Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the
podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement.
It's the podcast with you in mind.
I am your host for this weekly podcast, Tony Roig.
It's a pleasure to be with you for the podcast.
You may hear a little bit yipping in the background.
Those are some new puppies that are part of our family now, and they're pretty
active in the mornings while I'm recording this.
So once in a while, you might hear a little bit of a background noise.
That's either Benita or Olivia, figuring out who's dominant over the other.
There you go.
This week's podcast, I want to talk about a different way of approaching
distractions, distractions that arise when we play pickleball, and
talk about a different way of framing that that will help you
do it more constructively, right?
Do something more productive and constructive with those things that we
generally refer to as distractions when we play.
I was reminded it during the...
We were at Nationals for a couple of weeks now in Arizona.
We just got back a few days ago.
And while we were there, we got to play some pickup games, and we had to deal with
some adverse conditions, like the We were fortunate to have a court
where we were staying, but the court was oriented where the
sun in the morning and the sun in the evening basically were
directly into your face.
There was another day that we played, there was a lot of wind,
and a couple of the players were...
Their shots were affected by the wind.
And so it got me thinking about this idea of when we play pickleball, we
do have to face distractions.
And sometimes those distractions are wind again or the sun.
It could be the ball we're playing with, could be a number of...
It could be the noise levels around us, things like that.
And so when we face distractions, when we're...
By definition, a distraction is something that pulls our attention away from the
main thing that we're trying to focus on.
If you're trying to paint something, and somebody keeps
tapping your paint brush right on the end, hard to paint because
you're distracted by it.
It's a form of distraction, physical distraction.
You could also have mental distraction, where you're trying to focus on something
around your house that you're working on, and you have a lot of other things on your
mind, so you can't keep your mind on the thing that you're trying to work on.
Same thing happens, obviously, when we play pickleball.
We're out on the pickleball court, and we're trying to focus on the shot.
We're trying to focus on ourselves and what we need to do better the next
rally and things like that.
But we're distracted by a number of things.
And so, how do we deal with distractions in a way
that is more productive for us, that is more constructive for us?
And what occurs Our goal first to me is that we should
deal with those distractions or approach those distractions
as just simply more pieces of the puzzle that we are working on.
Think about a pickleball game rather than as
some independent activity that we're trying to or need to solve, or need to win
or need to figure out as just a puzzle, just like a crossword puzzle
or just a puzzle puzzle.
And we are trying to just navigate the puzzle and solve it to
the best of our ability.
Frankly, the more complex the puzzle is, oftentimes, the more
satisfying it is to solve it.
Imagine trying to do, let's go back to a puzzle puzzle.
If you're working on a puzzle puzzle and it only has 10 pieces to it,
or even more basic, you could have one of those puzzles that
toddlers use that have the wood pieces.
There's eight of them, and they go into predetermined slots on a wood board.
Pretty simple for most adults to do that, right?
And not very rewarding when you complete it.
Rewarding for the kid, sure, but not rewarding for the adult.
Compared that to doing like a thousand-piece puzzle.
When you're done with that, it's a pain sometimes, because you're
like, Where does this go?
And I can't figure out where this piece goes.
But once you're done, it's a very rewarding experience because you overcame
the complicated puzzle that was presented.
When we think about pickleball as a puzzle, it allows us to take areas or
situations that arise that are potentially distractions otherwise,
things like the wind.
I'm going to sit on the wind for a minute.
But things like the wind and we look at those as pieces of a puzzle or as
complexities presented to us by this puzzle.
We're actually thankful that we have some condition that creates a more difficulty
for us, raises the difficulty for us because it challenges us some more, and it
provides us with more fatter, if you will, for the
situation that we're having to solve.
So let's sit on the wind for a little bit here.
So when you have a windy day, The wind's swirling.
So the wind may be behind you, and then it's in front of you, and the
wind's coming from the side.
That's awesome.
Because now you need to adjust your core positioning,
the amount of energy you enter into, and the amount of energy you put into the shot
based on the wind conditions.
So the wind's in your face, then in your returning serve, you're going
to have to take a step back because the ball is going to go deeper,
and you're going to have to deliver more energy into the ball to get your ball
to go deep, your shot to go deep.
If the wind swirls around and now it's behind you and you're returning serve,
then you may have to take a step in because now you expect the ball to be
shorter on its trajectory towards you.
