You are playing Pickleball regularly and you are comfortably improving your game. Your graph of skill seems to go up for a period of time and then suddenly, it starts falling down.
It’s not a plateau, it’s a clear downward fall.
Till the moment you were hitting cleaner shots, understanding strategies better. Then slowly you start losing confidence with every game and it makes you anxious.
No matter how hard you try, your game does not feel like improving.
Many Picklers go through this stage, and the good thing is this phase is not going to last forever unless you understand what exactly is going on.
Your brain has not suddenly erased the Pickleball memory, but there is something happening in the background which you are not able to figure out.
Here I will address exact issues that cause degradation of your game and how you can overcome it. So let’s start.
Are You Taking Enough Off from the Game?
You may feel like you are losing the skills but in reality it is overloading. The Pickleball skills are easy to learn and stay with you for long comparatively to over games.
However if you are under fatigue or stress, you won’t be able to perform your best even though you are skilled. In such situations, you will find your performance has dropped suddenly.
This is why I always recommend the players to take off days regularly. It’s not always about volume and intensity, but you need to give your body time to rest and recover too. With bad recovery, your timing, reaction speed and decision clarity will be affected.
Timing is an inseparable part of Pickleball. With your body feeling heavy due to bad recovery, your response becomes sluggish resulting in poor execution of shots.
Even though your body and muscles are not feeling sore, the load on the nervous system can still be there. The fatigue will show up when you are on court where you start feeling you are getting worse at your game.
Many top level players have experienced this as their games are high intensity and focused.
The good thing is, it’s not going to last forever. It may have happened suddenly but with the right approach you can regain control quickly.
The wrong approach would be adding extra sessions to fix your game. Already your body is overloaded, and the extra sessions will make it even worse.
How Nervous System Fatigue Affects Your Timing
As I said earlier, when your nervous system has been overloaded, you will notice bad timing and poor shot execution. And in Pickleball timing matters a lot.
You won’t be able to identify nervous system fatigue easily. When you wake up in the morning, you will be feeling completely fine with no soreness in your body. However, the fatigue is working in the background, and it shows up on the court.
What happens on the court?
- The ball will not contact the paddle at the right point.
- The time to reach to kitchen line feels longer
- You find an easy shot coming towards you but miss it somehow
- You start doubting yourself and think that your opponent might be better prepared than you
It will become worse if you are under pressure during the tournament or stressed. That’s the reason why many advanced players feel their timing is completely messed up during close matches.
What you can do to fix it during crucial matches,
If you are participating in a tournament, you will have to play multiple matches per day. This surely stresses your body and nervous system. There is very limited time between matches to recover properly. But if you are making following mistakes then you are negating your chances of winning
- Don’t focus on DUPR. It’s just another number and it adds up to your stress
- It’s mandatory to perform mini warm-ups in between the matches, they keep your nervous system awake
- Try to rest properly for a week with limited or no sessions before tournament, the preparation window is already gone and whatever you do in the last week won’t add up to your skills
Effects of Practice Games Vs Training
So when your skills feel like declining, it feels obvious to play more Pickleball. So you go to the court and start playing more games with different opponents. But here’s where most Picklers are going in the wrong direction.
When you are playing a match, it is all about scoring points to win the game. If you can’t score against your opponent you lose. The actual game doesn’t fix your weak shots or help you sharpen your existing skills. In addition to that, during the game you are under pressure to win and you keep on playing the same shots that you are playing for long without understanding why you are losing the game.
In such a situation, if you are already fatigued, you’ll notice your movements have become slow. Body and mind co-ordination loses when you want to target a particular shot with particular length of swing and power and you fail.
You are not training yourself to fix weak shots and keep on committing the same mistake over and over. This is where Picklers start saying that they are losing their skill. Adding more games doesn’t make you better.
You must train yourself to play shots intentionally.
In order to play intentionally, you should have a clear target skill in mind before every training session. Focus on that skill throughout the session.
Repeat this over and over and your game starts improving. While training, you can work individually on each of timing, placement and speed leading to developing intentional and effortless shots.
Are you excessively Obsessed with DUPR Numbers?
One common feeling has been reported by many players who are advancing in their game is that when they notice their DUPR has reached a meaningful number they start becoming anxious. If the number is going up they feel good and if it goes down, they become sad.
It is not a bad idea to track your DUPR, the real problem is when DUPR numbers start affecting your emotions. You shift the focus from your weaknesses to the number that is merely telling you where you stand compared to others.
Someone who is too obsessed with their rating will be playing “not to lose” instead of playing to win. Without realizing you will get into defensive mode instead of playing aggressive, you stop trusting your instincts and become very cautious about shot selection.
You miss opportunities to score and after the game you feel that your skills are diminishing.
The mental pressure and outcomes of the match further create self-doubt in you. You feel your body becoming stiff and the shots getting missed without even realizing what’s going on inside your mind.
Your Skills Vanish During Pickleball Tournaments
The tournament plays are where many players report temporary breakdown of their skill level.
What exactly happens during Tournament play that your skill suddenly feels like it has disappeared?
It’s not always that your opponent is too good at the game. Your flaws and weaknesses were already there and during Tournament matches they become more evident.
There are multiple matches on the Tournament day. Playing more than one matches with minimal rest and without recovery causes physical fatigue.
So the first few matches might look like you are doing great but as the day progresses, the fatigue and mental pressure takes over your game and you start committing more mistakes.
The mental pressure of playing tournaments reduces the margin of error. The shots that seem to be effortless during rec matches become difficult to play all of sudden.
How Recovery Can Affect Your Performance
As a beginner, you feel like you are learning fast and your skills seem to be improving faster. However after your level rises, you need to pay attention to micro issues such as recovery.
At intermediate to advanced level, recovery becomes absolutely necessary as your game will mostly include faster rallies, higher intensity and extra load on your nervous system
For advanced players every rally demands timing, speed, and coordination. And without adequate recovery, sleep and rest days these things stop working. Recovery helps to restore energy and keeps the mind calm during the game.
Those who ignore the recovery assume they’ve reached the plateau. But in reality their confidence often returns after a short break not by making any technical changes.
Treat recovery as part of training and you will see your game improving.
Conclusion
To gain your skills back, you definitely don’t have to play more matches or work harder. The intensity of the game should be increased gradually by paying attention towards the core issues. These core issues can be any of these
- CNS fatigue
- Bad Recovery
- Overtraining
- Obsession with DUPR
- Tournament Pressure
Once you understand which of these things is actually sabotaging your performance, you can start working on fixing that issue by
- Reducing overload
- Taking good rest
- Prioritizing Practice over Rec Games
- Focusing on Game play rather than DUPR
- Training your body and mind together
Have you made a comeback after your skills degraded? What was core issue was holding you back?
