Ep. 289 - Recognition SuperPower

[00:00:00.160] - Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to [00:00:05.760] - Speaker 1 Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I hope you're having a great week. This week's podcast I'm going to dive into. It's a kind of a mushy subject, but it's extremely powerful. It's like a superpower, as I said in the title to the podcast. [00:00:20.720] - Speaker 1 And it's just recognition. It seems like a simple little thing, seems like a nothing burger, if you will. But if you get good at recognition, right? If you get good at understanding its uses and get good at applying it at the levels, at the three different levels that we're going to be talking about, I think it'll really help you improve your play. At the end of the podcast, I give you an invitation to connect. [00:00:43.950] - Speaker 1 If you want to connect. I'll put the email address will be in the show notes. If you want to reach out. If you're interested in having us coach you, we have different coaching experiences that you can engage with us on. And so I'll put that in the show notes and you can send us an email if you're so interested. [00:01:01.250] - Speaker 1 Put in the subject line coach me or please coach me or I'd like for you to coach me. Whatever you like. Something in the subject line so we know how to respond to it and we can put it in the right bucket of emails. All right, let's talk about recognition. Okay, so as I mentioned, I mean, that seems like a. [00:01:18.930] - Speaker 1 It's kind of mushy, right? Recognition. What does that mean? Even when you, when I looked up the definition, Merriam Webster, it was to acknowledge or take notice of in some definite way. I mean, very vague, right. [00:01:29.010] - Speaker 1 Very kind of broad in general. General. So, you know, how do, how do we use that, this concept of recognition within our pickleball space? And frankly, you can use it in your personal life as well. But I'm focused on pickleball here as our canvas that we're working in. [00:01:44.030] - Speaker 1 I'm going to basically break it up into three different areas that we're going to look at. And let me set it up right now for you. Let me kind of get you, get you going, get your brain going on recognition and maybe some areas of recognition where you could use of improvement. And so let me give you three different ideas, right? Three different situations. [00:02:04.290] - Speaker 1 One is you just finished playing a rally, okay? Do you remember if you hit the third shot in that rally, would you remember that right at the end of a rally? And if you do remember that, do you remember where you hit it? Even the type of shot you hit, right? Do you remember any of those characteristics from a. [00:02:21.970] - Speaker 1 From at the end of a rally, when you're on the serve team, whether you hit the third shot, and if so, what type of shot you hit? [00:02:29.590] - Speaker 1 Another one is you're getting lobbed, right? You're in one of these games, you just keep getting lobbed and you're like, oh, my God, another lob, another lob. Are you recognizing the player who's doing it? Are you recognizing the side the player likes to do it from? Forehand or backhand? [00:02:47.990] - Speaker 1 And then the third area that I'm gonna. I'm gonna tease for you is, you know, you're feeling a little bit stuck. You're feeling a little bit. Maybe, maybe not stuck, maybe that's a big word, but maybe you're feeling like you're wandering a little bit in pickleball and you're not really sure what to do next, right? How can you possibly move forward in your game or anything in life, right, if you don't recognize the thing that's holding you back, if you don't recognize the obstacle? [00:03:11.530] - Speaker 1 So that's another area of recognition. So we're going to basically look at each one of those three scenarios that I set out for you in the sphere of recognition that it, that it works in. So let's start with the smallest one first, which is little picture recognition, right? So the idea is recognizing inside the little picture, the minutia, if you want to think about it that way. And this is where we go back to the third shot, right? [00:03:36.370] - Speaker 1 So you're on the serve team. A third shot was hit, right? Because the serve was made, the return was made, presumably. So now we've hit a third shot, the rally ends, and, you know, the question would be like, you know, who hit the. Who hit the third shot? [00:03:50.120] - Speaker 1 What kind of third shot was hit? If, particularly if you're trying to work on your third shot, right? So you're trying to improve your third shot. Let's say you're working on a third shot, you know, hitting third shot drops to the middle more, you know, or third shot drives to the moving player. Whatever technique you're trying to add to your game, you know, the first step would be like, okay, who hit the third shot? [00:04:08.440] - Speaker 1 What kind of third shot was hit? Did I hit the third shot? Did my partner hit the third shot? And then what kind of third shot was hit? Because then we can make adjustments based on that. [00:04:16.400] - Speaker 1 And I want to be clear here. There's no, no, no criticism, folks. This is a very normal Thing for players not to be sure, right, as to who hit the third shot or what type of third shot was hit. You know, the rally starts going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We're not really not sure, you know, exactly how it played out. [00:04:35.920] - Speaker 1 And this happens very commonly in our coaching where we'll have coach play sessions. I come