There are a number of YouTube videos out there that discuss how to get from a low level to a 5.0 in a matter on months. I haven't watched many of these, but I ran across one that had some content that I wasn't aware of.
The guy's name is Albert Wan and I'll link to the video below. In the video he had five tips that he found vital in getting to 5.0, the one I want to talk about is paddle position to get faster hands.
He discusses where your paddle should be in the normal three scenarios of court coverage, that being the ball is in front of you, or coming from center court, or coming from cross court.
In video he uses the example of when he is on the left side of the court and he is right handed. Note that his partner is covering the middle of the court, but you all figured that out already, yes? Let's run through the scenarios...
In the first scenario, the ball is directly in front of you, your responsibility is down the line and your body, Anything that is going right of your body, i.e., towards the middle of the court, is your partner's ball. So don't stretch in front of her! Since we want to cover our body and the down the line shot, the paddle is held in a backhand position. Not in a neutral position, backhand only. Note that this makes it easy to hit shots towards the middle of the court and straight ahead, we are not interested in hitting anything to our left.
Second scenario, we are again on the left, but expecting a ball from center court. Now we set up fully forehand. We are ignoring any shots that would be to our backhand side as they are not likely to land in the court. Again, we are somewhat left of center. No team can cover the full court, so we allow opponents a miracle shot if they want to try for it and we trade off better overage on the rest of the shots.
Finally we are again left, but are the ball is coming cross court. Now there is more room to our left and so we have to cover a backhand as well as a forehand shot. It's more likely that a backhand shot will cause us trouble as our partner should be covering the middle. So now we set up for a backhand shot.
That covers the case if you are on the left side and let's try and generalize the expected shots and how we want to ready our paddles.
I'm either right, left, or center and the ball that the opponents will hit is in front, a bit to the side, or full cross court. You want to know before it happens which ball would go out, go to partner, or to you. If it comes to you, is it more likely to be a forehand or backhand shot? And knowing that, get your paddle ready to hit the expected shot.
Sure you will be surprised and beaten on occasion but mostly you're very ready to return to return the usual shot. You will not have to move your paddle much. You will be known as the player with the fast hands! And an added bonus is not causing partner any complicated shots if you try to cover a shot that is hers.
Let me drop in a thought about where you are going to hit the next shot. Albert doesn't mention it, but if you are readying your paddle as he suggests, then you can most easily hit a ball back to the center of the court. This is a good if not great thing. Middle shots are never a bad shot. I've expounded about them at length in other posts, and another way to think about readying your paddle is, "How do I setup to hit a shot to the middle."
Here is the video link, he describes the fast hands stuff towards the end of the video. The video is short, about 5:30 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg6xa2caG-I
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