games you want to do something to fire up your hand speed so a drill right so one of my favorite ways to do that is a drill where me and my partner come in inside the kitchen line and we start Ving with each other starting off slow and as the rally progresses we go faster and faster until we actually can't react anymore so the rally is actually meant to end right and when we do this we just really
get warmed up with reacting to hard shots I'm sure you've come out on court before where someone hits a ball at you really hard and you're just not ready for it so one of the best ways to prepare yourself for that is by doing hand speeed drills before your games and if you don't have a partner you can use a wall or the dink Master as well but you really just want to be doing something like this where you're going really fast with your volley so keep that in mind before the next time you play
and guys if you like our content make sure to like And subscribe to our Channel this really helps us grow and unfortunately only about 10% of people who watch our content like or subscribe and when you do this it actually spreads our content to more players and helps grow the sport so in a few years if you love pickleball this is going to help the sport grow a lot more so make sure to like And subscribe so now guys I want to talk about hand signals which I mentioned earlier so with hand signals generally your
partner gives you either one or two signals the first one which is less common is where they tell you where to hit the ball in the court so based off what finger my partner sticks out I will hit to that part of the court so if Kimmy was to tell me to hit to the right part of the court and if Drew serves me I'm going to aim for that part of the court or when she sticks it out to the right usually she's saying that cuz she wants that player to hit the third shot
so the next part of the signal though is based on whether or not you're going to poach stay or fake so if Kimmy is to post she'll stick out her hand completely she'll open her hand and what that tells me is that we're going to switch sides so after I hit my return I'm going to run to the kitchen on the other side of the court so that is called a switch or a poach but I guess more of a switch a stay is essentially where Kimmy closes her fist so that's how you call out
a stay she closes her fist and all I'm doing there is going in like a normal return a fake though which is very uncommon but you can do this and you might be able to trick your opponent is where Kimmy sort of pump fakes that she's going to switch sides but she doesn't the fake though is a little less common and that's where you pretend like you're going to switch but you don't so you call that out by opening and closing your hand really quickly and how that looks is like this so I'm going to
hit my return pretend like I'm going to the other side but I end up on the same side so what they might do there is hit the kimy since they think she's switching sides but she's there and can kill the ball so these are a little confusing to get the hang of but once you do they're a very effective way to coordinate against your opponents when you're the returning team next tip though is that you should start adding a little bit of curve on your shots just like on our banana serve that same outward Spin
and there's two main instances where I'm starting to see players use it the first is the ATP this one's definitely a little bit challenging so on your ATP you can of curve around the ball what that does is it actually bends the ball back into the court a little bit so you're starting to see some pros doing this some 5 players not the easiest shot to get the hang of but you can start giving that a shot and you might see some results with it the next time that you can be using curb is on
your roll volley so if you know what a roll volley is it's off of when your opponent hits a slower ball like a drop and you're usually leaning over hitting a shot like this so to add curve all you need to do is drop down your wrist a little bit more you can get a little bit of a side spinny roll volley and what that does is when it bounces it might jet off a little bit to the side make it really hard for your opponent to hit a drop so the curve on the roll
wall looks like this so usually like I said it's off of a drop and as you can see there I get a little bit of that sideways bounce which can actually make my opponents mess up so this is definitely easier to hit than the ATP curve and I'm seeing a lot of Pros actually starting to do this more so give it a shot in your games and comment below if you already have I think it's pretty effective and the next thing I want to talk talk about is that if you haven't done this before you
should try putting some weight on your paddle this is one of the things that can make the biggest difference in the least amount of time so one of my favorite places to recommend players to put weight on usually in the form of tungsten tape or lead tape is right above the corner so you see this corner here this is the point where you get the highest increase of twist weight with the least increase of Swing weight so twist weight is how much it takes for your paddle to go like this swing weight is how much
it takes for your paddle to go like this so twist weight is what increases your sweet spot so by putting the the weight here you make your sweet spot bigger in your paddle without making it too heavy to swing it around so this is a great spot to put your weight if you feel like the sweet spot on your paddle is small so highly recommend trying that out and my next tip guys is that if you get lobbed I see way too many players making the same mistake it's that if you get lobbed you don't
want to move backwards like this so what I did wrong there was I back back pedal and the problem with this is that one it's a lot slower than the technique I'm about to show you two a lot of players lose their balance when they're doing this fall back get hurt we don't want that to happen so what you want to do is the second you get lobbed your first instinct is to turn your shoulders and start running back so I don't want to be running back like this I want to be running back like
this while I'm looking up at the ball that's infinitely faster than going like this also you get the added bonus that your shoulders are turned your elbow is back you get that power from your rotation so when I get lobbed I can put my elbow back and hit my overhead or my smash as some call it as if I'm throwing a ball and by doing that you get like 10 times as much power so if you still suffer from the problem of back pedaling I highly encourage you to try moving back like this when you
get lobed it might take a a little bit to get the reflex of doing that down but if you force yourself to do it for a long enough time it'll be way better and you'll just be way better player and my next tiep guys is that if you're going for speed UPS from the kitchen you can get a huge Advantage by taking them out of the air I see a lot of players who let the ball bounce and they go for a speed up from behind the kitchen line but if you were to take that
same shot lean over the kitchen and Accelerate from here in this case I'm probably about 15 ft away from my opponent here I might be 11 ft away from my opponent so they have to react 30% faster to get that ball back so if you're going to be aggressive with a speed up it doesn't have to be the case every time but a lot of the time it's a good idea to try to do that out of the air so show you one quick example of that it's usually happening off of a dink so if
Kimmy hits me a dink I can accelerate with that roll B technique and that takes a lot of time away from my opponent he guys if you like this style where I go quickly through 10 tips in this next video I go over 10 quick strategies that'll help you boost your game [Music]