out onto the court at the end of a rally to have a conversation about the rally. So I'll ask. I'll ask questions different ways, but maybe I'll ask the question in this sense of like, okay, so let's talk about the third shot and where the third shot was hit. And then I'll have the. [00:04:53.210] - Speaker 1 All four players, frankly, even the return team will look over and say, like, they're trying to figure out who hit the third shot. You know, in terms of, like, did they hit it when they couldn't have hit it? Again, not a criticism, guys. This is very natural, right? I want you to understand how natural this is. [00:05:05.170] - Speaker 1 It happens all the time. And so then eventually they'll sort out, okay, we're the serve team, so, okay, and then they'll try. Try and remember who hit the third shot and then, you know, where it was hit or how it was hit and things like that. Very difficult, right? Very difficult process. [00:05:20.150] - Speaker 1 And the reason I point this out is because I want to make sure you understand that there's. There. It's perfectly natural for this to happen. This is because the recognition skill, right, the recognition muscle just hasn't been exercised. It hasn't been worked. [00:05:32.470] - Speaker 1 And so it's, you know, the. It's natural for the players not to know what's going on. They're so worried about other things. They have a million things going on in their mind, and they're not really paying attention to the steps in the rally, to the things that are happening in the rally. Now, if you're working on your third shot, right, then the first step is going to be, you know, recognizing what you're doing, you know, so let's say you're. [00:05:54.140] - Speaker 1 Let's go back to. You're trying to hit more. Third shot drops in the middle. Let's say if you don't know that you hit the third shot, you can't even answer the next two questions, right? If you know you hit the third shot, then you need to know whether you hit it as a drop or a drive or a live or just a nothing, like a shot where you didn't really think about it, you just made contact with the ball, and again, no criticism. [00:06:12.840] - Speaker 1 It happens. But you need to know that, and then you need to remember where you hit it. Did you hit it toward the middle, or did you hit it to the sides, or did you not have a target in mind? Until you can put those pieces together, right, you're not going to be able to put in the work. You're not going to be able to remind your brain about, you know, or tell your brain, I should say, about what happened so that then you can make a correction the next time. [00:06:35.440] - Speaker 1 And I'm going to give you a way to work on this, and I'm not going to recommend you do it on the third shot. I use a third shot just as a way to explore it. I'm going to recommend you do it with your serve. The reason I recommend the serve is because the serve is the time that you have complete control, right? Balls in your hand, take your time on the serve. [00:06:53.040] - Speaker 1 You can do what you want with it. What I want you to do is if you want to work on this recognition, the exercise you're going to do is you're going to basically have a clear picture in your mind of what you want your serve to do. How do you want it to travel, where do you want it to go, how high over the net. We're on the court, right? You're aiming. [00:07:08.310] - Speaker 1 And then after you serve, after the rally ends, don't do it in that moment, but after the rally ends, you need to go back to your serve and connect the serve that you actually hit with the serve that you wanted, right? And do those two match. And if they don't match, right, then what's happening is that's all you got to do, by the way. You just. You have your visualization of the serve that you want, then a recognition of whether the serve that you hit was close to that or not close to that. [00:07:33.420] - Speaker 1 Here's what's powerful, right? Just doing that alone, right, will build this recognition muscle where you're starting to work on, like, recognizing what's happening during a rally, starting with the serve. And another thing's going to happen that's super powerful is you're going to get this, like, indirect correction. Because what will happen is your brain wants to deliver what you want if you tell it right. So you have the visual of what you want to have happen, right? [00:07:57.380] - Speaker 1 This is how I want my serve to look. And then you have feedback that you're giving to your brain saying, yes, it did look that way, or no, it didn't look that way. Your brain will try and make those two match by Itself, right? You don't need to fret about paddle angle at point of contact, your foot positioning, whatever. Your brain will do a lot of work in the background to solve for that again without you having to fret about the little details of it. [00:08:24.570] - Speaker 1 Just by giving it that feedback loop, right? Where you're like, I recognize the serve was what I wanted, or the recognize the serve was not what I wanted. And then you. The next step would be, okay, it wasn't what I wanted because. And you just give it the visual, right? [00:08:37.290] - Speaker 1 Meaning, like it went. Let's say you want to have like a, you know, high. Let's say you want to do a system server we call a system serve. So you're aiming three or four feet over the net. You're aiming middle of the serve box, you know, 4 foot from the baseline, 3 foot from the baseline, something like that. [00:08:52.010] - Speaker 1 Boom. That's your, that's your visualization of the ideal