Key Highlights
- With elite players adapting to new equipment on the sport’s biggest stages, questions have emerged about how non-professional players should approach similar transitions. That topic came into focus during the Carvana PPA Masters, when broadcasters asked Ben Johns whether he had advice for amateur players adjusting to a new paddle.
- Johns, one of the most accomplished players in the sport, emphasised that adaptation is primarily a matter of repetition rather than overthinking immediate results.'It’s about putting in the muscle memory': Johns“First and foremost, like anything in pickleball, it’s all about repetition and getting a lot of reps because your body just naturally adjusts a lot better than your mind does,” Johns explained.
- “It’s about putting in the muscle memory, and getting used to it is mostly about repetition.”Johns added that frequent play allows players to recognise how a new paddle responds in different situations.
- However, he noted that not all adjustments happen automatically, particularly when switching to equipment with a different construction or balance.“Outside of that, I’d say when things are constructed a little bit differently, sometimes you do need to make mechanical changes based on the paddle switch,” Johns noted.
- “Think of stuff in particular that feels weird or isn’t working quite as well, you can usually think through why this might be.
