Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
[00:00:05.040] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickle improvement. I am your host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. I hope you're doing well this week, and I'm excited to bring you this particular episode of the podcast because we're going to focus on avoiding mental overwhelm, very common situation that happens when we're playing. I have a specific story from Dallas, from the World Championships. Some fellow pickleball players, friends, students who were there. I had some experiences being able to help them out a little bit during their games and also see what the pressures are that they're under when they're playing, pressures that we all feel when we're playing. Had some conversations. They were okay with me sharing some of their challenges so that we can all learn together. So I'm excited about this. As we dive into the podcast, a A couple of housekeeping. One, we've just added several camps. If you have not been to one of our camps, you are missing out. It is an amazing experience. You can ask any former camper, and they'll tell you. We have camps pending right now in Arizona, Tampa. Those are the two hotbeds right now of camps for us.
[00:01:20.480] - Speaker 1
We have a camp in December that has a few spots available still, I believe. Then we have several in the upcoming year. Then CJ has some awesome camps in Arizona if you want to go West Coast. So we have West Coast and East Coast camps available for you. We also have a program that we launched about three or so months ago called Direct Coaching. I call it DCP for sure, so Direct Coaching program. If you're interested in that, please reach out to us. You can send us an email at coaching@betterpickable.com and get more information on the DCP program. A couple of shoutouts I'd like to share with you. This is from Megan, MCC2. Thank you, Megan, for leaving a comment. Therapy for my mental game. When I started Pinnable, I quickly discovered my mental game was really beating me. This podcast made an amazing difference. I'm glad it did, Megan. I thought I had it conquered until I played in a tournament. A tournament, right? A tournament just brings up that stress. Now I know this is an ongoing battle that I need to regularly work on. I listen to this podcast on the way to the courts and when I'm walking my dog, most every day.
[00:02:30.000] - Speaker 1
I don't know what I'm going to do when I've listened to all the old episodes, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Thanks for continuing to do this podcast. I'm going to give you a quick suggestion on that there. My recommendation, there's no reason you can't listen to the podcast again. It seems weird, right, to repeat a podcast or repeat a book, but you hear something different. There's a couple of TV series that I'm particularly fond of. I've watched one of them three or four times, and it's almost like brand new when I watch it again. I see it differently. I understand it differently. I have a better understanding of how everything works together and see parts of it that I hadn't seen before. So that's an option there. Megan, thanks for leaving that. The second shout out was more recent here, only a couple of weeks ago from Agamawil. Great program, really good for the mental game, and we all love ice cream. So helpful. I think we all love ice cream. So awesome. Thanks for that. And if you have a minute to leave a review and give us a shout out in either Apple, Spotify, wherever it is that you listen to it, that's much appreciated.
[00:03:36.620] - Speaker 1
All right, let's dive into this idea of the mental overwhelm. So as I mentioned, we just came back from the World Championships in Dallas. It was A really nice event that PPA put together there. About 3,700 players played amateur, and obviously the pros were there as well. Mlp and PPA, a super exciting time. Kylene from our team was there. I was there. Jeff, also from our team, was there for a certain amount of it. So it was Really, really awesome. We got to teach a couple of... We taught one camp in Dallas, and then did a couple of clinics there for some of our students. So really nice experience. So several of our students and friends were participating at the tournament. We had Vicky, Tracy, Jody, Karen, Sandra, Randy, and several others who were there. We got to watch several matches. But I want to share a specific story about Tracy, and I'm going to focus primarily on Tracy here. Tracy is a student, but also has become a friend, him and his wife, Jody. And so Tracy played both in the men's division on Saturday and the women's mix division on Sunday. And watching him play, he's been playing a couple of years now.
