the number one technical mistake I see players making is they have their own grip or they're holding their paddle in the wrong way you might not have known this but on every shot in pickle ball you need to be holding the paddle a certain way to get the best results the problem is if you just started playing the sport naturally and you never thought about this you almost certainly are doing something [Music] wrong the first thing that players do wrong is they have the wrong grip on the wrong shot so what are the main times that I see this the number one time is unball so a lot of the time I'll see players balling with what I call a western grip which I'm going to explain later don't worry and if you have the wrong grip on your ballies your reflexes are never going to be quick enough and you're never going to be able to play at the highest level when you're at the kitchen the next Big Time Players mess up their grip is their backhand a lot of time on players backhand specifically from the back of the Court they're using a western grip or some other weird grip and it makes it pretty much impossible to hit backends well consistently and it might force you to always want to go for your forehand the last time I see players messing up their grip is on their smashes which if you don't have the right grip on your smash you're never going to be able to get enough power to end the point so if it feels like you can't ever end the point when you get high balls you might have the wrong grip so why do we want the right grip on these shots because imagine you're a baseball player and you have this technique you try to throw the ball like this you're never going to be able to get that good at baseball because you can't throw the ball hard enough you can't compete with players that have the right technique because you are throwing it the wrong way so by getting the right technique and the right grip on your shots you're going to raise your ceiling in terms of how good you can get a pickle ball you're also going to improve a lot faster because when you have the right grip everything will just be easier so it'll be easier to make progress with the wrong grip you might hit plateaus to where you can't get any better because you're limited with what you can do on specific shots and it's not just about the specific grip you're using shot by shot I also see a lot of players that are just holding the paddle the wrong way on every shot so if you're the type of player that's choking up really high like you're playing pingpong or you have a hammer grip like this there's a lot of progress you can make by doing things properly which I'm going to explain first though I want to go through the names of the main grips that every pickall player has to know before I show you these grips though guys I just wanted to mention that right now we're trying to become the first channel in pickall history to reach 250,000 subscribers so if you want to help us make history make sure to subscribe to spread this video around and to spread around the best technique in pickall make sure to like it so that more players learn the right technique more players like playing and the level of our sport gets even [Music] higher so the first thing we need to keep in mind when we're thinking about our grip is that we always have a reference point on our hand so this little X right here is on where my finger my index finger meets my hand so the knuckle the side of my index knuckle is the reference point that we use to determine the grip and if you're worried about about these lines don't worry I'm going to talk about these later for now that we just need to worry about this index knuckle in terms of our positioning so looking at the paddle what makes each grip different is where my index knuckle lines up with each of these notches so if you see this paddle notice that I've colorcoded each of the main notches so that we can make it easier to understand what each script means and every pickle ball paddle has these same notches it's an octagon shape so there's eight sides and as you can see there's one big side in the middle this is the fattest side most grips have this rectangular shape might not always look exactly like this but there's always this bigger notch in the middle and then you have these two angled notches out to the side and I didn't color coat them but there's also a notch on the side that is perpendicular to this big Notch right here so the first grip that we need to cover and the most important grip in pickle ball and any racket sport is the Continental grip so what is the Continental grip so if I'm a righty if you're a lefty just flip everything that I do if you're righty you're going to line up this X on your index knuckle to this angled notch on the left so we're not worried about this big blue Notch we're worried about this red notch on the left and all I want to do is line up my index knuckle so it's right in the center of that Notch right now I have the Continental grip and a lot of people say this grip is like you're shaking someone's hand so when I have this grip it should be very easy to flip my paddle from side to side while keeping it straight up and down so the reason that we use the Continental grip is so that we can hit forehand and backhands without having to change it so that's the point of the Continental grip and by the way guys if you have a paddle nearby I highly recommend pulling it out so you can practice this as I'm coaching you through it the next thing I want to talk about which I mentioned is these other lines on my hand so when I have this Continental grip I don't want to be holding it with this Hammer grip it's especially important with the Continental grip that I