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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.
[00:00:00.000] - Tony Roig
Hello, and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I am your host of the weekly podcast, Tony Roig. I'll be having a great week. This week, we are in February 2026 in this podcast, so just trucking along, I guess I should say. We had respect the Exe clinic today, having camp this week here in Tampa. It's always just such a pleasure to be able to coach players from all over the country, and oftentimes all over the world, who are just keen to learn and grow. And that's what this is all about for me and for us here at Better Pickleball is just helping players improve their play. If you're interested in a camp, we have some camp spots open right now. Go to betterpickleball.com and find one of those. If a Pickleball camp is in your future, we'd love to have the opportunity to train with you. We have a few spots left for our Super Camp coming up in March. It's going to be an awesome four days, 18 hours, a different format for camp. I think you really enjoy it. If you're intermediate or advanced, intermediate, advanced, even, whatever in that range, I think you're really going to enjoy the super camp.
[00:01:13.320] - Tony Roig
It's a really nice way to learn. So this is an improvement episode. We are going to be talking about the improvement journey, and I have a concept I want to share with you that I learned fairly recently. I've been working on this idea of plateauing a lot lately, writing some blog posts. You can check those out at betterpickleball.com put links in the show notes. But basically, the idea that the challenges that improvement journey presents to us. So that's what we're talking about in this week's podcast. And then the RIF, I have a little thing about smiling. I think you'll enjoy that. So hopefully you stick around for the RIF. All right, so what I want to talk to you about in terms of your improvement mental journey. And before we dive into it, I think it's important to that separate the improvement mental journey from the other parts of the mental journey. There's a mental journey from when we play pickleball, like focusing and things like that. That's one aspect of it. Perspective is another aspect. That's the book that we wrote, Pickleball Therapy. The book tackles the perspective part to it. Actually, I got to speak to one of our students and friend who actually was a part of the book itself, helping us push the book out.
[00:02:24.560] - Tony Roig
Michelle, she's instrumental, her and her husband Dave, part of the team that helped us get that across the finish line. But she picked up the book recently, was reading it, and she told me, Page 177, and it really resonated with her and the journey that she's on this year. So that's obviously very cool. But that's perspective. That's a very big picture. That's relationship with the sport and your life in general. And then the third one, which is the one we're going to talk about in today's podcast, the improvement journey, it's a different flavor to it. It's a different thing going on there. Because improvement journey is based on the idea that you are, in fact, moving forward in your game. You're trying to improve your game? And so how do you deal with the challenges that that in and of itself presents? And that's an improvement piece. So what I want to talk to you about today is this idea of this rule of thirds. I came across it on a video. It was being shared by a Olympic athlete and talking about how her coach explained that to her. So we're going to dive into that.
[00:03:24.120] - Tony Roig
But what was interesting is I was talking to another student about it, and she I've been working on her game, her and her husband working on their games diligently and seeing improvement. But there are challenges, right? Just like anything when you're trying to get better, when you're trying to climb a new mountain and things like that, there's going to be challenges. So I mentioned the rule of third, sir, and she had heard it in another context, and I thought it was interesting because it applies. I'm going to explain it to you there, and then I'll bring it over to pickleball. So basically, she had heard about it in music, the rule of thirds, and the idea being like a third A third of people are going to like your music, a third of people are going to maybe not know about it, not care about it, and a third of people are going to not like your music. So that's the rule of thirds in music, and it's pretty similar in pickleball or any sport, actually. But the idea is that the rule of words as it applies to our sport is that a third of the time, you're going to feel amazing.
[00:04:18.800] - Tony Roig
A third of the time, you're going to be like flying on cloud nine. You're going to feel like you're unbeatable, unstoppable in the sport. A third of the time, you're going to feel okay. You're going to be like, Everything's fine. I'm doing okay. And then a third of the time, you're going to feel like dodo. You're going to feel terrible. You're going to feel like you don't know what you're doing, like you're all thumbs. You're going to be struggling. And it's going to be a hard period. And we're going to focus here on which third you think we're going to focus on. We're not going to focus on the flying high. I mean, what's the point of that? I can just tell you, Yeah, it's great. Let's keep going. Whatever. We're just going to enjoy the flying high. And we're not even going to focus on the okay, because the okay is okay. Not to worry about. We're going to focus here on the one-third when you're struggling. What is that? How does that fit into the overall picture? And the idea is basically that when you're working to improve, and quick side note here, you don't need to work to improve if you don't want to.
