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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.
[00:00:04.900] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to Pic Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I am your host of the weekly podcast, Tony Roig. It's a pleasure to be with you. This is a different sounding podcast, probably because I'm on location. Myself and Kylene from the Better Pickleball Coaching team are at the PPA Tour event here in Dayton Beach, Florida. It's the last event of this year. It's a different vibe event, different We're in a mix of players coming to it. So it was an exciting event to come to. Have the opportunity to commentate this afternoon in about an hour and a half. I'm going to be going on to Grand Stand and commentating some singles matches, so we'll see how that goes. Looking forward to it. This week's podcast, I want to talk to you about some concepts that I've been reminded of and just honing in a little more, fine-tuning about how we approach the game. We just finished some camps here in Tampa a week a half or so ago. And then we have our upcoming camps coming up in January in Tampa again. And there's, obviously we deal with a lot of campers or play with a lot of, coach a lot of players, I should say, during those camps.
[00:01:15.020] - Tony Roig
And it helps us really get a sense of what's going on out there, what campers and players are thinking about in their game, and what we can do to help them get better. A couple of housekeeping notes before we dive into the sum and substance of the podcast. One has to do with the camps that I just mentioned. We do have some spots open for our upcoming camps. If you're interested in checking out one of our camps, it is a game-changing experience. So check out our camps. We have camps in Florida. We also have camps in Arizona on the table right now or on the calendar right now. You can go to betterpickleball. Com and click on camps and check those out. I also want to let you know that the book is up and out. It is available in paperback as well as Kindle. So if you want to check that out, you can go to amazon. Com. You can also just go to betterpickleball. Com and there's a link at the top that'll take you there. If you do happen to have the book and have read it and can leave a review on Amazon, that would really help us.
[00:02:09.020] - Tony Roig
I've looked at the... I appreciate the eight or so have left reviews, but I know a lot more than eight players have read the book so far. So if you can take a few minutes and leave a review, really appreciate it. It helps us reach other players and lets them know if you think it's valuable, letting them know when a review will help them gain access to the book as well. And then the last thing is that we have an eight-week fitness challenge starting in January. This is always a big hit for our students going into the new year. It's always an exciting project for them. So if you're on our email list at betterpickable. Com, be on the look out for the upcoming eight-week fitness challenge. If you want to challenge yourself in a very positive way to help your body not just play Better Pigger Bowl, but also feel better throughout 2026. To check out the eight-week fitness challenge coming up. All right, let's dive into the substance of today's podcast, which has to do with how do we approach the game of pickable? What's the best way for us as players to interact with this sport?
[00:03:15.320] - Tony Roig
And what we see time and time again is players trying to really layer too much into the game. And before we get too deep into this, I want to be clear here. I'm not being critical of any player who's done this or who's doing it right now. Very natural, right? As human beings, we see a situation, and a lot of times we want to solve it. So what we do is we add another layer to it, or we find another layer to add to it, trying to find a solution for the specific problem. It's rarer to stop and say, wait a minute, maybe I have too many layers right now, and I can remove layers. And I can tell you that in pickleball, this idea of layering and having too many layers is what is holding a lot of you back and really restricting you from moving forward. I'm going to address it in all three pillars, in the mechanical, strategic, and athletic pillar. In the mechanical pillar, what I see a lot is I see players who are overcomplicating the shot. If you think just really basically about what you're trying to accomplish on the pickleball court, is you're trying to take a small, usually yellow object, we call it pickleball, and send it into a specific part of the court along a specific trajectory.
[00:04:30.520] - Tony Roig
That's the whole king kabuda, mechanically. I want to get the ball to go where I want it to go reasonably well. And where I want it to go includes obviously not missing. Where I want it to go includes clearing the net and includes going in bounds if the other team doesn't hit it out of the air. So basically, that's what I want. So how do I accomplish that? So when you look at the way that we teach pickleball in our camps and also inside a pickleball system, we come at from a perspective of, Okay, what's the least you have to do to accomplish that objective? Let's take an easy example, or a concrete example. Let's take a volley. You get a ball around your shoulder, and you have an angle between the two players in front of you that you can just push the ball through. You can just punch it right through there, nice and simple. What do we end up doing sometimes? We end up taking a big swing at the ball. That's doing more than necessary. Or perhaps we try and spin the ball. We try and roll it or do something like that.
[00:05:28.940] - Tony Roig
When all we literally All you have to do is push the ball between the two players to win the rally. Anything that you're doing in excess of or in addition to the bare minimum necessary to get the job done adds complexity to your mechanics, adds the concept that we think about as variability, adds variability to your shots. The more variability you have in your shots, the higher likelihood that you're going to have errors in your game or variances in the shots that you're hitting, which includes errors, because of the additional variables. Another way to come at it that might help you out is think about a shot needing four pieces. Let's say you have a shot and you need four pieces to get it done, but you decide to use seven pieces to do the same thing. Now you've added three more pieces that if any of those three pieces break down, now your shot is subject to either missing or not going where you want it to go. If you can get it done with four variables, use four variables instead of seven variables. This applies to all parts of your mechanics. It applies to footwork.