[00:04:42.460] - Speaker 1
He's been doing a lot of work on his game. He's very dedicated to his improvement. And what I saw was I saw interference in his game coming from himself, basically, where he was defeating himself. I saw it in some other players as well. But I want to focus here on Tracy's story because, again, Tracy was fine with me sharing these challenges with you. And when I talked to Tracy about it right after the tournament we were chatting, he was sharing with me how his mind was just so busy. He's trying to figure... He had just so much going on up there, all happening in real-time, all happening while he's trying to navigate a pickleball game. And in a tournament, there's a higher stress level because it's a tournament, right? Whether it should be there or not is a topic for another day. But I understand why in the tournament, we all feel a little bit more anxious, if you will, a little more up tight about the situation because of what's at stake in the tournament. So what I wanted to do, and I told Tracy I would do, and I wanted to share with you in this podcast is, is try and help you maybe navigate it in a couple of different ways.
[00:05:51.100] - Speaker 1
And what I came up with was three different areas to talk about where you can hopefully quiet the mind in these areas because Each one of these areas can sometimes take over. So we're going to look at mechanics, strategy, and then how we use our body. So the athletic pillar. And if you know anything about our coaching, you know that we use the three pillars. So it's mechanical, strategic, and athletic that we're covering here. So I'm going to start with mechanics here. And in the mechanics, it's important to understand that you cannot really do mechanical work in real-time, whether it's a tournament or even rec play. When I'm even in mechanical work, I'm talking about where you're trying to develop or learn a new shot or a modification or something, and something you're doing. Very difficult to do that in game time situations. You want to put in the work on your mechanics off-court. And when I say off-court, I mean off-play-court. You can do it on a court if you're training with a ball machine, a bucket, a friend, things like that. That's fine. But you really want to be able to do that not during play time, is focussing on mechanics.
[00:07:03.860] - Speaker 1
Now, you can make some adjustments on your mechanics. And what I mean by that is it's knowing your tendencies. So for example, I'll give you a personal example. I have a tendency to move while I'm hitting reset shots. So I'm in a transition zone. I'm up at the non-bolly zone line. I'm trying to just soften the ball and reset it. Reset, if you don't know what it means, reset is basically where you make it neutral shots. So I'm going to drop it into the non-bolly zone. The idea is to not get smashed with the next shot. What I tend to do in those situations often is I will start moving out of it, whether it's moving forward, standing up, but I come out of the shot too early. That affects the shot and I end up missing. Now, that's repetitive. It's not that difficult for me to identify the source of the problem and suggest a correction to myself, which is to stay more set while I'm heading. That's an example of something you can do. Let's say, for example, you miss returns of serve. It with some frequency because you're running through them. When you run through them, you miss return to serve, then you can just remind yourself to slow down on that.
[00:08:07.980] - Speaker 1
What I see happening on mechanics is you can miss a lot of different ways. If it's not a pattern, if it's not something that's regular for you, you're trying to solve for that. So you're trying to solve for, okay, I just missed this shot that I'm not sure exactly why I missed it, but let me figure out why I missed it and let me work through that. Your brain is going to get overwhelmed with all of this, trying to solve that puzzle on something that isn't solving solvable in the moment. So on mechanics, one, if you're working on your shots, do that off the game court. Number two, if you want to spend some of your bandwidth, I should say, on solving mechanical problems as you play, focus on those that are repetitive, that are big picture for you. There's probably one or two that you can think of, whether it's a volley or a particular shot that gives you trouble. You need to identify what the problem is before you get to the court. So give some thought to it. Like, I know what my is on my resets before I get to the court.
[00:09:02.620] - Speaker 1
I'm not trying to solve for it. I'm just trying to go, okay, I see what happened. Now I just got to remind myself to stay set. Much easier, much lower bandwidth requirement to do that than to try and work through an entire process of what's going on with my shots in the middle of a game. So that's on mechanical quieting the mind. On strategy, on the strategic pillar, what you want to do is really free your mind here as well by focusing only on the areas that really matter to you right now. Now, what you do here is you think about setting a bar for yourself in terms of your play. That is a bar that you want to try and surpass every rally. If you are not yet 4. 0 plus player, most of this thought process is going to be on the return side. How are you doing on the return side? Because that's where the money is at for you. So the idea here is to simplify the amount of things you're trying to solve strategically when you're playing. And the way to think about this is like, you don't need to know exactly the best place to put every single shot that you hit.
