Hi all. I spend a lot of time working on my golf swing. The golf swing has a lot of similarities to a pickleball swing, particularly when serves and baseline shots are considered.
One of the fundamentals of the golf swing is that the right forearm will rotate clockwise for the right handed player. And this might be true in some fashion for the pickleball player.
In golf you want to maintain this rotation position as you start the swing towards the ball.
How about pickleball? Well, if you were to do that, you would be bringing the paddle edge on towards the impact area of the ball. What happens at impact is the big question.
If you maintain a lot of this rotation with a serve for example, you will get a low shot with a lot of clockwise spin. The ball will skim the net, curve left to right, and skip to the right as it bounces. You might very well want this.
Also in swinging the paddle edge on, there is less wind resistance, though how that will increase swing speed, I have no idea, but it has to be something.
So if you do this edge on swing, you'll get more speed, some curve, more spin, and a lower shot. Some of you might want that in a bad way and if you are interested, then try it out.
I think though, that the general case is that we all have some rotation taking the paddle back and then maybe rotate back automatically as we hit the ball.
(Though a lot of beginner players have no rotation. I'm not going to call that "bad' or inefficient, I'd be more concerned if the elbow is not extended, as that would shorten the arm and you'd get less paddle speed for the effort you're putting into the swing. Actually, the elbow position is critical to a good swing. The elbow should stay close to the torso and not move away from the body to move the paddle towards the body. The arm needs to lag behind the elbow position to swing efficiently for longer shots. Watch a video of a major league baseball pitcher and you'll see a lot of elbow lead. Maybe more in a future post.)
If we alter the paddle parameters, we are going to get some interesting effects. Let's consider a baseline shot where we are hitting the ball about waist high. Now if we come in edge on and don't fully rotate the paddle to "square," then we may create a ball trajectory that is a bit high, but it will have cut spin on the ball. Again, you might well want this effect.
There are a couple of caveats. One is that the paddle is going to present to the ball a smaller shape and if you have problems with miss hits, and that would be all of us, you might get more of them. Also, although you ought to get more paddle speed out of this swing, you might get less ball speed as the ball paddle impact is at an angle and some of the energy is going be used to create spin and a higher trajectory than a flat hit. In certain circumstances you might want all of this or some of it. You could think of it as a different tool
The edge on swing is also compatible to a backhand shot. I remember watching a match where Lauren Stratman hit three consecutive backhand shots with an edge on paddle position. Lauren comes from tennis and the stroke might be from that sport. Again, play around with it if it might help your game.
In prior posts I talked about extending or breaking the wrist for almost all shots. I don't think this edge on stuff is incompatible with that, I still like it for power and efficiency.
I was a runner at the Harvest Crush tournament this morning and I've got some observations about paddle technique that I'll pass on in another post.
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