[00:06:31.720] - Tony Roig
For example, let's say that on a lateral movement to get from point A to point B, you're able with your body to do it in three steps, three lateral steps. But instead, you do it in five. Well, you added two more steps. If your timing is off in those steps, if you have a little hitch, you hit the cord on those steps, things like that, that'll mess up your movement. If you can do it in three, you do it in three, not in five. If you can execute the shot in four variables, you use four variables, not seven. Some examples of specifics that players bring into the game that adds too much complexity to the shots. The easiest example I give you is spins. This one you probably heard me talk about before, but trying to add spins to your shots before you have shot dominance, before you have just really consistent shot mechanics is a recipe for disaster because it adds additional variability into your shots without the gain that you're trying to achieve from the shot. In other words, the gain from the spin, I should say. So you're trying to add... And let me be clear, when I say spin, I'm talking about extra spins.
[00:07:38.460] - Tony Roig
Every shot you hit right now, even if you hit it flat, has a spin on it. What players try and do is they try and use extra spin on it. They try and brush up on it or cut it excessively and things like that. In those situations, what we're doing is adding the higher chance of making a mistake on the shot. So spins is one. Another one is the example I gave with the punch volley where you can just punch it through. Instead of a big swing, a big cut, that's adding another, adding excess to the shot, adding excessive swing to the shot in order to try and accomplish the shot we're trying to hit. Those are examples of trying to layer other things into the shot. Another example I'll give you about overcomplication is having too many shots. And what I mean by that is you actually only need one good ground stroke mechanic, a couple of volley mechanics, one to handle blocks, one to handle punches. You're good to go. If you get really good at those mechanics, now you can do what you got to do when you're out on the pickleball court.
[00:08:40.260] - Tony Roig
What the pickleball players do is they'll have a ground stroke mechanic, and then they'll have a different ground stroke mechanic for this shot and a different ground stroke mechanic for that shot. And that looked like it hurt, Kylene. And a different mechanic for the other shot and things like that. So they'll basically have too many mechanics in their game. So what ends up happening is they don't ever master any of them because there's so many of them. Whereas if they just concentrated on one ground stroke mechanic, a couple of volume mechanics got really good at those, be much better off. And that's the concept of less is more. Of trying to simplify our mechanics, you'll actually end up playing much better. Now, once you get really good at those mechanics and you want to layer on top, that's fine. But have the solid foundation on which to layer on mechanically. From a strategic standpoint, what we find is we find this on the strategic a lot now. So this is understanding what shot to when navigating the game from a strategic standpoint. From a strategic standpoint, what we see in terms of complexity is a couple of different ways of looking at it, a couple of different areas that cause difficulty.
[00:09:44.520] - Tony Roig
One is being too complex with our strategies. An example I give you is a serve concept. I just saw a comment recently on a video that we found on YouTube for a little bit on the serve. And we come at the serve in a where he gets a job done, simplified, let's do this, it's going to do the work. And invariably we get a comment or response is, Oh, that's fine, but that's too predictable. It's not, but I don't want to get into the details of Why it's not? Because that's a serve conversation. I'll tell you it's not too predictable to begin with. But let's assume it's predictable. So what? Why overcomplicate that shot when it gets the job done? If I'm getting the job done with the serve, with the shot that we recommend, why go back to serve and then have 82 different thoughts about like, okay, you know what? This time I'm going to serve it out wide because I remember the last three times I serve it the other way. And also this player, they don't like their backhand, so I'm going to serve it over here. And what if I serve it low?
[00:10:46.080] - Tony Roig
It's an absolute nightmare. Absolute nightmare. And it's not adding really... If it adds anything to your game, it's adding marginally a tiny, tiny thing to your game. Not worth it. Well, not worth it. And I even talked about the additional variability in your shot, meaning the increased chance that you're going to make an error because all the different changes you're making to the shot. But even just from a bandwidth thinking process, it's too much. Too much. And again, it's not necessary. So one area on the strategic side is trying to do too much strategically. I don't know. It's like trying to split hairs. It's like trying to chop everything so finely that you just end up losing your mind out there. Here's the thing. Not even the pros do that. The best male player on the planet, Ben Jones. I like using him as an example on these because he's obviously an amazing player. The results prove it, and also just you watch him play, and he's so difficult to play against. But his strategy is a very simple strategy, which is he wants to get to the line when he's on the surf, he wants to get to the line, and he's just going to dink you cross-court and middle, cross-court and middle, cross-court and middle until the cows come home.
[00:11:58.260] - Tony Roig
And then he's going to dare you to to go hard and then he counters. That's it. That's the whole strategy. He's not like, Okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to cut this one like this, and I'm going to roll this one like that, and then I'm going to go over here, and then I'm... No. I'm going to hit an MBC lob, and I'm going to flick attack, and I'm going to do these things. No, no, no, no. Very simple but effective strategy that he can execute successfully, does the job. He's a master at doing the most with the least. Again, in terms of when you think strategically, he He comes into the game with a very set game plan. Everybody knows what he's going to do. All his opponents know exactly what he's going to do, but he does it, and he beats them doing exactly what he wants to do. I'll give you the other example. It's from another sport. It just popped into my head, and so I'll share it with you. If you ever watched basketball back in the day, there was this guard, and I think it was a forward, guard and forward combination of John Stockton and Karl Malone literally ran the same play every time down the court.
