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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.
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. It's a podcast with you in mind. My name is Tony Roig. I am your host of this weekly podcast, which is dedicated to helping you navigate Pickleball from the mental side of the game of the sport. And in this week's podcast, we're gonna do that by talking about the difference between learning how to pick a ball and learning how to do every single shot and from every single spot on the court at every possible time that you're playing.
Before we jump into the podcast, I need you to bear with me, and this will become relevant in a little bit, but just bear with me here. I'm gonna read to you a series of ingredients, two cups, all-purpose flour, two cups of sugar, threequarter, cup of cocoa, two teaspoons of baking powder, one and a half teaspoons of baking soda,
one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon espresso powder, one cup of milk, half cup of oil, two eggs, two teaspoons of vanilla, and one cup of water. So remember that recipe, and I'm gonna come back to it in a little bit. Before we jump into the podcast itself, I want you to be on the lookout for our upcoming WINMORE workshops that are gonna be in about a month and month,
month or so, month and a half or so. You'll get, you'll see 'em if you're on our email list, you'll get an early registration as well as a special tool that we've developed for you to help you with your assessment pro part of the process. Because part of this process is figuring out where you are to know exactly what you need to do to get to where you want to go.
So if you're on email list, you already get notif notified of it, just be on the lookout for it. I want you to be on, have it on the radar that is coming up. If you're not on our email list, best thing to do is join our email list at better Pickleball dot com. That way you'll gonna get notified by email.
Plus you'll get the early registration and the assessment tool. If you're not on our email list and choose to remain off our email list, that is your choice. Be looking on, be out in the lookout for registrations for the Winmore workshops in, you know, Facebook or wherever you're, wherever you're at. We'll find you somewhere probably to, to, they'll let you know.
But email is the best way to do it. Alright, so there's a a, there's a, a, a young lady who recently published a baking book. Don't worry, we're gonna get the Pickleball in second, how to Pickleball. But let's talk about baking first. 'cause it's really, it's sometimes helpful to learn these things through metaphor slash analogies. So this young young lady published a book on how to bake.
She's received a lot of pushback on the, I don't wanna say a lot, but she's received enough pushback that she's been, you know, addressing the comments and things like that in subsequent videos. And the pushback is this, basically it's there, there folks who have bought this book on how to bake that are complaining that there was no recipes, at least not the way that they expected the recipes to be written out in that how to bake book.
And what they were looking for is they were looking for a recipe book, not a book on how to bake, you know, the, the principles of baking, the framework of baking, the concepts of baking. They want to just recipes similar to what the recipe I read to you earlier, right? And the recipe I read to you earlier is actually,
it looks really good. I might make it one day, but it's a chocolate cake recipe, claims to be the best chocolate cake. It's got really good reviews and it does sound like a very, very nice cake. But here, here's the thing. Let's assume that you wanted to learn how to bake and you were doing it as a recipe rememberer,
I would ask you to recite back to me the recipe ingredients that I read to you. You probably remember a few of them, like flour and maybe eggs, milk, things like that. But you need to know the, all of the ingredients, and you need to know the quantities of those ingredients in order to make the recipe correctly. So if you're gonna use a recipe approach,
you would need to have the recipe in front of you in order to be able to bake that cake, right? And I don't know if you use recipes like that. I do, when I use a recipe, I have to look back at the recipe probably four or five times while I'm working just to make sure I covered everything and look at the steps and things like that.
So, you know, even if I'm working on it in the moment and I've just read the recipe and I, and I'm gonna put it together, I still need to double check myself. Like for instance, this recipe has two tablespoons, or sorry, two teaspoons of baking powder, one and a half teaspoons of baking soda. So when you go to do it,
you'll be like, which one was two teaspoons? And how much was it baking soda or baking powder? And then, so those kind of things are, it's hard to remember all that, right? And as you're putting together the recipe, now imagine if instead of using a recipe approach, you actually learned how to bake, which is what this other book that I've mentioned to you is teaching.
So if you learn how to bake, you would be able to put together a, a cake recipe, right? Any kind of cake recipe because of your knowledge of the ingredients that are in your cupboard. So you would know, okay, lemme get my flour. And you would know the difference between flour, between cake flour, all purpose flour, self-rising flour,
bread flour, things like that. You would understand that one has a little more protein is made for this cake powder, I'm sorry, cake flour is made for cakes, right? So it's, it's a little looser at the end. It doesn't have as much protein, so it doesn't gluten, gluten, ice like bread flour does. But you would understand all that.
