Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. This is an on onsite recording. What I mean by that is I'm recording this outside of the facility at at HTC in Tampa, at the Pickleball courts here. These are the courts that I often play at, and what I wanted to do is, is, is record an episode giving you five steps that you can take every time before you start playing,

so that you can make sure to have the best chance when you're out there playing Pickleball. This is a bookmark episode. What I mean by that is you wanna bookmark this episode because it's gonna give you the five steps every time you go out to play. If you, you, you don't have to remember them all. Put on this episode and we'll walk you through 'em to get you ready to play your best.

Next time you're gonna play Pickleball. Once they become habits, then you can knock off the bookmark. But for now, highly recommend you bookmark this episode so that you give yourself the best chance to play when you're heading out to the courts. As we jump into the podcast, make sure you're on the lookout for our Pickleball Academy courses. We have several courses coming out.

This is, this is, this podcast is being recorded at the beginning of 2023, so you're gonna get a lot of new courses coming out. If you're listening to this sometime later. There's probably already a lot of courses inside the Pickleball Academy, specifically courses designed for to help you with parts of the game that are giving you trouble, bangers, LOBs,

things like that. So all sorts of things. All right, let's talk about the five steps to allow you to play your best Pickleball. Number one is you want to prepare for the day. If you're watching this on YouTube, you're seeing that I am recording this inside a car. I am sitting in the parking lot outside of the facility because if I,

if all I do is I get here, I'm thinking about 9,000 different things I'm thinking about, you know, I gotta go to the grocery store, I gotta, you know, I gotta clean up whatever it is. And then I, I get here and I jump out on the court. I am probably not gonna have my best day of Pickleball if that's my preparation prior to getting out on the Pickleball court prior to,

to, to getting ready to play Pickleball. If you wanna play your best, you're gonna want to prepare yourself, prepare your mind, prepare and we'll talk about the body in another step, but basically prepare yourself to partake in the sport that you're gonna play today. One easy way to do this is listen to the Pickleball Therapy podcast. It's a way to,

to refocus your mind on something that's, you know, more, more relevant to what you're gonna be doing out there to give yourself some perspective before you step out on the court. If you bookmark this episode, then you're gonna be already getting ready to play your best. You're gonna be thinking about Pickleball. You're gonna be thinking about, okay, what is it that I'm gonna be,

you know, why am I going to the courts and things? The next steps that we're gonna follow on the, on this episode, but you're gonna get ready to play your best. It's simply not realistic to expect that you're gonna, you know, come from, you know, your normal, hectic day of doing whatever it is that you know, occupies your hectic day,

step out on the Pickleball Court, and all of a sudden play amazing Pickleball. If you spend just a little bit of time, 10 or 15 minutes prior to stepping out on the court, you're gonna play better. And usually when you play better, you enjoy your day better. So, step number one, get ready for the, for your day out on the Pickleball Court.

Now I'm gonna step outta the court. I'm gonna go walk to the facility and we'll talk about step number two as I make my way over to the courts. We're gonna talk about step number two to get ready to play your best Pickleball. Step number two is be clear on why you're heading to the courts. Why, what, what drives you, right?

What is it that made you get outta bed today? Or if it's later in the day, put on your shorts or skirt or pants and get ready to go play some Pickleball, right? What is it that's that, that is your driver for why you're headed to the courts right now in order to play this awesome sport? For some of you, it may be,

I just want to go have fun. I want an activity outside of the house and I wanna, you know, disconnect from the insanity of what's going on in my life. I just want some time on the court. Awesome. For others of you, it might be, you know, I wanna go see my friends. For others it's, I want exercise,

I want, you know, I just wanna be active, I wanna be healthy. Whatever it is that your reason for playing Pickleball, I'm pretty confident that your reason for playing Pickleball is not because you're going out there to win five and lose two or whatever the ratio is that that, that you want to fill that in with. And here's the thing,

when you go out to the courts, if you have a clear understanding of why you're heading out there, when you get there, you're gonna probably get what you came for, right? So if you came to see your friends, when you get there, they're your friends, you smile, shake their hands, hug them, whatever it is you do and that's what you came for.

So when you go out to play, now all of a sudden the score and things like that become less important because you got why you came to play Pickleball today. So step number two, in order to have a really good day on the Pickleball Court is reframe yourself, right? Remind yourself, why am I going out to the Pickleball courts? Because as long as you've got that,

you're a complete, I'm gonna go inside now and we're gonna complete step three of getting ready to play your best Pickleball. I'm halfway to the courts and we're gonna pause here and get step number three sorted so that we can get ready to play our best Pickleball. So step number one was we're gonna go through this process, right? We're gonna prepare ourselves for the day of Pickleball.