[00:12:55.940] - Tony Roig
But virtually identical play. It was basically John Stockton would go to the outside go to the top of the shot key there, and he would basically bounce past it into Karl Malone, who would turn around and score. Pass it to Karl Malone, turn around and score. Why wouldn't you do the same thing again and again and again if it works? So strategically, simplifying your life is going to help you. The other side, I would suggest you, and this one straddles strategic pillar and athletic pillar. Athletic pillar is body and mind. So it's a strategic concept, but it's also an athletic concept because it's occupying too much of your mind, which Which is trying to figure out the solution to everything. So the one I just talked about is where you're planning everything. And perhaps you can plan everything. You have the ability to come up with the optimum strategy down to the 72nd degree of specificity. What I'm suggesting is you don't need to do that. The other one is where you don't know what's happening, meaning you're not sure what's happened. And a good example here is where there was a couple of dings, you got pulled out wide, maybe you popped it up and you're, Okay, what do I do then?
[00:14:01.560] - Tony Roig
What I suggest there is try not to answer all the questions right now. Understand that there's questions that you can answer later, and that's perfectly fine. So don't try and answer everything right now and allow yourself the grace, if you will, of focusing on a couple of areas that are a primary concern to you right now. Focus on those. An example, again, would be like your For instance, we like to do a lot of our third shots towards the moving player. If you're one of our students, this will be familiar to you. So focus on that. When you're playing, you can focus on that. You don't need to focus on the exact... Did you go to the back end or the fore-end? Did you go to this or that? Just keep it more big picture, more where you're at right now. Focus on that from a strategic standpoint. That'll help you strategically because it'll focus you on what matters. It'll also help you athletically because it'll free up your mind from having to worry about every little thing, which segues into the last piece that I wanted to talk about on the athletic pillar in terms of less is more.
[00:15:09.660] - Tony Roig
What I see players here is I see players, and this is not so much a camp concept that came to mind, just from play experiences and hearing stories and seeing it, it's when we worry about things like, what's the score? Or is that an illegal serve? Or whatever. These ancillary things that don't go to the heart of what we're doing. They're not really central to the heart of the experience that we're having. I'm not going to go into too much in-depth on the illegal serves. I think I did a whole other episode on that and I've written about it. If the illegal serve is something that's materially changing the game, fine, let's worry about it. They're serving overhead and just crack at the ball 200 miles an hour. Okay, fine. If they're serving a little bit of side arm, a little bit above the waist, a little bit of whatever, and it's just a normal serve that anybody else is hitting, let's not get bogged down on that. With the scores, getting bogged down on, I can't serve until I know exactly what the score is, and I have to ask for the score several times because literally, it's occupying your mind.
[00:16:10.980] - Tony Roig
And it's here the less is more idea is you're worrying about too many things. Why are you worrying about all these things? Worry, and worry here, I'm putting air quotes around it. If you're watching the video, you see it. But worrying quotes about your next shot. Worrying quotes about where are you aiming your serve? Worrying quotes about what's your position when you're the non-returner at the non-bubbley zone line? Worry, again, in quotes, about the things that really matter, a big picture that would go to the heart of the experience that you're having on the pick-up-ball court, and perhaps try and avoid worrying about peripheral items that aren't... Who cares, really, at the end of the day, about those in terms of the overall experience that you're having, as opposed to, I care about them because it's some marginal thing. Anyway, so hopefully this idea moving forward, you can think a little bit about what parts of my game and what parts of the way that I'm thinking about my game can I modify, can I strip away? I should say not modify, but strip away, remove from what I'm doing. Because if you do that, what you'll often find is that you're going to be able to shine more in the areas that really matter.
[00:17:24.300] - Tony Roig
And perhaps this will resonate with some of you. Think about it like you got a an older piece of furniture at a garage sale or somewhere, and it's covered in 72 layers of paint and primer and whatever, and they're just beautiful wood underneath. So you're going to just sand it down. You're going to remove those layers that don't really add to the piece. And instead, you're going to let really the heart of the piece expose itself. So maybe that will resonate with somebody out there in terms of less is more. But it's a practice. It's something you have to do. It's something you have to work at. I should say. You have to work at if you want to do it. So you need to work at it. I think that'll give you more peace of mind, more calmness when you're playing, and also you're going to play better. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Pickable Ball Therapy. If you had a chance to rate and review the podcast, but also the book, if you've read it, really appreciate that. And as always, consider sharing this podcast with your friends, particularly any friends of yours who are worried about the score, illegal serves, and things like that.
[00:18:28.360] - Tony Roig
Let them offload that so they can have more fun and play better. I'll see you guys. I'll probably be in studio next week. I think next week is the holidays, I think, so I should be able to record one in studio. If not, we'll pull them from the archives. Be well. Happy holidays, and I'll see you next time on Pickleball Therapy. Ciao.