Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to
your pickleball improvement.
I'm your host to the weekly podcast, Tony Roig.
It's a pleasure to be with you this week.
This is another episode of our Walk & Talk podcast versions,
which are recorded while I walk.
So if you hear some background sounds, don't be surprised.
I am not in the studio right now.
Perhaps these episodes will be an encouragement
to you to get out and walk yourself.
There is very...
There are not many exercises or activities that you can do, frankly, including
playing pickleball, that are better for your overall body
health and your mental health than a walk.
And I believe the latest research is somewhere around 10 minutes of walking.
It's a good amount of time. If you can do a little longer, great.
If all you can do is five minutes, that's fine, too.
But the benefits of walking cannot be overstated.
It's really good.
Actually, I'll give you two reasons to walk.
One is that's how your body is designed.
We're bipeds, and we are made to engage in this motion.
Again, pickleball, fantastic. Love pickleball.
But the movement of pickleball is not our natural movement pattern.
Walking is. That's how we're designed.
So you're lubricating all your joints.
You're moving in the way that your body is designed.
On the mental side, there are several benefits, but
one benefit in particular is your brain is on fire when you're walking.
Your eyes or your visual stimuli that you get when you're walking,
so you're walking in a forward manner.
That's how your brain is super designed to receive that information and process it.
And it's just like candy for your brain as you walk forward and you see the stimuli
tree hedge, garbage can, the road coming at you.
It's just tremendous for your brain.
So try walking.
It's a great thing for you, generally speaking.
Excuse me.
And it'll improve your pickleball.
Believe it or not.
All right.
Subject for today's podcast, in addition to the mini soapbox walking presentation,
is about different styles of play.
What we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about
the Sometimes the risk, I think, of players who, or not players, but of
content and messaging that you get out there that talks about this is how you do
it or that's how you do it in terms of style of play.
And so you'll see arguments made in favor of the soft game.
I'm a proponent of the soft game.
But because I'm a proponent of the soft game, doesn't mean that I'm
an opponent of the hard game.
The soft game and the hard game are both parts of pickleball.
They're both skill sets and strategies that can be used to be
successful in pickleball.
But what happens is you'll see something on Facebook or a YouTube video
or something that says, Pickleball is hard now.
It's gotten hard in terms of pace.
And that's a circular saw.
That'll be interesting background noise.
So basically, you'll see about the hard...
The game becoming a hard game.
So what happens is, pickleball players then will start migrating
toward that hard game, right?
Towards, okay, I got to play hard.
Soft is dead, hard is in.
And that is a mistake because both hard and soft strategies, approaches
to pickleball, can be successful.
And the analogy/metaphore that I like to think
about in terms of the approach to pickleball that works
is mixed martial arts or MMA.
So MMA, if you're not familiar with it, is a format of fight where you can
almost do whatever you want.
There's a few rules, but within those rules, you can fight
whatever style you want to fight.
So if you're a wrestler, you can wrestle.
If you're a judo practitioner, you can try judo.
If you're a jiu-jitsu, that's like martial arts, where you subdue your
opponents, chokes, and things like that, you can do that.
If you're a boxer, you can go in there and just start whaling in your opponent.
So you can do anything that you want, from the hard arts, like
karate, boxing, Muay Thai, striking type of techniques,
to the more soft style techniques.
Jiu-jitsu, in my opinion, being one of the most effective soft styles that
you can use in mixed martial arts.
So you can see a mixed martial arts situation where you have a good boxer
against a good jiu-jitsu practitioner.
And in that situation, you're going to have one of the fighters who is
going to be throwing punches.
They're going to basically be throwing big punches at the other one,
trying to knock them out.
The other fighter is going to be using jiu-jitsu techniques.
That means they're going to be closing the gap with the boxer.
They're trying to get close to the boxer to take away the boxer's range
and then try to subdue them.
I'm going to work through a little bit more because I want you to see how that
transitions toward your pickleball strategy.
So when you have a boxer against a jiu-jitsu practitioner,
what you have is you have one fighter who is trying to keep distance
from the other fighter, and then using punches and perhaps
kicks if they're a kickboxer.
So they're using punches and kicks and things like that to inflict damage
on their their opponent, which is what they do.
That's the game that they're playing.
So you have one who's keeping distance and then trying to punch and kick and
inflict their stress that way.
You have the other fighter who has a different strategy,
totally different strategy.
The jiu-jitsu fighter does not want to keep distance.
The jiu-jitsu fighter wants to close the distance.
The jiu-jitsu fighter is trying to get in close, grapple.
So basically, grab onto the boxer.
And then once they grab onto the boxer, they want to keep hold of the boxer.
And then they work to basically subdue the boxer.
You can think about it like a Python, like a constricting snake
that grabs on to its prey and then constricts the prey into submission.
And then, well, in the Python's case, into death, but into submission.
That's what a jiu-jitsu practitioner or a jiu-jitsu fighter will try and do.
