Pickleball instruction: How to practice hands battles like a pro
Last Edited
Feb 04 2025
Category
Instruction
If you've ever watched pros or high-level amateurs play pickleball, you've likely been mesmerized by their reflexes when they get into a hands battle at the kitchen line.
Their composure and ability to keep countering even as the ball keeps flying back at them comes from hours of practice, and James Ignatowich recently revealed in his newsletter a few of the top drills pros use to practice hands.
For a warmup, it's fine to hit back and forth with a parter for a few minutes. This may help when you are just starting out your pickleball journey, but as you get better, this form of practice becomes unrealistic.
Here are a few different ways you can practice hands in a more realistic way:
Bad dink -> speedup
In this drill, you feed your partner a “high” dink (one that they would normally speed up) and your job is to practice making the counter. This will help with your reaction time and holding the line.
It is important to remember that you should not be cheating one way or the other in this drill. Make sure your elbow is tucked in and that you are maintaining a neutral ready position. If you don’t, the chicken wing will show itself.
The wall (or, better yet, the Dink Master Pro)
The wall is a great place to practice hands if you don’t have someone to drill with. There are a few different drills you can do with the wall that will improve reaction time and comfortability at the line.
You can also use the Dink Master Pro and Dink Master from Enhance Pickleball, which are durable hitting surfaces that provide accuracy targets for you to practice placing dinks, speedups and chicken wing attacks.
To start, you can simply try to switch between backhand and forehand volleys repeatedly. This will help you understand the concept of the “triangle” in pickleball. It will also help you flip from forehand to backhand consistently.
Another drill is called "dink, speedup, reset." Feed yourself a dead dink, speed up to a specific spot and be ready to reset the next ball softly. This is more of an advanced drill, but with this drill you are able to work on multiple shots along with your ability to control your paddle in speedup situations.
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