Step number two is reminding ourselves why we play Pickleball. And step number three is going to be looking at two different areas, one to two, it can be one, one to two different areas that we're going to focus on today in our actual play. When we're out on the court, we're gonna try and pick one thing from the mechanical pillar. The mechanical pillar,

if you're not familiar with it, is the mechanics of how to hit the shot. So it's the how to of Pickleball. And you're gonna take one thing, one area, and the mechanical pillar. Now here, what you want to do is you want to be very specific, as specific as you can. It's not really fruitful to use metrics or framing,

like, okay, I'm just gonna make less mistakes today because that's too broad, right? Mistakes and what area, what shots and things like that. What you want to do is you want to be as specific as possible. The next level of specificity would be, or a level of specificity you can use, is I'm going to try and increase my respect of the net.

And so I'm gonna try and avoid the net and I'll notice when I hit the net, that's okay. But you can be even more specific. Usually there's a shot that particularly affects us with the net. Let's say it's our serve or turn to serve dink or volley, some sort of volley focus on that, right? That's gonna give you the best bang for your buck in terms of your focus for the day.

So as an example, you could say, I'm gonna pay particular attention to my fourth shot, volleys not hitting, not landing in the net. That that, that alone will radically change your day. Plus it gives you something very specific to focus on, rather than having to worry about 9,000 different things out there. You're real on the mechanical side, you're gonna focus on this one area,

you're gonna focus on the net and you're gonna focus on the particular shot. That's a really productive way of framing out your day from the mechanical side. If you want to, you can also have a strategic component to your day. So the strategic pillar is what shot to hit when it's the strategy, right? It's taking advantage of position and things like that on the court,

as well as selecting more optimal shots. A couple of good examples there would be, one would be, you know, are you making it to the non bozo line after every return of serve? If not, that's a great place to focus. Another example would be like, you know, depth of shots. My shots or my shots going deeper now because deep shots are strategic,

right? We need, they, they bring strategy into the game. And so what you wanna do is pick one area on the mechanical, one area on the strategic and make that your focus today. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to quiet the noise of everything else that's gonna happen. 'cause listen, things are gonna happen, right? There's gonna be weird shots,

there's gonna be, you know, there's gonna be adversity when you're playing and things like that. And there's gonna be a player who doesn't, you know, isn't particularly friendly and open play, whatever it is, right? There's gonna be extraneous factors out there that can, that can distract us as long as we're stay focused on the areas of the game that are really important to us,

we can avoid the noise of getting distracted with popups and things like that. 'cause popups happen and we understand that. So we're gonna focus on those two areas, one to two areas. Again, if you wanna do one perfectly fine, no criticism, do one. If you wanna do two, do two more than two. It's pretty hard to do during one session to play.

So that's the focus on step number three is to pick either one of two, two areas to focus on from mechanical strategic. The reason we don't focus on the athletic is because you're already doing that right now. It's great to do athletic, right? But you're doing that right now when you prepare to play. And step number four, we're gonna continue the athletic pillar preparation for our day.

So our focus on the core can be mechanical and strategic. I'm gonna go out to the court now, I'll talk about step number four as I walk up to the courts. Want to talk about step number four. So step number four is we're gonna turn to our body now. We're gonna get our bodies ready to play the best that they can today.

First thing we wanna do is avoid the temptation of simply rushing out there, right? You see your friends on the court, they're ready to play. You get your paddle, you run out there, start whacking the balls around. Next thing you know, it's three hours later you're tired, your body feels tight. Maybe you pulled a muscle in the middle of the match,

but you definitely didn't spend any time on your body getting it ready. So I'm gonna take my bag off here and we are going to talk about how to get ready for your match. First thing you wanna do is you want to do a warmup, okay? You want to do a a, a body warmup. What that means is, generally speaking is getting your body a little bit of sweat break in your body,

get a little sheen on your skin perhaps, is how you'll know that your body is warmed up. You want to get your, your body temperature up a little bit so that you're ready to, to play. Your muscles will be warm, you'll less likely to have an injury because your body is warm. You also want to do some stretching. Now you want to do dynamic stretching.

Dynamic stretching is stretching and motion, right? Not static. So static stretching is the kind of stretching that we did when we were kids. Probably, you know, in gym there would, they would make us hold the stretches for a certain certain amount of time. Static stretching is great afterwards, right? For flexibility work and things like that. It's great.