[00:05:19.440] - Tony Roig
That's perfectly fine. There's nobody saying that you need to reach a certain level, you need to grow to a certain place in pickleball. If you feel good where you're at right now and are enjoying the sport and you want to just continue to enjoy it, that's Keep doing what you're doing. But if you are, in fact, trying to improve, then this idea that a third of the time you're going to struggle, a third of the time you're going to feel like you can't do this or that you're not playing well and things like that, having that understanding that that's implicit, that's baked into this improvement journey, I think will help you not avoid the feeling, because the feeling will be there, but it'll help you navigate it, it'll help you understand it and put it in its right place relative to your improvement journey. One The way to embrace perhaps the one-third struggle period or the one-third feeling bad period is that without it, you don't improve. Without it... How about this? With it, it's the indication or feeling it is the indication that you are, in fact, pushing yourself. And the way that the Olympic athlete explained it was like this, that I explained to her by the coach, is you have...
[00:06:29.220] - Tony Roig
If you're Let's say you're happy all the time and you're trying to improve. Probably means you're not pushing yourself enough. And maybe think about it like, let's take maybe a simpler activity, like lifting weights. So let's say that you can lift 15 pounds comfortably doing a certain type of movement with your body. So you're lifting the 15 pounds and there's no resistance. It's just easy for you to do it. You keep doing it, right? Nothing wrong with doing it. But you You can't expect the strength gain or the type of gain you're trying to reach because you're not pushing yourself at all. There's no challenge to your body, right? Whereas, let's say, if you lifted 25 pounds, maybe it feels a little bit tense. It's not killing you. You're not like, Oh, my God, I can't lift it at all. But God, it's hard to push the 25 pounds and move the 25 pounds. Probably with the 25 pounds, you're going to see some improvement in your strength. Your body is going to have the signals that it needs to continue to grow strength-wise. Same thing with a pickle ball. If you're coming from a place where everything is always hunky-dory and fantastic, probably not pushing yourself.
[00:07:42.100] - Tony Roig
You're probably not trying things that are a little bit uncomfortable, maybe, or a little out of your zone, or maybe challenging yourself by playing the types of players that will push you, that will make you feel uncomfortable. And I talked about him before. He's become a good friend, a gentleman named Scott, and he plays in different groups here in But one of the groups he plays with is in our group. I know that our group pushes him probably harder. Not probably. I know that our group pushes him harder than some of the other groups he plays with. And this is nothing in criticism of any of the players in these different situations. It's just the reality that for Scott, when he plays against this group, the group that I'm mentioning, it's a little bit of a struggle for him. It's a challenging for him. It's maybe a little frustrating sometimes because we're exposing parts of his game that the other players simply don't see or can't expose. And so what that does, that frustration, it drives Scott, it pushes Scott. It says, okay, if I want to, if I want to get better, then I need to fix these holes in my game that are being exploited by these particular players.
[00:08:43.340] - Tony Roig
And it's going to be the same for you. If you want to get pushed, or if you want to grow, I should say, then you want to get pushed. Whether it's by lifting the 25 pounds instead of the 15 that you can lift easily, or by playing players that are more challenging to you, that are not like, I can't beat them all the time. They beat me some of the time or beat me a lot of the time. That pushes you, right? And the level of pushing will be depending on how far you go, right? If you're getting your butt beat all the time, you may have gone too far, right? Same thing with the weights. I mean, you can't go from 15 pounds to 100 pounds, right? That's crazy. But you can go from 15 to 25, and maybe from 25 to 30, and maybe 35, and things like that. Same thing with your play. Let's say if you lose to a If you're losing to a team consistently like 11: 5, 11: 6, 11: 7, then they're pushing you. If you're losing to a team 11: 0, 11: 0, 11: 0, 11: 0, then maybe that's the 100-pound weight.
[00:09:38.440] - Tony Roig
But find that ground where basically like a third of the time, you're feeling like, Jesus, I still got to grow, and that'll push you. It reminded me of the story in Josh Whiteskins' book, The Art of Learning. If you want to get a copy of the book, you can just go to our betterpickable. Com, click on resources. There's a link there, so you can just order it from there if you want to. But he talks about the idea of the hermit crab, the anorexia hermit crab. In case you don't know, a hermit crab is a crab that lives inside the shell of another creature. So it doesn't create its own shell. Sometimes they live in cans, they live in all kinds of stuff. Basically, they grab something that's already there, and they use it as their shell, and then they walk along in that cover. They use it as their protection. So the hermit crab grows goes inside the shell until it reaches a size where it needs to make a decision. If it wants to continue to grow, it's going to have to leave its shell. So in other words, exit its safety, be exposed to the elements and predators and things like that while it finds a new shell.