serve. And let's say you hit a serve and the serve went like, you know, it was the. Just two feet behind the non poly zone line out toward the sideline and really low, like, you know, a foot over the net, you're like, eh, that's not what I'm looking for, right? So you feed that to your brain and your brain says, that's not what we want. [00:09:12.860] - Speaker 1 We want is this other serve. And you feed, you know, so it has that serve as the ideal. And then it has these feedback loops of these serves that aren't what you're looking for. What happens is your serve starts to move more and more toward the serve that you want automatically. That's how powerful your brain is. [00:09:26.320] - Speaker 1 As long as it has the correct information, the pieces of information that it needs to put that process together, to put that work together. So that's the work that you'll do on little picture recognition. [00:09:37.680] - Speaker 1 And if you do the work on it and it does what I suggested it will do. Let us know. Send me an email. Send me an email. Send it to. [00:09:47.120] - Speaker 1 Send that one to. I think we have an email. Pickleball therapy at better. I think we have pickleball therapy. Better pickleball. [00:09:52.920] - Speaker 1 I don't remember exactly. I'll put in the show notes, but let me know. Excuse me. Let me know if that worked out for you. And the next one we have is medium picture recognition. [00:10:02.670] - Speaker 1 So this is the one with the lobs, right? You're playing in this game and you just get lobs like math. I mean, it's just again and again, lob after lob, right? Absolute nightmare. What I want, you know, the, the, the, the. [00:10:13.150] - Speaker 1 And I'll give you a real world example, actually. So this happened yesterday in a clinic I was giving. So I basically I, I was pairing up with the players in a rotation and when I was partnering up with Tom, our two opponents, Mac and Ivo, are good lobbers from the baseline. They're very good lobbers. And so I returned, I think I returned in the middle. [00:10:32.210] - Speaker 1 And Mac, she's left handed, she hit a good lob right, so we poked it back in the middle. Good lob. Poked it back again. Good lob. The, the, this one, I actually then moved the ball to the outside. [00:10:44.410] - Speaker 1 So I moved the ball towards her, her backhand, towards her right side. And no more lob. No more lob, you know, because Mac likes a lot from her forehand, not from backhand. Now in the middle of the rally, I'm analyzing that. That's that medium term recognition. [00:10:59.390] - Speaker 1 I'm see, I'm recognizing, okay, she's lobbing from that side. Send it to the other side. Once I'm done with that game, that goes into my little book, goes into my little, my little stats for the players, right? Where I know now next time I play against Mac that if I give her a ball deep to the forehand, probably going to be a lob. If I go to her backhand, less likely I'm going to be a lot. [00:11:19.600] - Speaker 1 So that's how I can solve for that lobbying situation in the medium term recognition. Right? It's a bigger picture than the minutia. It's more like I'm looking at the whole game and I'm seeing what's going on. Our medium picture, I should say. [00:11:30.480] - Speaker 1 And, and you know, I'm going to give you some work that you can do here. So you're going to do the exact same thing. Okay. And I'm going to give you way to work on it. Whether you're playing bangers or lobbers, okay. [00:11:43.870] - Speaker 1 Depending on what it is that most vexes you, I would start there. So if you're like just tired of getting banged by a certain player or starting a little tired of getting lob for a certain player, just pick one, work on that first. So you're looking at a type of shot, a banger lob, and you're looking for a particular player, there's got to be a player who you play against frequently. Who's that player who just. You go, ma, oh man, I gotta get ready because I'm gonna get lob like crazy or I'm gonna get banged like crazy, right? [00:12:07.350] - Speaker 1 And here are the steps you're gonna do. So look at, try and see if you can figure out what shot do they like to bang or lob from? Because players have preferences, right? Players are pattern players. So what you'll find is you'll find a certain type of shot that the banger likes a lot or the certain type of shot that the lobber likes a lot. [00:12:25.400] - Speaker 1 See if you can identify a preferred side. You know, do they like to do it more from the forehand or more from the backhand, like I did in the example I gave you earlier? And then are there any tails you can, sometimes you can suss out some tells. This is, this is more of a detail, but see if you can set out some tells. So sometimes what you'll see is, you'll see when they're getting ready to hit their magic shot banger lob, you'll see them act differently with their body. [00:12:46.260] - Speaker 1 Sometimes they'll squat down a little more, like they'll get down a little more intently with the shot. For bangers, what you'll see is you see the paddle pull back more, right? Obviously generate more power. So they'll pull the paddle back more than they would for a dink, let's say, or a drop. And then the lobber, oftentimes, particularly an MVZ lob, non volley zone lob, what you can see is you can see them open their paddle more. [00:13:06.260] - Speaker 1 So you'll see them, they'll squat a little bit, they'll open their pad, probably a lob, and then you can make adjustments based on that. And I like to think about yourself becoming the. You like the Sherlock Holmes of the