And then you'd be able to pull down ingredients, your sugar and your baking powder and baking soda. You'd understand the difference between the two. And depending on what you were trying to accomplish with the cake, did you want a, you know, did you want a dense kind of a cake, sort of like a breakfast kind of a, a cake?
Or did you want something super spongy? Then you could add ingredients based on those, on your knowledge of baking as opposed to simply following a recipe. Because here's the thing, like you follow a recipe and it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, you follow a recipe, you come out with a nice dish and okay, that feels good.
But my experience in, in the kitchen has been, it's, I feel much more fulfilled when I know what I'm working with. In other words, when I know the process that I'm engaging in, I understand how the ingredients work together. I understand if I, you know, I can make variations of the recipe and my choosing because I know how the ingredients work.
I, I, I would suggest to you that, or submit to you that that is a more fulfilling interaction with the process of baking than just following recipes rote, right? Just basically following recipes. Now, let's take that concept and let's, let's switch over to Pickleball Now, using the same method, same framing, right, same understanding. So let me,
let me, let me run down another list with you and bear with me on this one as well. So we're gonna put our left leg at two 80. These are made up numbers. Don't literally write these down and try and follow it. So left leg at two 80, right leg at one 70, knees at 165 degrees. Let's do a six degree shoulder tilt paddle.
Let's set the paddle at 97 degrees open to the court, and we can keep going on this, you know, again, and, you know, swing the paddle at, you know, at 22 miles per hour up through a completion arc of, you know, of so many tangents and things like that. So many degrees. And so that would be a third shot,
drop hit from two feet inside the baseline, four feet to the left of the right sideline example, right? So that would be a very specific way of hitting a very specific shot into, and also into a very specific spot, right? That, that, and that would result in the ball landing around the center line on the opposite NVC, you know,
near the, the opposite non volley zone of the court. So you can see how that we could come up with a recipe for every single shot that you want to hit when you're playing, you know, a third shot drop from this position versus a third shot drop from that position. Now, we'd have to change the recipe, right? We'd have to change our foot position,
perhaps our knee position, perhaps our paddle angle, perhaps our follow through, perhaps the amount of energy that goes into the ball. So all of those components would have to change depending on where we're at on the court, depending on how hard the ball has hit our way, depending on the type of shot we're trying to accomplish. I mean, are we trying to hit a cross court third shot,
a straight third shot? Are we trying to lobb it from there? You know, are we trying to drive it at them? All those, we require different recipe cards, right? And so if we take a recipe approach to our Pickleball, we end up having to remember that it's two teaspoons of, I'll probably get this backward, but two teaspoons of baking soda,
no baking powder, two teaspoons of baking powder, and one and a half teaspoons of baking soda. I think. So, you know, you'd have to remember that, right? So you'd have to remember it's the left leg at two 80 and the right leg at one 70 and not the other way around. And it's just a very limiting way to develop your skills as a Pickleball player.
Yet a lot of times what we end up doing is we end up getting mired down in that level of recipe detail for different shots that we're trying to hit. What we recommend is, instead of, instead of trying to remember the details for every single shot that we're trying to hit, is to take a bigger picture. Because one of the other limitations,
in addition I to remember everything, is that even if you learn how to hit one particular shot, right, what happens is the minute you move two feet to the left or three feet back, or you know, one foot forward, whatever it is, the shot breaks down because the shot you're hitting is may work exactly from that spot, but the minute that that something changes or different ball sent your way,
right? So a ball with spin, for instance, or, or a lower harder or dink to your feet or something like that, you're not sure how to react because you don't have a recipe in your mind for that particular situation. So instead of approaching it from a recipe standpoint, think about learning how to Pickleball, right? So instead of like,
how to bake, how to Pickleball. So instead of, of, of trying to learn, again, a recipe for every particular situation out there, if you start, if you step back from it, right? And say, you know what, let me look at Pickleball from a macro, right? Let me step back from Pickleball and let me evaluate the sport.
