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The podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We are here to help you achieve your pickleball goals, with a focus on the mental part of your game. Our mission is to share with you a positive and more healthy way of engaging with pickleball. Together let’s forge a stronger relationship with the sport we all love. With the added benefit of playing better pickleball too. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your pickleball journey, Pickleball Therapy is here to encourage and support you.
[00:00:00.160] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to pickleball therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. It's the podcast with you in mind. I am the host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. I hope you're having a great week. This week's podcast, we're going to address a, I don't call it a sensitive subject, but it's a, it's a subject that, you know, may feel a little weird to talk about because we're gonna talk about stress, but we're actually going to talk about how stress is part of the game you chose to play and, and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage as we progress through the sport.
[00:00:35.210] - Tony Roig
As we do this, if you have had a chance to check out the book, pickleball therapy, and appreciate hearing from you is what you thought, you can go to Barnes and Noble, Walmart or Amazon and leave us a review. Really appreciate you doing that. Helps us reach other players. If you haven't checked out the book yet. All right, that's, that's your decision.
[00:00:51.130] - Tony Roig
You're an adult, so hopefully Hopefully you'll get a chance to read it because I think it'll really help you out. And that's the feedback we've been getting. You can find it on any of those places, Amazon, Walmart or Barnes and Noble. All right, let's talk about this. Oh, and I have a riff today.
[00:01:08.080] - Tony Roig
I want to talk about that situation that happened. I think it was in Cal, was it? No, it was in Florida, I think, where the, there was an assault of a player, I think two, two, two players got charged with assault for a kitchen violation. So that gives us something to talk about. All right, let's dive into this idea of embracing erasing the stress.
[00:01:27.700] - Tony Roig
So here's the, here's the basic premise of the sport that you've chosen to engage in. And I think it's a beautiful sport. I love the sport. I think it's, has a lot to offer us. But this sport, by its very nature, is a stressful Endeavor.
[00:01:43.540] - Tony Roig
It is designed to be stressful. If you think about, just think about a rally, right? When you're getting back to the return, standing back to the return serve, what's the server trying to do to you? At its most fundamental level. Stress you, right?
[00:01:59.020] - Tony Roig
When you hit your return of serve, what are you trying to do to your opponents? Stress them. You don't make it easy on them, right? You want to make it difficult for them. When you're placing a banger, why are they hitting the ball so hard at you to stress you?
[00:02:13.740] - Tony Roig
What does the third shot drop do? It provides stress on you because it puts the ball behind the net, makes it difficult while relieving stress from from the player hitting it, right? Everything that we do in pickleball is all about, I'm stressing you, you're stressing me, and then at the end of this exchange of stressors, we're gonna have a winner of the rally, okay? Games are stressful. Scores apply stress on us, right?
[00:02:38.490] - Tony Roig
Think of how you feel whenever you've been down 9-1 in a game. Not great, right? You don't feel like, Woo, I'm on top of the world. I'm down 9-1. That's stress.
[00:02:46.770] - Tony Roig
That's a form of stress. But I think the better that you, I shouldn't have said butt there. Let's take the butt out. I think, and I will propose to you that the more open you are to understanding the nature of the game that you play, and just embracing the very structure of the game, which is a game built upon stress, then the less damaging, potentially, that stress can be to you. And you understand that the stressors there are really, they're positive stressors.
[00:03:23.470] - Tony Roig
They're stressors that are aimed to help you grow, aim to help you challenge you, aim to, to make you dig deep. Right. You're down 9-1 what do you got to do? You know, you got to dig deep. You got to say, okay, I'm either going to rise up to the challenge here and I'm going to keep fighting or I'm going to fold the tents up and go home.
[00:03:38.350] - Tony Roig
Right. That's your choice. But if you choose, if you choose to rise up to it, you know, I, I don't know if you have, I, I can tell you for sure. I've come back from 9-1 down. I've come back from 10-0 down.
[00:03:49.020] - Tony Roig
In a tournament game. Okay, so, you know, I've, I've, and now, you know, I've lost those, too, obviously. I don't come back all the time on those, but I have come back from them, and they're memorable. Right. Those, those kind of experiences where you're down, you know, 10-2 and you mount the comeback and you end up winning 12-10.