courts if you do that. So you basically, like, you're able to see what's happening before it happens, like in Sherlock Holmes stories or movies, and that help you out on middle. On middle. [00:13:27.560] - Speaker 1 Picture or medium? Picture recognition. All right, Big picture recognition. This one is, this one is the biggest in terms of scale, but also in terms of impact on you. And this is the one where you're either stuck in the game or you're kind of like wandering a little bit. [00:13:41.060] - Speaker 1 You're not really sure what to do next. And, you know, if you want to advance, you want to continue to grow, you need to recognize what it is that's holding you back. What obstacle, what is it that will help you? Now, I will tell you, this is the hardest one to master because this one requires additional knowledge that you by definition don't have. Right? [00:13:57.940] - Speaker 1 If you had the knowledge, then you would need the knowledge. So you're kind of a little bit, a little bit stuck here in terms of, like, being able to move forward. I'm going to use some steps on what you can do, but it is the most difficult one because again, you're lacking that knowledge to help you break through. So I'll give you three tips to help you improve in this area. Number one is avoid quick tips. [00:14:16.140] - Speaker 1 So this is those quick hitters. You know, a lot of YouTube videos and things like that are built around quick tips right around, like, you know, quick satisfaction. Those, generally speaking, are not going to work. And if you think about it, think about, you know, you're playing like roulette with your pickleball. That's what you're doing. [00:14:32.300] - Speaker 1 You're just spinning a wheel and hoping that the ball lands on what you need. More often than not, it's going to be wrong. Focus on fundamentals. It's a dirty word, guys. I know it because I, I don't, I don't try not to use the term fundamentals with folks who don't know me. [00:14:45.300] - Speaker 1 I'll use it on this podcast because then you know me. But as soon as they hit the term fundamentals, if, you know, if someone's been playing for a year, they turn it off because they think I'm talking about beginners or basic. And I'm not. I'm talking about fundamentals. You know, the best player on the planet, her name is Annalee Waters. [00:15:00.060] - Speaker 1 And I mean best player, not best male or female player or best female player, I mean, or best woman player. I should say, not the best woman player. The best player, period, is Annalee Waters. Annalee Waters excels because of fundamentals. Yep. [00:15:14.460] - Speaker 1 She has a great shot. She has beautiful shots, great athleticism. She can do amazing things. So can a lot of players. You know what Annalee has? [00:15:21.540] - Speaker 1 A lot of players don't, has. Don't have fundamentals. It's just, just a total dedication to her fundamentals. So stick to the fundamentals. The fundamentals are keys to amazing play. [00:15:32.980] - Speaker 1 You know, if you're, you're unsure what you need, stay away from fanc stuff. You know, extra spins, ATPs, you know, fancy put, you know, extra putaways, those videos that say 99 of, you know, players can't handle this. Forget about all that stuff. Focus on fundamentals. Focus on your serve, your return footwork, your. [00:15:48.840] - Speaker 1 The volleys that you need to execute your play. That's what's going to get you good play. And the last one, I'll give You is to get a guide. You know, find a guide. You need a guide. [00:15:56.440] - Speaker 1 You need, you need someone to guide you and teach you this sport. You can find, you know, some local pro, not, I should say some local pro. You can find a local pro. There are pros out there who familiar with, who teach the game, I would say correctly or in a way that is most helpful to you, I should say in order the priority that's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and who can also coach. So they're out there. [00:16:20.700] - Speaker 1 Unfortunately, you know, the reality is that there are also coaches out there that either don't really understand the game, haven't put in the time to, to figure it out well enough to be able to coach it, or are unable to coach. And that's just reality. So, you know, if you can find a local pro, great, get yourself a guide. Otherwise, I am happy to be your guide. This is what I do. [00:16:43.100] - Speaker 1 I coach pickleball. I believe I'm pretty good at coaching pickleball and I've had good success coaching pickleball and this is my full time career. So do this. If you're interested in finding out how I can coach you in pickleball, send me an email again. I'll put it in the show notes and send me an email and let's connect and see what, what type of coaching or guiding is available to you. [00:17:05.980] - Speaker 1 But I will say, you know, whatever you choose, whether you choose to work with me or with somebody else, you know, recommend that you find a guide. You find a way to continue to grow your knowledge because with that knowledge you gain the recognition that you need for this big picture part of your relationship with the sport of pickleball. So that's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Recognition. [00:17:29.440] - Speaker 1 Don't, don't sleep on it, guys. Super powerful. Work on it. You can develop better recognition. The more you do it, the better you get at it. [00:17:36.920] - Speaker 1 And then next one becomes easier and so on and so so forth. I will be back with you next week for a regular episode of pickleball therapy. Until then, be well.