Then you need to make sure that you deliver less energy into your shot to
make sure your ball doesn't go out.
So that's an example of how one additional factor, like wind, creates
more puzzle for you to solve, and also makes the shot itself more complex.
One of the players who was playing with us this week had difficulty with balls that
that bounce and then came into the body.
And so what does that do?
That just creates another challenge, right?
Just another hurdle that we have to overcome, which is we need to
stay light on our feet before we get set and hit the shot.
In other words, we to be ready to move as the wind moves the ball after it bounces.
And between the time it bounces, the time we have to hit it, we need to
stay more focused on the shot.
So it's just another challenge for us.
And I think what that does is it allows us to shift our perspective away from
something like, which you hear players say this, I don't like playing in the wind,
or I don't like playing in X, right? Whatever it is.
Rather than that, you look at it and you say, You know what?
This is an interesting challenge for me.
Maybe this is something that I'm not comfortable doing.
It's more difficult for me.
It's like they added it instead of being 1,000 pieces, now it's 1,200
pieces, so it's more complex.
But that's cool.
That's nice because it increases the challenge that I face, and
it makes the game that I'm playing more interesting.
And so this idea of solving a puzzle looking at these
challenges and potential distractions as pieces of the puzzle will help you
generate more challenge for yourself, but also
create more It's more rewarding because you get to work through those as you play.
And you can take the same concept of the puzzle, and you can extend it out even to
things like playing tricky players, playing players
who shots you don't know where they're going to go, unpredictable players.
Playing, let's say, next rotation, you have a lober on the court.
That's just a different puzzle for you to solve.
Instead of being like something that you don't like doing, something that you
maybe, just try to get the word, that
you look across, you're
like, Oh, no, not a lober.
That's just not what I want.
Instead of looking at it that way, say, Okay, a lober, great.
Now that's another piece of the puzzle.
What can I do to make my life as easy as possible when I face a lober?
You can do the same when you're facing a banger.
You can do the same thing when you're facing a really good dinker,
a really good third shotter.
And all of these pieces are just all of these elements that you're facing, whether
they be distractions, such as wind, sun, things like that,
or challenging opponents or challenging situations for you, are nothing other than
pieces of a puzzle or aspects of a puzzle.
And the more complex the puzzle is, the more challenging the game that you
are playing is going to be for you.
And at the end of the day, is that not why we play pickleball?
Do we not play pickleball, at least in part, because of the challenge that it
presents to us?
If it was easy, then you'd probably grew bored with it.
I always pick on cornhole Again, no problem with corn hole itself.
But corn hole is a static event, where it's just the
bean bags are always the same weight, the holes themselves are only, the
boards are always a set distance away.
You always toss from the same place, things like that.
So it gets a little bit rote, doesn't it?
As pickleball, what conditions are you going to play in today?
I don't know. What's the humidity level?
I live in Florida, and Florida, the humidity level will
affect how the ball flies.
Cj lives up in Lake Tahoe, and in Lake Tahoe, the balls there fly much farther.
So altitude, humidity, wind conditions, sun conditions,
types of opponents you're playing, all those different things go into this mix,
and they create at the end of the day, the puzzle that is the challenge of the game
that you're going to currently play when you're playing pickleball.
And for yourself, removing the power that a potential distraction or a
potentially challenging situation presents to you
is helpful to you in terms of your growth as a human, because you have that power.
No where you have the ability to, the agency, as we always say in here,
the agency to not allow just objective things like wind or
lobbying or whatever to impact you negatively.
Instead, you make it a challenge. You make it a puzzle.
You make it just something that you are going to
do your best to solve during the game, understanding how it impacts the
solving of that game, the carrying out of that game.
Then you work on yourself and you work on not just working on solving the puzzle,
working on how you perceive the input, how you perceive the wind or
the condition that generally bothers you, noise and things like that.
And you turn that around to a growth experience for yourself
in terms of solving a puzzle.
So hopefully that soon, next time you're facing a potential distraction, or what
you currently call a distraction, as opposed to thinking about it more
positively as a challenge to you as you continue to solve pickle puzzles
every time that you're out there and play pickle.
If you have a minute, consider rating and reviewing the podcast, and as always,
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they probably will, too.
I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you at the next episode
of Pickable Therapy.
Be well.