Big picture. Let me understand what's going on on the court in terms of the structure of this game. Let me understand how the rules interplay with, with what I'm trying to accomplish. Lemme see if I can be clear on my objectives when I play. Let me have an understanding of how the mechanics work. In other words, what are the different pieces of every shot that I hit,
whether it's a volley a ground stroke, a dink a drive, they're all just com, they all have com, the same components. It's just different variations of it, right? So going back to the baking analogy, all of those shots have a certain amount of flour, a certain amount of water, a certain amount of eggs, and things like that.
The end result is very different, right? You know, sometimes you have a chocolate cake, sometimes you'll have a, you know, a pound cake. Sometimes you may end up with a, you know, like a breakfast, a crust for like a quiche or something, or a quiche even. So, you know, you, you end up with all sorts of different recipes based on how you inter intermingle these ingredients.
How you different amounts and different relationships between the ingredients. But all the shots have the same basic ingredients because at the end of the day, it's you and a paddle directing a ball and you know, over the net to, towards the other side of the court in some sort of a, a manner, right? And so if you understand how those ingredients come together on the Pickleball court,
you can then start playing around with your shots and start understanding, okay, I'm gonna start trying this and see how that works. And then, okay, that worked pretty well, let me keep doing that. Or No, that didn't work so well. What do I need to do to fix it? Right? What, what ingredient is it missing,
right? Is it missing? Maybe I need another egg in there, or maybe I need some, some more sugar, whatever. It's, and so, you know, if you have an understanding of the mechanics of Pickleball that way, the strategy of Pickleball, the strategy of Pickleball is another area where we get bogged down on recipes, right? Because we want to know,
okay, what exactly should I do when I'm playing two players who play like this? Okay? And then all, you know, so you have this idea like, I'm gonna hit the ball here. And then the very next game, all of a sudden you're facing like a, you know, they, they throw in a different kind of player, or you're play playing a lefty right ear,
or you're playing some other combination and your strategy, you know, goes to hell in a hand basket because you're not sure what to do. Now, again, if you have an understanding of your objectives, understanding how the game is played, if you, if you learn to Pickleball, then you can make those adjustments on the fly as you go. You can set your oven at 3 75 instead of three 50 because 3 75 is burning it or whatever it is that's happening on the court.
You can make that adjustment as you play. So as you think about your Pickleball, think about taking a bigger approach, right? A, a bigger cut at at, if you will. And I mentioned the workshops earlier that we have coming up. That's the way that we teach Pickleball. So in the workshops, you know, we're going to, we're gonna start with a framework.
You know, the first workshop you're gonna come to is a framework of, of, of our instruction. And then the next class, next workshop, we're gonna teach you the specifics, right? So we're going from general to specific. And then the third one, we're gonna give you, give you a specific action plan based on what your assessment is.
Remember I mentioned the tool to get your assessment done. So that's the process that we follow in all of our teachings, including inside the Pickleball system. At the end of the workshops, you'll be, have an opportunity to see what the system's about. You'll hear about our new class opening, and then you can make a decision whether it's right for you and if it's,
if, if, if you wanna learn to Pickleball, I can't recommend, you know, our, our way of teaching enough to you because we do get some pushback just like this gal on the, on the in her book did. Because players want shortcuts. They want the recipe. The problem is the recipe A is hard to remember the details like that,
right? When you're out there in the real, real world playing, and B, the details for every shot, I should say, and B, it doesn't account, it's impossible to think of every possible combination of variables that you may face while you're playing. So if you, if you learn to Pickleball, you will avoid the pitfalls of the recipe approach to your Pickleball game.
If you wanna know a little bit more about this concept of how learning to Pickleball will impact your game, we did a podcast, it might have been a week or two ago now, depending on when this one publishes, that talks about inputs and outputs. It's called Baking Your Pickleball, your Chocolate Pickleball Cake. And so if you haven't had a chance to listen to that podcast,
recommend it to you because you have a, again, a bigger picture of how you know the output that you want is controlled by the inputs that you need to get to that output. And so learning how to pick a ball will help you gain the knowledge you need to in order to come up with the right inputs so that you get the outputs you want when you're playing.
That's this week's podcast. I help you enjoyed it. As always, please consider rating and reviewing it. And I would say even more importantly, share with your friends because if you enjoyed the podcast, they probably will too. I'll be, have a great week and I'll see you the next podcast.