[00:10:09.600] - Speaker 1
Sometimes it's fine to finish a game and not even realize you're playing a left-handed player, if if you're not ready for that processing yet. There's nothing wrong with that. Don't require or don't demand of yourself a breakdown of the strategy or an analysis of strategy that is beyond where you're at right now. Because all What you're going to do is overwhelm your mind with too much information, too much processing. Maybe it's helpful to think about it this way. We're all... Your mind is a computer. At the end of the day, it's a computer. It does computational analysis at a very sophisticated level, but it's still a computer. So just like if you took your regular computer, your laptop or your phone or whatever, and you overwhelmed it with processes, it wouldn't work. It would shut down or it would basically lock up or be delayed. You get that little... Remember the little spinning, the circle thing that happens when you're overwhelming your WiFi, for instance? It's the same thing here. What you want to do is not red line your mind, not take your mind into where it can't handle the processes, and it either locks up or it's delayed in thinking, in giving you feedback on what you actually have to do for your next rally.
[00:11:23.640] - Speaker 1
So that's what we're trying to do here, is free up some bandwidth from your CPU up in your brain so that it doesn't get overwhelmed that doesn't get overtaxed and then just basically breaks down and can't process anymore. All right, so that's mechanical and strategic. Let's talk about athletic now, because what's interesting here is you can actually utilize your body to help calm your mind. That body-mind connection works both ways. If your mind is tense, your body is going to be tense. But if your body is tense, your mind is going to be tense back. So it's a circular thing or two-way street, if you want to think about it that way. So there's two ideas here that I want to share with you. One is releasing the paddle between rallies is going to be very helpful for you. Releasing the paddle from your dominant hand. So take the paddle out of your dominant hand, release the hand. You want to shake it out? Great. Just that disconnect, letting you know that the prior rally is done. Take a break, get ready for the next rally. Avoid getting that carry-over from one rally to the other.
[00:12:30.260] - Speaker 1
Another thing that you can do is breathing. And I'm not going to go through a breathing exercise here because I've done in the last couple of episodes, you can go back and check that out on the two push breathing technique. Find a breathing technique that works for you. You want to use a two push that we coach? Great. We've also done the box breathing or four seconds, four seconds, four seconds, four seconds, four seconds, four seconds. That one works, too. It takes a little longer. Find a way to use breathing. Use the breathing that works for you to get back in the moment and to quiet everything down. And that's how you start using your body to interact with the mind and quiet everything down in your mind to avoid the overwhelm or to take you out of those overwhelming situations. And then think of the end of every rally is its own... When the rally ends, close the loop. The rally is over, what's next? One thing that you can do that's very common that you see a lot of pros doing, I think, is super powerful technique. You just take your paddle to the back fence and just tap it there.
[00:13:34.550] - Speaker 1
Just tap the back fence. That basically indicates, okay, we're done with that. What next? What's going on? What are we going to... You got to get ready for the next one and leave all that baggage behind you, because what happens is if you leave that baggage in your brain from the last rally, the rally before, it's going to interfere with your current rally. And I'll tell you examples of... You can see examples all the time of like, Hey, what's the score? I have a scoring problem, whatever. Miss the next Miss the next shot. I'm upset because of the last out call. Miss the next shot. Whatever. I'm upset because I popped the ball up. Miss the next shot. You're increasing the chance that you're going to do that because you have this baggage from before. So close out the rally and get ready for the next one. Those are three techniques that you can use to quiet the mind and also avoid the overwhelm that is natural, and that you see players all the time being subjected to or being subject to because of the... They're allowing too many inputs to try and crowd the mind, whether it's a mechanics, strategic, or sometimes just nervousness and things like that, get into our brain and overwhelm our ability to process as we play.