[00:04:03.900] - Tony Roig
I mean, those things are, the reason they're so, the, they're so sweet. Right. When you accomplish them is because of the difficulty that they presented to you in the moment. And so. Embracing this idea, right, that or not embracing, embracing the concept or accepting the fact that it's a stressful event and going all in, as I'm going to talk to you about in this podcast, I think will help you get the most out of the experience and avoid some of the potential negatives of that very stress, which is baked into the sport that we, that you and I both love in both and, and play.
[00:04:36.910] - Tony Roig
So, so let's talk, let's talk through some different process, different steps, and then I'll, I'll tell you at the end, I hope that you leave with this idea that you can, in fact, not just recognize that they're stressed and be like, okay, they're stressed, I accept that, but actually go, I am so happy this has stress in it so that I can use it for my benefit. So let's talk through stress a little more and some of the steps that you can take so that you can leave this podcast with a better sense of that.
[00:05:09.420] - Tony Roig
Let's start with this thing that, you know, this concept of recognition. I think recognition, and you probably heard me say this before on the podcast, if you're a listener, recognition is one of these skills that is greatly undervalued by all people, including pickleball players. We're no exception. Recognition is a pretty broad concept, right? But in this context, it basically means recognizing I'm going to use it two different ways.
[00:05:37.070] - Tony Roig
One is recognizing the very nature of pickleball as being a stress dependent activity. If you take stress out of pickleball, you're not playing pickleball anymore, right? You might be playing Kadima. I don't know if you know what that is, but that's where you go to the beach and you hit the ball with the paddle. It's a collaborative, cooperative kind of activity.
[00:05:56.150] - Tony Roig
It's a fine activity. I like doing that when I'm at the beach, but it's not pickleball. We can throw a Frisbee around, right? That's collaborative, right? I'm not really trying to stress you.
[00:06:04.350] - Tony Roig
In fact, I'm trying to get you the Frisbee close to you, so you you can get it nicely and you throw it to me nicely and we go on. That's not pickleball. Pickleball is a stressful activity. So recognizing and starting to understand the very importance of stress to our sport as an important piece of our sport. And the other part is understanding, recognizing the way that stress impacts you as you're playing, right?
[00:06:32.010] - Tony Roig
And understanding that when you're down 9-1, for instance, instead of seeing it as a negative, perhaps, as you, as we'll work through this, perhaps start looking at it as a positive, right? Recognize the, the stress for what it is. It's a positive stress, not a negative stress. Right. There's a lot of things in life that are negative stress.
[00:06:46.680] - Tony Roig
Okay. And I think it's easy to confuse the stresses and pickleball, potentially, with negative stresses because they're all stresses, right? So they all, they're all going to activate our, our stress response system. But if we understand that the pick, that pickleball is a positive stressor, I think we'll be able to better engage with those stresses. And let me, let me use one of my analogy metaphors here.
[00:07:06.150] - Tony Roig
I swore one of these day. No, I'd be alive. I said one of these days I'm going to, I'm going to remember the difference in analogy and metaphor because I won't. Cuz I don't care. You'll see what I'm saying in a second.
[00:07:14.590] - Tony Roig
It's analogy metaphor about going to the gym. Okay, so let's say your objective is you want to get stronger. You want to have stronger muscles, denser bones, things like that. And so you're going to lift weight. Now you can go to the gym and you can grab a 2 pound Dumbbell, right?
[00:07:31.430] - Tony Roig
Or barbell, I'm sure to say, or dumbbell, I'm sorry, two pound dumbbell and curl it, right? You can lift it two pounds, two pounds, two pounds. For some of you, that's going to be fine, right? Right now, you're going to be like, okay, two pounds is, is, is, is putting stress on me. Right.
[00:07:45.070] - Tony Roig
For others of you, you're going to pick up two pounds. It doesn't feel like anything. That's not stressing your muscle. And if it doesn't stress your muscle, if the weight doesn't stress your muscle, it's not doing anything for you. Not if you want to get stronger, not if you want to get more bone density.
[00:07:59.160] - Tony Roig
You need to send your brain a signal that your muscles need more muscles, right? That your body needs more of that. That's how your brain knows to send more nutrients, pay more attention to that area of your body. If you think of the inverse for a second, think of atrophy, right? When your muscles atrophy, so say you have a cast on, your muscles atrophy not because your brain is mad at you, not because it's trying to hurt you, It's just think of the messages that your brain is receiving.
[00:08:28.570] - Tony Roig
Your brain is receiving messages. Let's say your right arm is in a cast. Your brain is basically receiving over the period of time that you're in a cast, oh, you're not using that arm anymore. Now it doesn't know why, but all it knows is like, well, you don't must not need that area of your body anymore. So that's why it atrophies.