Not before you're gonna play, before you're gonna play. You want to do dynamic stretching, you're not sure what that is. I'll put a link down in the show notes to a video on our Better Pickleball channel with some dynamic stretching to get you into it and show you what that looks like. But here's the thing, make sure you get your body ready,

right? Don't expect to go out there and play great if you didn't prepare your body to play and again, resist a temptation of just running out there right away and hitting the shot without getting your body ready. Because here's the other kicker on that. When you rush out there, so you get to the court, you put your bag down, you rush out on the court,

guess what else gets rushed. Your mind, your mind will get rushed out there. You'll never, you'll be able to like reset yourself and, and, and slow yourself down because you already started the day going a hundred miles an hour. Get to the courts, get your body ready at your tempo and your time before you step out there to hit your first shot.

So that is step number four and second, I give you step number five as we get into step number five to have your most amazing down on the Pickleball Court. Wanted to let you know that we have added several camp locations in 2024, and if you're listening to us later, probably have a lot of camp locations, your as your year as well.

We have made a concerted effort to make ourselves and our training more available to players all over the country because you've been asking for it. And we wanna make sure that you have access to the best Pickleball training available. If you wanna join one of our camps, go to better Pickleball dot com, click on camps, then you'll see any look every location that's still available.

Alright, let's get into step number five. So step number five is having at least one technique, if not more than one available to you to allow you to reset yourself whenever things get kinda wacky out on the Pickleball court. Because as I said earlier, things will get wacky out on the Pickleball court. It's just part of how things happen out on the Pickleball court.

It's a lot unexpected things. That's why I keep calling out here. We don't know what the, what gifts it has for us. So I'm gonna give you three options here and if you have other ones that you use, perfectly fine, but you want to have some technique that allows you to reset yourself when you're out on the court. One I'm gonna give you is from our friend Jen and my paddle in my hand to show you this one.

What she would do is she would come back here to the back, tap her paddle on there, on the on the fence, and just basically give the bad shots that the paddle has hit, put 'em on the fence. Not your on your paddle anymore. They're not yours anymore. They belong to the fence. She also does that with her friends and her,

you know, her partner and she's playing. She'll just tap paddles with 'em after they missed a shot that they're upset about. Take it from their, from their friend's paddle, put it on your paddle, put it on the fence, get it outta here. Right? That's a good way of resetting. Another technique I'll give you is to release your paddle.

So after the rally, take the paddle out of your hand, out of your dominant hand, put it in the other hand that's great for your forearm, relaxes your arm and it resets you. It says, you know what? That rally finished. I don't even need the paddle anymore till the next rally. So it kind of resets you. Actually,

I said three, I'm gonna give you four. The third one I'm gonna give you is basically, it's a question you can ask yourself. Some players like to say, what now? What next? Things like that. You know, this is a really good technique you can use to just reset yourself. Ask yourself, okay, basically that's over. What am I gonna do in the next rally?

What am gonna focus myself on the next rally and what I'm gonna do next as opposed to thinking about the past? The last option I'll give you, it's a breathing technique that we use at our camps. The camps I mentioned earlier that CJ teaches there, which is a two push technique. It's a, it's basically the same technique that's used in lama,

but it works something like this and you can follow along if you want to. You'd be very relaxed when we're done. We're gonna, we're gonna breathe in once and push out twice, so breathe in fully through your nose and then push out through your mouth. Once, twice, do it again. Breathe in deep, push out twice. I dunno about you all,

but I'm perfectly relaxed right now. And it's great to have that available to you when you're playing Pickleball before you step out on the court, you know it's there. You have it in your back pocket. Use one or more of these techniques when you're playing to calm yourself down. Reset yourself when you're playing Pickleball. That'll make sure that when things get crazy out there,

which they will, you'll be able to reset yourself and come back to neutral. I hope you get to enjoy a great day at Pickleball today. The key to these five steps is to get you ready to play your best Pickleball. Remember, get ready to play. Remember why it is that you play Pickleball. Focus on one at the most. Two things in order to get your mind ready and focused on what you want to work on today.

Then get your body ready. Really important and have some sort of a reset mechanism. Have a way to get yourself out of those situations when things invariably will get a little bit out of whack. That'll ensure that you are able to play your best next time you play Pickleball. If you want to know more about like the perspective of playing Pickleball at, check out our episode number 85 on bowl of ice cream.

If you haven't heard it in a while, that's a great one to bookmark as well. Remind yourself that you always get a bowl of ice cream every single time you head out to the Pickleball Courts. Hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, as always, please consider rating and reviewing it. If you haven't checked it out on YouTube yet,

go to YouTube, check us out on YouTube, subscribe to the channel. Help us reach more players just like you. Plus, you might enjoy seeing the different parts of the court where I was doing the, the podcast from this week. If you li, if you listen to it on YouTube, not on podcast yet, highly recommend you put us on your podcast as well and bookmark it so you can listen to it on the way to the courts.

This is a bookmark episode, intended to help you every single time that you go out to play Pickleball. Have a great week and I'll see you next time.