Hitting Your Own Knee and Getting the Paddle Ready

 One of the surprising things that is part of pickleball is self-whacking.  Usually it's the knee, but feet are not that uncommon either.

Sadly, it's not a happy experience and the bruises and pain can linger for a couple of days.  That's the first problem for this post...

Problem Two: not having the paddle in a reasonable position for the next shot.   If you watch pros dinking you will see them lead with the paddle, seemingly pause just a fraction of a moment, and then give the ball a little bump.  The important part of that, as I see it, is getting the paddle in a good position early.  Once it's there, you can flip it or hit it inside out or speed up, or even dink, but getting the paddle there is the key.

The last few sessions out I've been working on keeping the paddle in front of my body and the paddle head elevated above the grip.  To do this, I've found that I want an upper body leaning in towards the net a bit.  I'm much more likely to want to move up or sideways and being in a torso forward position is not a bad thing for that movement.

So I'm leaning forward, my paddle is in front of my body and elevated.  It's very hard to hit yourself in the knee from this starting position.  It is easy to bend the wrist out (extension) to a forehand position or bend it backwards (flexion) to be ready for a backhand shot.

But what is great about this, is that it's very hard to hit your knee.  And it's easy and fast to get the paddle to a good position for the next shot.  That provides more time to hit a good shot without lunging and flicking at the ball.  This is very effective when dinking, too.

Give it a try.

Also, a quick bonus thought...  I played this week and partner and I were closing up to the net.  Partner was hitting the current shot.  I didn't have to move much and I took some time to look up at both opponents, where they were, where they were moving, and what they might do with the shot partner was going to hit.  It was very useful information and I could fine tune my position for the next shot.  I've not really spent a lot of time looking at the large picture before.  It was tough enough to follow the ball.  But this game had a lot of dinking in it and that provided me with some extra time to examine the big picture.  Part of my attention was on partner's shot and an additional task was thinking a shot or two ahead.  More research is required, but it looked like it was worth doing.  If I got a speed up or middle shot, I think I would have been more ready (more better ready?) for it.