Hand Speed – What is It?

Due to my table tennis background, since starting pickleball I had faster hands than basically anyone else on the court. People on the court have often commented on my hand speed and asked how to get fast hands.

Most people think hand speed is just pure reaction time, they think how fast your hands are is purely based on your reaction time. It’s not.

So what is hand speed? It’s actually multiple things:

• Anticipation
  • knowing what’s going to happen, what could happen, limiting the options.
  • For example: if you speed up and get countered down hard, that means the opponent had that hands sitting there waiting for you to hit into it.
    • You got “Read”, that’s anticipation not reaction time.
    • The opponent anticipated where you were going to hit the ball, and put there paddle right there. And you speed up right into there paddle.
• Reaction time
  • If you didn’t expect the ball to come, and you instantly put up your paddle and got the ball, that’s reaction time.
    • Example: when I’m anticipating a speed up to my backhand, I put up my backhand up ready to counter. And the opponent attacks my forward and I flip my paddle and block it back with forehand. That’s reaction time, NOT anticipation.
• Strength
  • How far back do you need to pull back to hit a hard counter back at opponent. The less far back you need to pull back, the more time you get to hit the shot. The bigger your stroke, the slower your hands.
  • If you watch pro JW Johnson play, he flicks every ball in hands battle using mostly his wrist, there is very little swinging movement.
• Dexterity (hand-eye coordination)
  • For example, my left-hand and right-hand both have the exact same anticipation, reaction time, but my non-dominate hand isn’t as good as my right-hand because it doesn’t have the dexterity to get the paddle to the right place.

These are the 4 things you need to work on to get increase your hand speed.