Practice makes perfect……..or does it?

After a previous post, I had a text from a friend who liked what I had to say about practicing skills, but said I should consider that practice doesn’t always make perfect.  He went on to say, “perfect practice makes perfect!”

Good point!   One made by Vince Lombardi once upon a time.

Repeating a skill in the wrong way does nothing but make you proficiently bad.  Practice will help you break bad habits, but it’s hard to practice while playing a competitive game.  It’s difficult to predict what shot you will receive from an opponent, so in order to practice a certain skill repetitively, it’s important that you have a practice partner or use a pickleball machine.  With either, you can ask your partner to hit to a specific target, or set the machine to a  predictable shot, allowing you to repeat the same shot over and over until you are able to do it successfully more times than not.

Consider getting a machine for yourself or your club.  The machines toss or shoot balls from one end of the court, over the net to where you are standing and can be adjusted for speed, direction and height according to what skill you are working on.  They can be used for drill sessions on  specific skills, and can accommodate several players at a time.

As for drills to use with the machines, an easy internet search of “pickleball machine drills” will provide you with a vast return of written articles, blogs, and video’s explaining and showing you how to use these machines for every skill you want to practice.

Here are two popular machines.

• Simon – offered by Pickleball Rocks
• Pickleball Tutor – offered by Pickleball Central
  • use my 5% discount code – ARBKENNISTON – at Pickleball Central

Look for games you can play during your practice sessions with machines.  The majority of us play pickleball for fun, and therefore we need our practice to be fun too.  Otherwise, our practice sessions become very short, and eventually non-existent.

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