angle my hand upwards a little bit so if you see this black line you want to have that in line with the grip and you don't want to have your knuckles in line to the grip so this is what's called a hammer grip you want to spread out your fingers a little bit so that your hand is angled upwards this gives you way more leverage on the paddle because your your fingers are spread out more so it's a lot easier to control the paddle this way so this is no this is yes the next grip that I want to talk about guys and don't worry I'm going to show you each shot that you need the Continental grip for later the next grip I want to talk about is the Eastern grip so the Eastern grip is where I do the same thing when lining up my index knuckle and I line it up with this big blue notch in the center so this is also an extremely common grip the second most important in pickle ball and all I have to do to do this is put that X right in the center of this blue Notch so if you see I'm lined up perfectly you want that same spread out fingers so that you have the same leverage so you don't want to be using the hammer grip here you want to have your fingers nice and spread out so that you have that leverage and I'm going to show you the shots for this later as well but before that I want to show you one last grip which is the Western grip so the Western grip is essentially the opposite of the Continental grip and it's where my index knuckle is lined up with this Notch right here so this is actually a grip that in a lot of shots you really don't want to use so I see a lot of players using this grip when they shouldn't there is a time for it which I'll show you but just know that this grip is when the index knuckle is lined up to the right for a righty of this blue Notch so for Lefty it would be the opposite but for righty we're lined up with this red Notch here on the other side of the Eastern Notch and this is what a western grip looks like so Within These grips aside from switching there's also some mistakes I see in terms of hand positioning so as I already mentioned you don't want to have the hammer grip you usually want your hand to be angled upwards a little bit like this the other mistake I see though is in regards to where your hand is positioned on the paddle so a lot of players come from ping pong and they give me this one which is okay but there's a lot of limitations to this so the reason that the paddle grip is a little bit longer is because when you're at the end of your paddle you get a lot more power than if you're up here and that's because of Leverage so when I swing my paddle like this from the bottom versus like this I'm not getting as much leverage I'm not going to be getting as much of the paddle weight behind the ball so if you're trying to be the best player you can you want to have your hand somewhere near the bottom of the grip so what I like to tell people is that your pinky should be somewhere near the bottom of the grip you don't want to have your pinky up higher like this ideally your pinky is within an inch of the bottom so it doesn't have to be right on the bottom but I recommend the bottom of your pinky being within an inch of this grip if not within a centimeter so personally I do it like this where it's right on the bottom I'm a tennis player though so I'm used to that if you're not used to it maybe you start off a little bit higher moral of the story is though you don't want to be way up here when you're where you're choking up on the paddle because you're just not going to get as much leverage also pretty much makes it impossible to hit a two-handed back end if you want to and you're just really not using the paddle grip if you want to feel like you're more choked up maybe you can get a paddle with a shorter grip but you definitely shouldn't be you know wasting this part of the grip and not using it to the best of your ability so highly recommend that you have this spread out finger so from this side you'll notice my index finger is actually not even touching my middle finger and I'm somewhat near the bottom with that spread out hand so for me this is almost taking up the whole grip and this is an elongated grip so I recommend using all this real estate because that helps you stay loose when you're hitting the ball so when I'm spread out like this I don't have to grip the paddle as tight versus if I was like this I have to really squeeze the paddle to get a good grip on it so make sure you're not doing these pingpong two fingers on the paddle face if you are doing that and you're really used to it maybe slowly start to work your way down don't it'll be really hard probably to go from here to here and be used to it but eventually I think and you see 99% of Pros with this grip because it's the best one and it makes it the easiest to play at the highest level so now guys I'm going to show you on each shot which grip you should be using and of course there's always going to be counter examples to what I'm saying because a lot of players have their own grip and they're still good but 99% of very good players do exactly what I'm about to show you now so Continental grip when do we use the Continental grip well when you're at the kitchen you want to be using the Continental grip pretty much every single shot so whether or not I'm dinking like this or hitting volleys I want to be using the Continental grip when up here because when I'm using a continental grip I can go side to side without having to make any changes and why that's advantageous at the net or at the kitchen is because my opponent when I'm up here can hit the ball at me and I need to be able to react very quickly so if I have an Eastern grip on my forehand and a continental