Pickleball Footwork for Beginners – Think Boxing

Beginners often don’t even realize 90% of their mistakes come from one thing: bad footwork.

I was trying to explain pickleball footwork succinctly to my cousin who has no racket sport experience. I couldn’t really get to him until I said think of footwork like “boxing”.

Just like Boxing:

1. Be on your toes.
   • Ever get caught “flat-footed”? That’s because you are on your heels. So you get stuck on the ground and can’t move your feet. You end up leaning and over reaching to one side with your arms and hitting a bad shot.
2. Bend your knees
   • Bend your knees and get low. Lower center of gravity gives you more control and helps you say balanced.
3. Lean forward.
   • In boxing when you want to throw a hard power punch, lean forward. In pickleball when driving and returning, lean forward.
     • In boxing of course, you don’t want to lean forward too too much because it’ll put your head in range.
       • But in pickleball you can lean forward even more than that. Lean like a Spartan holding a shield.
         • Lean forward, with your chest forward.
4. Power comes from hip and leg, not arm.
   • “A recent study found that only approximately 25% of power is generated from the arms while 35% is generated from pushing legs into the ground. 
   • Plus the other  40% is generated by hip rotation which is another aspect of footwork as well
   • Basically, feet and hips are responsible for generating 75% of the power in your punches.” https://boxrope.com/blogs/boxing/boxing-footwork-don-t-throw-a-single-punch-until-you-get-this-right
5. Get in the pocket
   • In boxing you want to throw a punch when you are in the pocket. You aren’t throwing punches trying to make contact when you are far away from your opponent. If opponents are out of range and you throw your punch trying to hit, the hit even if it connects won’t be hard.
   • Same in pickleball, move your feet to the ball FIRST and THEN swing. Don’t swing when the ball is not in the pocket.
     • Imagine every time you swing at the ball when you are out of position, you get countered and hit in the face.
6. Take extra small steps.
   • Don’t only take big steps. Especially as beginner, take lots of small steps to get to the right spot. Err on the side of taking too many steps. Look at Pickleball pro James Ignatowich.
   • If you take too big of step or don’t take the needed steps and are out of position? You miss hit the ball and lose.
   • If you take a ton of small steps, what’s the worse that can happen? You get tired. Good, you play pickleball to get exercise in anyway.
   • “Good footwork is small footwork. Inches matter.” – https://youtu.be/yJBTjxVtLME?t=57
7. No backswing
   • In boxing you aren’t winding up with a huge backswing too punch. Same in pickleball, keep your backswing short and in front of your peripheral vision.

Drills:

Solo Drills:

• Look up boxing footwork and movement drills.