So in this ring, you have two fighters, one with a certain strength,
which is striking, and one with a certain strength, which is submission.
Each one has their own strategy, their own way of coming at the fight,
and their own approach to how they want to fight the other fighter in that match.
Pickleball is the same way.
In pickleball, you can have a player who is particularly good at the hard game.
A lot of times, tennis converts into pickleball.
Their Their first strategy that they use is hard.
They come in and they're blasting balls at everybody because that's what the tennis
player instinctively knows how to do from tennis.
That's fine. That's the boxer.
Then you have other pickleball practitioners who are
softening, and those are your jiu-jitsu fighters.
Those are the players who want to submit, who want to keep everything nice and tidy
and grind, and then submit their boxing or hard-hitting opponent.
The point is that you can win at pickleball in both ways.
You can win as a good jiu-jitsu practitioner with a soft
game, or you can win as a good hard game practitioner in the boxing.
Now, I will tell you that once you get, as you move up in level
and look at the pro game, most pros have both a good soft game
and a good hard game, because they'll mix the two depending on
what's working in that moment and their overall strategy.
An example of the best jiu-jitsu practitioners would be
the Johns brothers, Ben and Colin.
They're extremely disciplined with their soft game approach,
and that is primarily what they rely on.
You'll see them drive a ball here and there, but most of the time when they're
driving balls, it's simply trying to extend the rally.
They're not driving balls as their winning strategy.
What they use as their strategy to win is the soft game, primarily.
They just grind out the rallies and wait for a mistake from their
opponent, either a ball that they can attack from the air, a roll volley
type of shot, or just a miss.
If you look at a team that is a hard-hitting team,
you would look at Kwan Wong and Chr. Alshon, for instance.
Their strategy is the shake and bake.
So they come in hard, hot, and heavy, and they can have success.
They beat the Johns Brothers in a recent tournament in the finals.
And so there is a place for that boxing style to win in those tournaments.
But just because we see Chrishun and Kwaung
win that match against the Johns brothers, doesn't mean we all need to run out and
learn how to hit the balls the way that a kwaunguan goes, for instance.
Because Kwaung has a very unique style of play.
It's very effective, and it's no criticism of Kwaung.
It's a fantastic way to play for him, but it is extremely difficult to copy.
The way he grips the paddle, the way that he hits the ball, very unique,
very effective for him.
So we don't watch that match and then run out and go, Okay, I need to learn how to
hit everything hard because that's what won that particular match.
What I want you to walk away from or take away from this is that you can
be successful as a pickleball player with different types of approaches.
And what that allows you to do then is to customize the game
to your particular style.
Meaning if you're a better soft game player,
you can keep working on your soft game and improving your techniques in
your soft game, and and have success.
Now, if you want to add some hard game to it, that's fine.
That's great. Keep layering.
But don't feel that you saw a Facebook post or a YouTube
video or a friend said, Got to hit hard.
And now all of a sudden, what you know how to do, which is the jiu-jitsu soft game of
pickleball, doesn't work and you need to throw everything out the door because you
can be very successful with that approach.
And when you're playing with a soft game, consider thinking about...
I got a helicopter now, see?
Got all sorts of surprises for this podcast.
When you're playing as a soft game player, envision yourself as
the jiu-jitsu fighter.
Understand that you're using a technique that is effective and successful in in a
sport of pickleball, understand what you're trying to do, which
is to submit your opponent.
Let's say you're playing against some bangers, some hard hitters.
Your objective is to slow them down, is to get everything under control, and
then force either a pop-up, a miss into the net, or an outball.
Because I'll tell you this, if you're playing a good soft game
and don't have good outball discipline, that's going to be very difficult
for you to really be a jiu-jitsu master and to be able to submit
from that style of play.
But there is a submission approach that is very effective in the sport
of pickleball with the soft game.
So keep working on your craft, understand that there's different techniques and
different approaches that you can bring to bear in the sport,
and you'll have more fun, but you'll also be able to think more broadly
about the sport of pickleball. That's a diesel, by the way.
So we've gone saw, diesel truck next to my path, and helicopter.
We have the trifecta. It's almost the bingo card.
But just Just remember that you can come at pickleball different ways.
Find the approach that works for you.
Understand that it's multidisciplinarity, meaning jiu-jitsu, boxing, wrestling.
The better you get at the different areas, the better you'll play
a well-rounded game.
But focus on the area that's more natural to you, that's more maybe easier for you
in terms of your personality and how you like to play the game.
Get really good at that.
Understand that you can win a ton of games from that solid foundation.
And then from there, you can grow. You can expand.
You can add a little boxing.
You can add a little wrestling, maybe even a little judo into your game.
So that's this week's episode of the Pickleball Therapy podcast.
Hope you enjoyed the podcast.
If you enjoyed the podcast, as always, consider sharing it with your friends,
because if you enjoy the podcast, they probably will, too.
I hope to see you all at the next episode next week.
In the meantime, be well.