[00:08:43.570] - Tony Roig
That's why your muscles just go, you know, your brain says, okay, I don't have to send as many nutrients there anymore. So the muscle just breaks down and gets smaller. The, the flips, the flip is also true, right? If you add stress to that area. So let's say take your right arm again, and let's say you want to make it stronger.
[00:08:58.680] - Tony Roig
Let's focus on the right arm. And so you pick up two pounds and you curl it a few times and you're like, yeah, I'm feeling anything. Then you try five pounds, then you try 10 pounds, whatever it is, right? You're gonna get to a poundage that you say, you know what? I can do it, but it's not easy.
[00:09:12.120] - Tony Roig
What you're doing there is applying what? Stress to your muscles. And that stress is a positive stress because it is a stress that is going to get you the results that you want. Playing pickleball, similar, right? If you are playing in games that are causing you stress that is allowing you to move forward, then that is a positive type of stress.
[00:09:34.740] - Tony Roig
Now, there is a limit, right? So like, for instance, going back to the weight again, let's assume that 10 pounds is your number right now, eight or 10 pounds, whatever it is. That's fantastic. Then you're going to work in that range until that becomes not challenging, and then you're going to move up to 10 or 12 or 14 or 15, I don't know if it's 14s, 10, 12, 15, something like that. And you just keep adding stress or maybe you'll do a few more, a few more reps in your set, something like that to add the stress that you need.
[00:10:01.800] - Tony Roig
You wouldn't be able to pick up like, okay, I'm going to go to a 60 pound weight and start doing 60 pounds. Cause that's not doable, right? So there it loses its purpose then. Same thing with pickle ball, you know, let's, let's use some level numbers. Level numbers for me are just shortcuts.
[00:10:15.400] - Tony Roig
I don't like to get bogged down in them, but let's use them as a shortcut. So let's say you're playing, you know, wreck or 3.0 pickle ball, something like that. And you want to improve. Well, if, if, and you want to add stress to your game, well, playing at your level is going to add stress to your game for sure. Now, let's say you went out and played, you know, against 1.5 pickleball players and you're a 3.0.
[00:10:35.620] - Tony Roig
Not going to apply any stress to you. And if you think about it, right, think of how that correlates to the value of the win. If you're a 3.0 player beating a 1.5 player, I, you know, I hate to say it, but that win has absolutely zero value. No value to anybody. To you, the loss to them means nothing.
[00:10:51.450] - Tony Roig
It's just an irrelevant activity that just happened. I mean, I say irrelevant if you're going to train somebody and stuff like that's fine, but if you're doing it to get the benefit of the stressors of pickleball, it's an irrelevant activity. Now, the other way too, right? So let's say you're a 3-0 player and you matched up against four or five players. That might be like picking up the 60-pound dumbbell, right?
[00:11:13.250] - Tony Roig
It's too much. So you want to find what stresses you, but you know, is workable, right? So, like, if you're 3-0 and you're playing three ones, you're 3-0, you're playing three twos, things like that, that's going to give you plenty of stress to work on your game. And all those stressors, again, are positive stressors. You need to, you, I should say, need, you want to play pickleball games where that you have a chance of losing.
[00:11:39.830] - Tony Roig
If you're playing pickleball games where there's no chance of you losing the game, What's the point, right? And you're definitely not getting stressed in those situations. So the same way that like you want to lift weights that will stress your muscles to make you stronger, playing pickleball games that cause you stress makes you stronger as a pickleball player. You're more resilient because you've dealt with a lot of nine, you know, one-nine games or two-eight games and things like that. You've seen it.
[00:12:05.920] - Tony Roig
And in fact, when I'm playing in a game, you know, or I'm coaching a lot more now at the pro level, so, you know, we get in games that we're behind, right? And so, you know, if we take a time time out and we're in a, you know, say we're like, you know, down three eight or something in a game, you know, I'll often ask the player, I'll say like, okay, so have you ever come back from three eight? And of course the players, I shouldn't say, of course, but then at this level and they play in plenty long enough for them, they're going to go, yeah. So that gives them the ability to know that, okay, we're in this game, right? We're not out of it completely just because we're down.
[00:12:37.300] - Tony Roig
I mean, I'd rather be a three and three eight, but we're three eight. That's the reality. Can we come back? Have you been here before? That's resilience, right?
