How to drill so you (actually) get better

Everybody says it. "If you really want to get better, you have to drill."

It's true, but incomplete. The way I see it, there’s three ways to improve at pickleball. 

Level 1 - play lots of rec and get better slowly. 

Level 2 - casually drill and get better faster.

Level 3 - Deliberately drill and get better even faster.

Most do level 1. Some level 2. But very few live in that level 3 category.

See, I grew up in the basketball world playing, coaching, and being mentored by some incredible teachers. And there’s one big thing I took away from these brilliant people.

When they came to a session, they had a plan and a purpose for helping those students improve.

When I was out with my wrist injury, I had a LOT of time to think. And one thing I invested time thinking about was drilling.

See, over time, I’ve noticed many people (who do drill) do the exact same thing:

1. Show up to the courts
2. Ask their partner “what should we do today?"
3. Proceed to work on cross court dinks, resets, 3rd shot drops and then call it a day.

Now, some drilling is better than no drilling, regardless of what drills you do — because you increase your RPM (reps per minute) by drilling rather than just playing. 

But I’m approaching my drilling in a different way. A way that was born from me asking myself the question…

How much potential am I leaving on the table? And how can I close the gap between where I'm at now and my potential as a player?

So I came up with a mini framework to make me (and hopefully) you better, faster.

• Prepare
• Isolate
• Compete

PREPARE - Before I go to the courts, I invest 5-10 minutes to think about what I plan to improve by the end of the session. Then I ask myself, "what drills will get me the most quantity and quality reps of that skill?"

In fact, here’s a message I sent my friend Zach two days ago before our drilling session. 

Note* 3rd shot drives were my priority for this session.

ISOLATE - As I mentioned before, it’s often hard to get high quantity + high quality reps of a particular skill in rec because there’s other variables at play.  

• 3 other players.
• They’re all bangers.
• Maybe they’re working on skills that don’t allow points to go a certain direction so you can’t even hit that shot you came in ready to work on.  

That’s why I love to isolate a skill. Now, one challenge in isolating a skill is knowing what drill you should use.

Listen, I’m not a drill guru and I don’t have 1000 drills in my back pocket. But I do have my imagination and memory of how shots I’m working on play out in actual games. And that’s all you need.

So, I try to re-create scenarios from games into my two person drilling sessions, and boom, those scenarios become my isolated drills.

For example, maybe you struggle in transition when your opponent attacks your backhand.

If so, the the drill could be:

One person at the kitchen. One back at the baseline. Baseline person hits a drop and starts to move in, and the person at the kitchen hits to your backhand and you have to hit the reset. Repeat that for 5-10 minutes.  

COMPETE - Now, you take that skill you were isolating and put it into a game like scenario.

Let's build off the example of working in transition. If you wanted to make it game-like, you could play skinny singles with a twist.

I like it when one person serves the whole time and the other returns the whole time. THEN, I get the most back to back reps of the skill I’m working on. In this case, transition practice. So then, I can get more reps, make quicker adjustments and improve faster.

Now, If you’re an obsessed player like me who's looking for any edge to outplay your opponents and move up levels, I have good news.

99% of players (yes I spoke to everyone in the world who plays pickleball :) ) don’t do anything close to this.

Either, they never drill or drill in a sloppily thought out way. This can be your edge.

By now, maybe you're thinking, "I'm in. How often should I do this? 50% of the time. 75% of the time?"

Well, I don't know. But let's start here. If you drill 0 days a week. Start with 1 day a week of focused drilling where you go in with a plan and purpose. Then after doing that, maybe move it to two days a week. I promise, over time, you’ll be a different player. 

I went from never playing to pro in 15 months by drilling with some purpose, but not nearly as much as I just described. And every day I wonder, how much further I would be if I was doing it like this from the beginning.

Now Imagine — where could you be if you did something like this in your game, starting right now!

Until next week,

Kyle

PS: Yesterday, I filmed a video about this on the same topic. Keep an eye out for that. It will probably come out in 6 weeks :)

PPS: Pretty stoked my youtube channel just hit 100,000 subscribers! I'm grateful for everyone who watches those videos! And I owe a HUGE thank you to my team who helps me with the strategy & editing behind the channel. Youtube is hard work, and it's truly been a team effort to consistently create videos that (hopefully) help you all improve at the game :)