grip on my backand sure I might be able to hit the ball really well but when my opponent blasts at my face it's going to be really hard for me to react because I'm thinking about so many different things you don't want to be thinking about changing your grip you just want to be thinking about reacting so when I when you're up here on almost every single shot you want to have that grip so you're ready to respond and you're ready to react so if you watch Pros 5os 4.5 players they're almost always going to have the Continental grip on all their dinks and their volleys also on their smashes which I'll show you later too but generally your voles and your dinks you should have the Continental grip if you're not comfortable with this you need to get used to it because to get to that 40 plus level you're going to probably want to be not changing your grip when you're hitting these shots from the back of the Court things start to change a little bit so when we're using our forehand drive so when I'm hitting my forehand hard like I just did there most players are using an Eastern grip so some people use a continental but I think you're probably better off using an Eastern cuz the Eastern on your foreign makes it a lot easier to generate Top Spin so this applies to your serve too because the technique on your forand drive and your serve are pretty much the same thing so when you hit these shots you want to make sure you have the Eastern grip so you can get under enough so that you can use Top Spin while still hitting through the ball but I don't recommend doing if you come from tennis you might want to have that Western grip but because we don't have strings and pickle ball this is probably too far under to where you're not going to be able to get enough spin to grip the ball so in tennis we can kind of grip the ball by brushing up on it with our strings and pick a ball if we brush too hard the ball just goes straight down the other thing that I don't really recommend doing is using a full Continental on your forehand because it makes it a really hard to hit Top Spin and if the ball's a little bit higher it's also just sort of challenging so if you have a full Continental you can still do a pretty good job there's players that can make this work if you get a higher shot it's a little bit awkward to hit with the Continental so I recommend using Eastern and I think that's probably the best grip for most players on the forehand or the ser on the backhand drive this is a little bit controversial and I think that there's multiple ways you can make this work but I generally say that players should have a high Continental so by high Continental I mean a continental grip that's rotated a little bit further away from Eastern and I think that this is the best grip to hit through the ball on a one-handed backand drive so what that looks like is this this is one of the grips that I see the most players getting wrong and when you're doing it wrong if you have a western grip it's pretty much impossible to hit the ball hard and get Top Spin so I see a lot of players doing it with a western or an Eastern they're doing a lot of stuff with their wrist you want to make sure that you are hitting with a high Continental because this allows you to hit hard through the ball and it allows you to get Top Spin so I made a full video on the back end so I'm not going to go super deep into that but just know this is probably the shot that requires the grip the most so if you have the wrong grip on your back end you're you're pretty much screwed you're not going to be able to hit it well and you're not going to be able to improve bit so highly recommend focusing hard on your grip there and trying the high Continental if you don't have it already the next shots we need to think about are our drops resets and emergency shots so whenever you're hitting a ball into the kitchen from the back of the court I recommend having the Continental I think it's the easiest to get under the ball with and even if you're hitting a Top Spin drop you don't need to be getting as much bruss as brush as a Top Spin drive so I think a continental is the best grip to have here and when I say emergency shots I mean when my opponent hits the ball really hard at me you want to have that Continental grip cuz just like when you're out the kitchen you don't want to have to be thinking about your grip when the ball's coming at you really fast this applies to when you're at the back and they're smashing it and you're just on the Dead stretch trying to get the ball back into the court you want to have a continental it even applies when you're hitting a reset so when I'm hitting a reset the ball's generally coming at me really fast I did a two-hander there but if he hits it to my forehand I want to have that Continental grip is it just Mak makes it a lot easier to react so if you're switching back and forth when you're at the kitchen and they're blasting the ball at you it's not going to be very easy to respond so just know on pretty much any defensive shot and pickle ball you probably have a continental grip it makes it the easiest to defend when it comes to smashes so when I'm going like this this is one shot where I think there's a few different ways you can do it so if you see former tennis players playing they're probably using a continental cuz they can do what's called pronation better when they do that which is where they go like this but a lot of P players even Pros I see using the Eastern grip so an Eastern smash looks more like this it's also maybe easier to hit an Eastern smash when you're leaning into the kitchen more so on this shot I think you can go either way what you don't want though is Western so if