[00:12:44.090] - Tony Roig
You've seen this before, you've seen this movie, you know that you can do it, right? So it gives you that strength and that knowledge comes from what? Previously been in that situation, previously being under that stress of being down 3-8. So recognizing, I think, is step number one. Step number two on this idea of stressors and dealing with them is lean into them, right?
[00:13:06.090] - Tony Roig
Lean into the stressful activity. And let me give you a couple ideas here thinking about it.
[00:13:11.890] - Tony Roig
If you're in rec play, oftentimes what happens in rec play is you'll see a team target the weaker player opposite them. So there'll be a clearly better player and a clearly weaker player and the weaker player get targeted in rec play. Don't do that. What's the point of that? Why shy away from the stress?
[00:13:28.130] - Tony Roig
Lean into the stress and hit balls to the better player. I'm not saying to ice out the weaker player either. Don't isolate them. Play like normal. Play the shot that you would play normally, regardless of which player was in that position in rec play and in training situations.
[00:13:42.230] - Tony Roig
If you're in league play or a competitive play, yes, by all means, target away and stuff like that. That's what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is, you know, a wreck game. Don't target the weaker player because you're, you're shying away from the stress. You're making a mistake.
[00:13:55.070] - Tony Roig
You're picking up the two pound weight when you should be picking up the five or the seven or the 10 pound weight, you know, so, so lean into the better player in that situation. Lean into the stress. And then I would say, Go all in on stress, right? That's the next level. So it's recognized, lean into a little bit and then just dive all in on the stress.
[00:14:13.020] - Tony Roig
Okay. And that means like, you know, when your opponents hit like a really nice shot or there's really good rally and it doesn't come out in your favor, don't get upset about your performance. Be thankful. Be thankful that you had that experience, that you had that rally that had, you know, 12 or 14 shots. And yes, you made a mistake at the end or yes, you, you, your opponent hit a really nice, wide dink to the side and stress you, your opponent hit a great lob over you to stress you.
[00:14:38.090] - Tony Roig
Thank them for adding stress to your game because you want that stress. This is where you're all in. This is where you're like, let's go. And a story that you may have heard me say before or relate before, it was a, I related a lot because it's such an important game in my journey, my arc as a player. This is many years ago, me and Jill were playing during the holidays and in a local facility here, and we were, if not the best, Team there.
[00:15:04.210] - Tony Roig
We were among the better players there. And we came from tennis. We could just normally blast people off the court because we didn't really understand pickleball, as you'll understand in a second, as you'll figure out in a second. So we basically, these two gentlemen came in during the holidays. They're looking for a game.
[00:15:22.370] - Tony Roig
They look kind of serious. Like they knew what they were talking about. They were really nice guys, but they look like the real deal. So the group basically sent us out to play them. Game lasted three minutes.
[00:15:32.050] - Tony Roig
We lost 11-0. One of the most important games of my life because it showed me, oh, oh, you know, there's more out there. And what, what these gentlemen was doing was two things. One, they were causing us a tremendous amount of stress with third shot drops into the kitchen that I did not know how to handle. That was a huge stressor.
[00:15:47.650] - Tony Roig
I didn't know what to do with it. And the other thing they were doing is they were showing me that the stressor that I knew, which was just bashing balls at people, doesn't work all the time because they can handle whatever pace I sent them. Right. So that was super helpful to me as a player. And that's going all in on the stress saying, like, Jeez, thank you for beating me like a drum because now I can grow, I can keep going as a player.
[00:16:09.020] - Tony Roig
And that's what stress does for you, just like with the weight. So go all in on the stress, guys, little by little, little by little. First recognize it that, okay, this stress is okay. It's not scary. It's not bad.
[00:16:18.620] - Tony Roig
It's positive, actually. It's helping me just like lifting weights would. And then you can kind of lean into it a little bit. Okay, I'm going to stop targeting the weaker player. I'm going to try and hit the better player because I want to see that.
[00:16:27.300] - Tony Roig
I want to see what they can do. How do they They're gonna expose more of your weaknesses in your game, right? So that'll show you more. So hit more balls to them so they can see, you can see what's going on. And then eventually just dive all in, go into the deep end on stress.
[00:16:38.320] - Tony Roig
It's a positive in pickleball. All right, let's talk about the riff for a few minutes here. So this is, I don't know the whole story, but I know enough that there were assault charges against, I think there was a couple, but basically there was some apparently a kitchen call violation. I gotta laugh because it's just, I mean, it's it's it's comical, not comical, obviously, someone got hit. But it means just to think that, like, we're fighting over kitchen violations.
