Your Pre-match warmup
We've written other blogs about common mistakes. But there's large variety of common mistakes.
This blog is about mistakes we see people making in their warm ups.
What we usually see is people dinking, often exclusively "line dinks" to a warmup partner on the same sideline as you.
Let's go over some essentials for a good warmup, because the inevitable consequence of a bad warmup is losing the crucial first ten points of match, and the worst consequence is an injury.
Warm Up - LITERALLY
We've said that perhaps the biggest mistake made in pickleball is literally not warming up: Not getting your muscles, tendons and joints warmed and stretched. But we've covered this in another blog post so we won't repeat it here.
Dink Line and Cross
Don't just dink down the line. Most of the dinks you're going to hit are cross court so you want to get that warmed up too.
Don't Just Dink
One of the foremost values of a warmup is retuning your game after some time off. Remembering the form. Dialing in how hard to make the contacts.
This is of course vital for dinks, but in my experience, it's utterly VITAL for third shot drops. Most of us are almost GUARANTEED to mess up the first half-dozen or so drops we hit each day. So you don't want to be missing those you're giving up points right?
One of my favorite warmup drills is known as the progressive drill: One partner stays at the NVZ line while the other hits a drop from the baseline, moves in to hit a drop from the transition zone, and then moves in again to hit a dink. And then... reverse that.
Drives and Volleys
Of course the alternative to drops is drives (and "drips" which are halfway between a drive and a drop).
In this warmup drill one partner stays at the NVZ line while the other partner is at the baseline hitting drives. This warms up the drives for the person at the baseline, but also volleying drives for the person at the net.
Serves and Returns
Missing a serve is a lost opportunity to score a point. Missing a return is GIVING UP a point. You don't want to yield either of those in those crucial early stages of a match. So having one partner serve to the other partner is crucial.
If you have a variety of serves, it's also valuable to hit each serve in your repertoire during the warmup.
Weak Spots
I'm always trying to be conscious of particular areas I feel cost me in recent matches. Maybe I missed some overheads. Or perhaps I netted a lot of dinks I hit out of the air.
So I try to get a few reps of the sore spots in before the match.
Summary
I'll repeat it one last/third time: the early parts of a match are the most crucial. They set the tone, the confidence of each team, for the rest of the match. An early lead might give you confidence and shake your opponents confidence in ways that determine the final result.
So you do NOT want to give up anything crucial by not having both your BODY and your GAME ready on point #1.
Dave Blickstein - IPTPA Certified Pickleball Coach