you're using a Western on your smash you're just you're not going to be able to get any sort of wrist snap into the ball which is going to limit your power and this is the one shot where you really want to go hard so you can end the point also if you're using a Western on your smash this is generally what we call the pancake which is good in a certain situation which I'm about to show you you but on the smash it limits your power I think it makes it a little bit harder to aim the ball and get angles cuz you can't hit it as high so don't use a Western on your smash choose between Eastern or Continental based on what's more comfortable for you and what you can get more power and consistency with so the one time you can use the Western is called the pancake shot or the Scorpion shot so a pancake shot is where I'm doing a Counterattack where I'm guarding my right shoulder by going like this so a lot of people have trouble with the Continental guarding the right shoulder so you're seeing some pros now do the pancake shot where they're guarding the right shoulder this is a little bit Advanced and I don't want you guys to get confused by changing from Continental to Western so only do this if you're really comfortable switching your grip back and forth but you can also do the Scorpion version which is more of a higher version where I'm ducking down more so a scorpion Counterattack looks more like this where I'm ducking down and sort of hitting a smash as a Counterattack so again very Advanced shot you have to be able to predict when they're going to hit it and where they're going to hit it so probably not something you're going to use very often but just wanted to make sure you knew the one time that I think using a western grip is a good idea so now guys I'm going to show you exactly how you can change between these grips effortlessly and there's two ways of doing that this is one and this is the other so I'm going to show you that before that though I want to talk about our paddle The Sweet Spot Pro so this is our first paddle we ever launched and the reason we made it is cuz we wanted to launch something that has all the best technology at a better price so last week in a review video this paddle was actually compared to the carbon 1X which is $223 paddle cuz it has all the same technology and it honestly feels very similar so if you're looking for something that's that good but you don't want to pay over $200 this is the paddle and if you use code grips you'll actually be able to get it for $120 so that's $20 off and there's nothing like this for that price on the market so if you want that upgrade highly recommend checking out our paddle The Sweet Spot Pro now though let's get into the grips so getting into how you change your grips there's two ways to do that the first way is where I'm doing it with one hand second way is where I'm doing it with two hands so generally you're going to be doing this between Eastern and continental and I'd say the advanced way of doing it is with one hand it's more efficient all you're going to do is you essentially Need To Shimmy your hand from Continental to Eastern and what's important is that you don't change the position of any of your fingers when you do this you just want to be able to do this fast without messing up your grip so if I'm going like this and my thumb's on top or my fingers are changing that's not good so you need to actually practice this if you want to get good at it and it's really easy to practice at home you can just grab the paddle practice is changing between Continental Eastern Continental Eastern Western and if you do this enough at home it's going to translate directly to the quartz but the easier way of doing this which a lot of players that are really good still do especially from the back of the court is using their left hand to position it so if I'm at the back of the court and I'm about to hit a forehand I can grab my padd with my left hand and get to the eastern and then by the time maybe they're hitting another shot to my back end I can grab my paddle again and change it to Western what's important though is you usually always want to be way waiting in the Continental grip because we're you know ready to respond to those fast shots with the Continental grip so you always want to be waiting with the Continental so a lot of the time you're changing from Continental to Eastern to hit a forehand and it's totally fine to use your left hand to do that but you could also do it with one hand you just need to make sure you get the hang of it because you don't want to be landing in a different spot every single time you want to be very consistent so you can practice with the exact same grip on every shot so yeah and when you're changing your grip guys it's going to be really challenging to get the hang of it so if you're changing you know the grip on your volleys or something from Western to Continental it's not going to be an overnight thing you need to hit a lot of balls and guys there's always going to be counter examples to really good players that aren't using the grips I showed you just now so if you want to argue with me in the comments about what you think is the best on each shot please do so I'd love to give you my opinion why I think these are the best but overall you see most good players using this setup that I just showed you so I highly recommend trying it if you don't have it already and I think in the long run maybe not in the short run but in the long run this will make you a much better player so if you want to learn guys how to use these grips to generate spin this next video I go over how to hit every spin in pickle ball on every single shot so make sure to go watch it