[00:17:02.810] - Tony Roig
But anyway, there was a kitchen, a kitchen or an alleged kitchen violation or a claim kitchen violation. There was some sort of kitchen violation argument and violation in quotes. I don't know what happened or didn't happen. It doesn't matter. But anyway, there was an argument and then ended up with like, you know, fisticuffs and two people charged with assault and I think assault and battery.
[00:17:23.140] - Tony Roig
Serious. Wow. I mean, that's, you know, we'll do a fuller episode on the, on this kind of concept maybe at some point, but here's what I would, here's my takeaway, right? Obviously that should never happen. I mean, I think, you know, we can all agree on that.
[00:17:36.060] - Tony Roig
I don't know, anybody, if you think, if you think it's appropriate to have fist that goes on any kind of a pickleball situation, let me know. Send me an email. Tony@betterpickleball.com and let me know the circumstances under which we should, fight on the pickleball court, but barring that, right? So if we all agree that this shouldn't happen, what this tells me, right, is that there's, there's a bigger problem here, right? And not bigger problem with pickleball, a bigger problem with these folks.
[00:18:05.830] - Tony Roig
And, and, you know, I would submit there's a bigger problem with the folks, certainly with the folks that threw the punches. I don't know the whole details of the thing, but I can assure you that at no point, I don't think at any point would someone be throwing punch at me because I would just, defuse a situation, I would just leave, walk off the court. I don't need to win every argument on a pickleball court over like a kitchen violation or an alcohol or something like that. So, you know, I think there's exploration here, but, you know, it's certainly indicative of a bigger picture item for those folks. And I think what's interesting about pickleball, and I've talked about this before, and this is what I wanted to touch on with this story, is, you know, I think of pickleball as a canvas for us to grow, right?
[00:18:44.570] - Tony Roig
To use pickleball as like this beautiful space for us to, work on ourselves, work on our bodies, right? Our, our coordination, our eye hand, our balance, our, our, our just overall health, physical health, our mental health, too. You know, how do we deal with stress and stuff like that, which obviously these folks have not taken advantage of, at least not fully, with pickle ball. But, you know, this is, this shows the other side of the coin, which is sometimes inside the canvas of pickle ball, we see, we see flareups that are indicative of bigger, bigger stories, right? In these folks lives, you know, bigger things are going on.
[00:19:23.020] - Tony Roig
Because if you come out to the pickleball court and you have to argue about a kitchen violation so much that it ends up in fisticuffs, there's something more fundamental going on, right? And so maybe we can be on the lookout with our friends and, you know, acquaintances, even in pickleball, to kind of be on the lookout for, you know, behavior that maybe indicates some other thing going on in their lives, and then maybe we can Offer them an ear or maybe a friendly word of encouragement to help them outside the pickleball court. Hopefully it doesn't happen on the pickleball court to that level. But just be on the lookout for that because that shows, I think, a more fundamental flaw going on, a more fundamental challenge, I should say, going on in these folks' lives. And I think we can be aware of that using pickleball as our place where we engage with each other.
[00:20:15.290] - Tony Roig
So anyway, so that's it. This week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you have a minute to rate and review the podcast, really appreciate, appreciate you doing that. Sorry.
[00:20:22.390] - Tony Roig
So that we can reach as many players as possible. And we'll be back with another regular episode next week of pickleball therapy. We have a couple special episodes coming up. I'm interviewing a couple of folks next week. I think you're going to like them.
[00:20:36.630] - Tony Roig
One is a content creator, Nikki, that we've started engaging with, and we're looking forward to chatting with her about her story and what she's up to. And then the other one that I've been, I've been actually probably 18 months later or something like that, because we, we talked about it about 18 months ago or maybe a little longer. And it's a young man who has a project called fail first. And I think the name of the project itself gives you a sense of what it's about. And I think it's, it's going to be really helpful to hear his perspective on that.
[00:21:04.020] - Tony Roig
So be on the lookout for those special episodes that are dropped midweek. Otherwise. Oh, one more last thing. We have a strategy clinic coming up on Monday. If you haven't been to one of our strategy clinics, I think you're really gonna enjoy this one.
[00:21:14.340] - Tony Roig
We're talking about some areas that really help you play at the 3-5 level. So if you want to join us for that, you can still have time to join us for our strategy clinic this Monday. If I don't see you then, I will see you next week on the regular episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.