Today I want to talk to you about how to efficiently move with your partner. A lot of the old school mentality of movement is to tether with each other, and I’ve often heard it referred to as maybe the Bunny hop, or some type of shuffling movement.
The concept used to be to move to get the ball in front of your hips and your shoulders. The problem with that is for those of you who have bad knees, bad backs and all that kind of stuff, like I do, it puts a lot of strain on your knees, your ankles and your joints. Essentially all that friction in your movement, that’s really troublesome for us.
So, let’s think of it in a simple way, so both of us are partners and what we’re going to do is just kind of put our weight in our toes. This is what I want you to think about imagine you have a button underneath your big toes, we’re going to press the buttons and that’s going to actually pop up the heels.
OK now what we’re going to do is pretend the ball is on the left side of the court, so we’re going to put our weight into our left leg. Now we’re going to pretend the ball is on the right side of the court and now we’re going to shift.
So a lot of people they track with their paddle, however if you turn your hips and your toes what you’re doing is keeping the ball in front of you. That actually tracks the ball to your paddle so the ball is your 12:00 o’clock.
So if I am turning here and the ball is cross court and now the ball comes to this spot, I can now turn and step and my toes, and my knees are bending properly. See how my weight comes off this direction, if I want to step this direction that now covers my court. What it does is it keeps the ball in front of you. Instead of shuffling over like this, to take that same ball, all I’m going to do differently is turn and get my paddle out in front. Now I’m engaging my weight and pushing my body behind the ball, but more importantly I’m saving my knees.
Anybody can work on this, every single level should be working on moving more efficiently with their partners, because we all want to play this game just a little bit longer.