[00:14:52.000] - Speaker 1
You're going to play much better when you have CPU bandwidth to allow you to get to do the job that you're trying to do, whether it's hit ball to the left, hit the ball to the right, hit your serve, get ready for a bang, let the ball go, whatever it is you need to do, you're going to be much better serve when your CPU has the bandwidth to be able to process that. All right, I want to dive into the RIF now. So this was at Nationals. I got a question from Ryan. Ryan is a fellow pickleball player. I had the pleasure of playing against Ryan at Nationals last year. This was in the hybrid. Ryan is a wheelchair player. They call it pair of pickleball and amazing athlete. I mentioned Ryan, too, in a prior episode, about a year ago or so, because I have never seen a player in any level or standing or seated player that served and returned better than Ryan. His consistency on his serve and consistency on the return, amazing shots, amazing consistency, and super effective as a player. Anyway, so I ran into Ryan at Worlds. We started chatting, and he's doing a lot to help promote, I believe the term they use now is adaptive pickleball.
[00:16:15.320] - Speaker 1
So basically, like pick a ball for players in wheelchairs. Super awesome that he's doing that. Anyway, so we were chatting and he asked me a question. He says, What advice would you give to a player, a newer a player or a player who's struggling to find their way. So I didn't give him a great answer at the time. So we're going to get him a copy of this podcast so that he can hear my better answer now. I was in the middle of some other things in my brain, and I was like, Oh, okay. And so I fumbled around a little bit with it, but we're going to make it up now. So there are three things that I want to share here. So number one, there is a path forward. If you know a pickleball player who's struggling, a pickleball player who's having difficulty, there is a path forward for that player, a path where they end up playing better than they are today. And if you want to think about it this way, thousands of pickleball players started playing pickleball without a clue. They took their first step, they took the next step, and they're now better than they were, and still growing as players.
[00:17:16.250] - Speaker 1
It's a continuous journey a thing. And so I think the understanding that there is this path that the player has in front of them, that they can move forward with their game is super powerful. So that's number one. Number two is you cannot learn anything new, pickleball or anything else, without making mistakes, without errors and mistakes and struggles and stubborn your toe, so to speak, and just stuff like that. It's just baked into the process. It's baked into any growth situation, and pickleball is no different. So mistakes are going to happen, part of the deal. And then the last one is that your growth as a person comes from the challenge that this sport presents to you. No challenge, no personal growth. So embrace the challenge, embrace the difficulty of becoming better as a pickleball player. And we've talked about this in a prior podcast, but think of it like a canvas. Think of this game as just a canvas for yourself as a human being. You'll get better athlet, your spatial recognition, your vision, your movement, as you navigate the court, your your physical shape, as you exercise, as you... All these things. Pickleball allows you to express them through this beautiful sport called pickleball.
[00:18:35.080] - Speaker 1
So that's just the last thing I would say there. So hopefully, Ryan, if we get to this podcast, maybe this was a better answer for you, and you can share it with whomever you think would benefit from hearing of it. Which brings us to the last thing that we always ask on the podcast, which is, well, rate and review. But the last thing that we ask you is that if you enjoy this podcast or if there's something in this podcast that helped you or you think might help a friend, a friend who's feeling challenged by the sport, please feel free to share this podcast with them. We do this podcast with the hope of helping as many pickleball players as we can. I know it's helped me over the last five years being able to host this podcast, and I hope that it has helped you and brought you some benefit. Let's also allow the podcast to benefit others who may not yet have heard of the podcast, and that is on me. I'll do my I'll continue to do my social media posts and get it out there as much as I can. And I ask you to help me in that process as well, because remember, if it helped you and if you found something beneficial, it'll probably help them, too.
[00:19:40.950] - Speaker 1
They'll probably find something beneficial in it as well. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the podcast. I hope you have a great week, and I will see you next time on the next regular episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.