[00:10:48.520] - Tony Roig
Now, that process of leaving the old shell to find a new shell is very scary. It's the only time that the Hummer crab is really exposed to any elements out there, or a broader array of elements out there. But it has to if it wants to get a bigger shell, if it wants to continue to grow. Otherwise, it becomes an anorexic hermere crab. It basically has to stay the same size. Same for you in your pickle ball. You can stay in your cocoon if you want to. And again, I don't mean that to sound like I'm criticizing. It's fine. You want to stay in your shell and do that thing. And if you're happy, then you're happy. That's fine. Or you can say, You know what? I'd like to grow, continue to grow as a player. And if you're going to do that, it's going to be a little scary. It's going to be that third of frustration or the third of feeling bad or negative or whatever about your game will come from that. And I'm going to talk about a young player who I've known him for several years. I got to spend some time with him at the tournament this last week down to the PPA, and they had a very tough match.
[00:11:53.990] - Tony Roig
They lost the match. It's the worst score he's ever had in a pro or high-level match like this. And And after the game, he was frustrated, which is natural to be frustrated about the results. And I told him, I said, Basically, one, you have to recognize that it happened, right? It happened. It's life, and it's just an event that happened. Recognize that that's a bad one-third, right? You're pushing yourself, you're playing against players who are very good, right? They're pro players. And so you're pushing yourself. And so that's a bad third of your pickleball existence. And then what's interesting there is you just say, Okay, what now? What am I going to do? What's next for me? Is it fold up the tents and go home? Or is it take a look at what happened and try and grow from it, try and figure out, Okay, this is what was happening. My shots weren't working the way I wanted them to because of X. Maybe I need to develop this shot a little better. Maybe I need to work on some strategic play and things like But basically, you can always grow. There's nothing impeding you from growth other than yourself.
[00:13:05.100] - Tony Roig
So it's how do you process that event for yourself. So hopefully that helps you in your improvement journey, this idea of the thirds. And so that when you're in one of these tough spots, that will happen. It's unavoidable if you're pushing yourself. If you're trying to lift that 25 pounds or 30 pounds that you're not used to, you're used to 15 or 20, then it is going to feel a little uncomfortable. It's going to feel a little bit like you're putting, obviously, a literally weight on your body in order to move forward. So hopefully, it helped you with that. So in the RIF, I wanted to... It just happened today. I was working on a video on stacking, and as part of the video, I needed to pull some footage from some match play. So I have some match play where I'm playing with my friends, Tyson, Paul, and Brian, a few months back. And one of the clips that I pulled was me and Brian playing because Brian and I, we like to work on... When we're playing together in rec, we'll work on We would play by the score, not stacking, so that we play...
[00:14:03.740] - Tony Roig
I'll play on the left side, and Brian plays on the right side. If we were playing a tournament or there was money involved, something like that, we would play opposite. I'd play on the right, he'd play on the left because that's where we're stronger. But we like to work on the game and things like that. So we play unstacked, and when I play with them, we're just the score. So anyway, I was pulling the footage to use in this video where I'm explaining how to stack. I noticed that as Brian and I, the camera is just running as we're getting ready to play. So Brian and I walk out on the court, and I don't know what I said to him or what he said. And we're just smiling, we're laughing, we're joking with each other. And it's very evident that I'm smiling, he's smiling. And so I left it in the video, and I put a little title on it that said, If you're not smiling while you're playing pickleball, you're not doing it right, right? Or are you doing it wrong if you prefer that? But basically, there's something not right. If you're playing this game and not smiling, while you're playing, right?
[00:15:00.720] - Tony Roig
I'm thinking about it laughing because I'm just smiling about it, going like, How can you play pickleball and not smile during the event, right? And if you're not, you probably need to look at something. You probably need to do some exploring as I say, some self-exploring. The book's a good place to start, by the way. Not to plug the book here. That wasn't the point of this. But as I thought about it, I'm like, Yeah, the book's a pretty good place for you if you're not smiling when you're playing pickleball. Anyway, hopefully, it helps you think about yourself and how you're engaging with this sport because when you're playing pickleball, you definitely, definitely, definitely should be smiling. All right, that's this week's podcast. I look forward to seeing some of you at the upcoming camps. Otherwise, I will see you guys next week. If you have a minute to rate and review the podcast, please do. If you have read the book and have a minute to go to either Walmart or Barnes & Noble and review it there, I really appreciate that. Amazon is very helpful, too, but we're on Barnes & Noble on Walmart now, and it'd be nice to have a couple of reviews on there just to help guide people, on their players on there who might not find the book otherwise.
[00:16:02.000] - Tony Roig
And as always, if you enjoyed the podcast, share with your friends, because remember, if you enjoyed the podcast, they probably will, too. Hope you have a great week, and I'll see you next time on Pickleball Therapy. Be well.