Drills are necessary for player growth.
Even if you had the chance to play serious matches all the time, you’d still want to opt-out and focus on drills to hone your skills part of the time.
Drills allow a level of focus and repetition that will help you develop techniques and skills much faster than just playing alone.
But, you can get even more out of your drills by using more than one training aid at a time.
A lot of pickleball drills can be done using a pickleball machine that gives you a ton of flexibility.
You can set up shot speed, location, spin, and frequency to copy real-life situations as closely as possible.
The ball machine here is a training aid. It’s a tool that helps you train.
But let’s not stop there.
Here are 2 great training aids you should add to your pickleball drills.
1. Backswing Solution –
The Backswing Solution is a unique, simple, and effective training aid that naturally keeps your arms and elbows in the right spot to ensure great positioning and proper swings.
A lot of players will falter when they’re facing hard shots. They take too big of a backswing and then are late and miss the shot.
Often, the adjustments players make on their own here just creates more problems. But the Backswing Solution will help get for a more compact swing so that you can return those tough shots with confidence.
Because the Backswing Solution teaches you kinesthetically, that is by feel, your body learns this position simply as you go through your normal drills.
This best maximized by alternating between using the aid and then taking it off. You can divide every drill you do in half. Half with the Backswing Solution and half without. This helps the brain form a physical understanding that helps players learn much, much faster.
2. Start Rite Grip Trainer –
The continental grip is imperative for both control and power. Most students can adopt the grip before drills or matches start, but as they get into the flow of the game, their grip is slowly lost.
This is really detrimental because, during a drill, only the first few shots will have the proper grip, meaning most of the simple spent practicing will not be with the right grip.
This is how we develop bad habits.
The Start Rite Grip Trainer is a clever little addition on your paddle that gently trains the hand into the proper grip, giving more mental energy for the player to focus on the drills while still getting the grip down in no time.
Because most players learn by feel, the Start Rite Grip Trainer will help ensure the user is getting a feeling for the grip without taking away from the drill.
And just like the Backswing Solution, it’s ideal to go through drills using the trainer for half of it, while getting a chance to practice the grip without the trainer for the other half.
The reason these two training aids go great with your pickleball drills is that they don’t take away from doing the drill itself, while still greatly increasing how quickly your body and mind learn what the aid is teaching.
But it doesn’t stop there. You can find a variety of aids that will help you improve while doing the drills you already know and love right here with OnCourt OffCourt.
We also have an amazing video from Simone Jardim, one of the best pickleball players and coaches in the world, where she uses these two training aids along with the Pickleball Tutor Plus to create a drill that checks off all the boxes you want in a pickleball drill.
Kalindi Dinoffer is trained in multiple aspects of mindfulness in life and in sports, sharing on her blog MindfulKalindi.com. She is also certified to teach yoga, fitness, reiki, and MFR. Kalindi also serves as VP marketing at OnCourtOffCourt.com, a leading supplier of tennis, pickleball, fitness and yoga training aids and equipment and has been published in Tennis industry Magazine and Pickleball Magazine, and has conducted workshops at conferences around the world. In her spare time, Kalindi plays tennis, pickleball and table tennis and enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and biking and cross country skiing in the winter.
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