What is the point of a warmup for pickleball? Many have good answers to this question. To get the feel for the ball, to get the muscles loose, to get the blood flowing, to prevent injury. All solid responses.
What do most players actually do when they warm-up?
Dead dinking for two minutes and that’s about it. After that, it’s game time.
Does that provide an adequate warmup? If the game was solely played in the non-volley zone (NVZ) with the baseline as the NVZ line, then yes, partially. But pickleball is much bigger than that. What about the other phases of play? The serve? Return? Third shot? Volley? How can you get a feel for those shots if you literally haven’t hit even one before competing?
And what about warming up your body? There is little footwork and movement when dead dinking, so the blood isn’t flowing through widened vessels and the muscles aren’t loose, flexible, or efficient after a couple minutes of dead dinking. Sudden movements aren’t going to be received very well going right into match play after that. You are far more likely to get injured.
There needs to be a better way to warm-up for match play. And at Slate, we got it. Ours is reasonably simple and time effective, but will make a big difference in your competitive experience.
Ideally, before you even walk on court, you should have completed a quick dynamic stretching warmup. We’ll get another post on that soon going over exactly what that should entail.
Either way, there should be four basic phases of the cooperative hitting warmup:
- Dink to Dink (1-2 minutes)
- Volley to Volley (1-1.5 minutes)
- NVZ to Baseline (1-2 minutes each end)
- Serve and Catch (5 serves each side each player)
The first three phases should be down the line, with the last going cross court. The third phase can use the yo-yo movement to get a feel for the transition/midcourt zone. This means that one player slowly progresses back from the NVZ to the baseline while maintaining a rally with the volleyer.
See this cool guy? He warms-up properly.
Our warmup ensures there is adequate athletic movement, as well as touching on the play situations and shots that actually occur in pickleball. It does not need to be more than 10 minutes.
This is what we’ll be implementing at Slate in our League and Match Play formats.
Complete this warmup, and we guarantee your initial game will feel great. No more ridiculous errors that you know you never make. And you won’t be blowing out that ole calf during the first point of your fun day of pickleball either, which is always a nice bonus.
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