Health, Fitness, News & Fun for Picklers of All Ages

What's Cooking in the Kitchen This Week:

• 5 Ways To Win More Points Without Hitting a Better Shot

• How Many Rest Days Do Pickleball Players Actually Need?

• DRILL OF THE WEEK: The Lob-and-Cover Drill

• Fitness Expert Glenn Dawson: 5 Recovery Products Worth the Money

• What 6 Studies Say About Pickleball and Mental Health

• NEW SECTION: GEAR REVIEW: CRBN Pickleball Paddle Eraser

• Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis?

• Off The Court Storylines To Watch As The PPA Kicks Off The 2026-27 Season

• HUMOR: Explaining Pickleball Rules To A Beginner

• Coach Mary: When to Drop & When To Drive?

🥷SKILLS

5 Ways To Win More Points
Without Hitting a Better Shot

Players often assume improvement means adding something new. A better drop. A harder drive. A more aggressive serve. A sharper dink.

Sometimes that is exactly what helps. But plenty of points are won by players who are not hitting anything more difficult than the other team. They are simply using their existing shots more effectively.

Better positioning, earlier preparation, smarter targets, cleaner recovery, and more patience can all change the outcome of a rally without changing the stroke itself.

Here are five ways to win more points with the shots already in your game.

1. Get Into Position Earlier

A familiar shot becomes much easier when the body arrives on time.

Players who are late to the ball often compensate with the paddle. They reach, flick, lean, or swing bigger because their feet did not create enough space first. The shot may still go in, but the margin for error shrinks.

💪 Health & Fitness Section

How Many Rest Days Do
Pickleball Players Really Need?

You wake up the morning after pickleball and every step reminds you that yesterday was a good day on the court.

Your legs feel tight. Your hips are slow to loosen up. Getting out of a chair takes a little more effort than usual. It is a feeling almost every player recognizes, but it does not always mean the same thing.

Sometimes it is normal muscle soreness after exercise. Other times, the stiffness has more to do with what happened after the last game than what happened during it. Understanding the difference can help you recover more comfortably and get back on the court sooner.

Why It Happens

Pickleball asks a lot from the body. Every game is filled with quick starts, sudden stops, lunges, squats, and changes of direction. Even players who are on the court several times a week can wake up feeling stiff after a particularly long or demanding session.

One of the biggest reasons is simply doing more than the body has recently been asked to do. Maybe the games were especially competitive. Maybe friends kept arriving and it was too much fun to leave. A normal 90-minute session quietly turned into three hours.

That does not necessarily mean an injury occurred. It often means the body is working to recover from a workload that exceeded what it had been prepared for.

🥷 Drill of the Week:

The Lob & Cover Drill

You track down the lob, get underneath it, hit a solid overhead and start moving forward. But what happens when the ball you thought was finished comes right back? The Lob-and-Cover Drill is built around that moment, forcing you to recover, read the new court and handle whatever comes next.

See how to practice the overhead as the start of a sequence, not automatically the end of one.

 🏋️ STAYING FIT with
GLENN & BRIANNA

5 Recovery Products
Worth The Money

⚕️HEALTH NEWS

What 6 Studies Say About
Pickleball & Mental Health

A review of recent studies put a familiar pickleball feeling under the microscope: players often leave the court in a better mood than when they arrived. Across six pickleball studies involving 865 players, researchers found links to happiness, lower depression and stronger social ties, with one especially revealing clue emerging when players were forced to stop playing.

See what the research found about pickleball and mental health, and why the social side of the game may matter more than the workout.

⚙️ GEAR REVIEWS
 
CRBN Pickleball Paddle Eraser

NEW FROM PICKLER JUNCTION: The Pickler Junction Team’s reviews go above and beyond a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. They pull together independent testing, verified buyer feedback, community opinions, and objective performance data to show where the CRBN Pickleball Paddle Eraser shines, and where it may not be the right fit, depending on how you play. Note: Review will list MSRP, link will show sale price if available.

Shopping for new pickleball gear? Reply here and we’ll tell The PJ Team what to review next!

🤩 ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

Can Andre Agassi Enjoy
Pickleball More Than He
Hated Tennis?

Andre Agassi spent a career becoming one of tennis’s greatest players while openly hating the sport that made him famous. Now, at 55, he’s deep into pickleball, preparing obsessively, promoting the game, and trying to figure out whether he can compete without returning to the tortured mindset that followed him through tennis.

See why Agassi says pickleball has created a strange new feeling for him: caring deeply about winning, while somehow caring less.

 🏓 PRO NEWS

Off The Court Stories To
Watch As The PPA Kicks off
2026-2027 Season

The PPA is heading into 2026-27 with much more changing than the names on the podium. A controversial new ranking system is only one piece, with Tour Finals changes, disappearing bronze medal matches, expiring player contracts, rapid international expansion, and a new World Cup partnership all creating questions about where pro pickleball is headed next.

See the biggest off-court storylines that could reshape the PPA this season.

🤣 HUMOR

RALLY RUNDOWN:
LOCAL HIGHLIGHTS

CARY, NC: For Jessie Irvine, The Pickleball National Championships Is A Homecoming
HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, OH: Charity Pickleball Tourney Does Find Your Voice Now
LONGMEADOW, MA: JGS Lifecare Tournament Raises $139K For Longmeadow Senior Care
EMPORIA, KS: Pickle For A Purpose Sees Bigger Turnout And Raises Over $5,000 For June Bug Patient Assistance Fund
NEW BUFFALO, MI: Pickleball Paddle Battle Benefits NB Students' Japan Trip
BALTIMORE, MD: 
KANSAS CITY, MO: Kansas City Pickleball Event Rallies Support For 8 Local Organizations
WHITE OAK, TX: Pickleball Push: The Sport's Growing Demand In East Texas


DO YOU HAVE LOCAL NEWS TO SHARE? REACH OUT TO US AT
[email protected] and send us a link to your story!

  💪 When To Drop
& When To Drive

Coach Jess Covers When to Drop or Drive

Decision-Making is a question I often get from my advanced drill classes. They often ask: “What should I have done in that situation?” Coach Jess covers 6 different decisions, but we will just focus on the drop versus the drive for the third shot. Check out the attached video.

1.  Preference- what are you comfortable with?

· Do you like to drive it? Do you have great topspin?

· Do you love your third shot drop? Slice, Topspin, Drip?

· Choose what you love to do. 

2. Court positioning

· If the ball is in the front part of the transition zone and it sits up, this is a great ball to drive.

· If the ball is lower, you should drop.

· If the ball is deep and sits up, you can drive it.

· If the ball is deep but is low, you should drop it.

3. Ball height and pace

· If the ball sits up, you can drive from up close or at the baseline, but the closer you are, the less power you should use. 60 – 70 percent. More topspin.

· If the ball is low, you should drop it, giving you time to move up to the NVZ. This goes for up close and at the baseline.

Things to Consider:

• Do you have slice and topspin? These skills will help you with execution of the third shot drive or drop. Low to high, use your hips and shoulders, finish with your knuckles to the sky.

• Your mobility: you need to move back to execute a third shot drop, it must be executed in front of your body, at knee height. If you have mobility issues, practice executing from the transition zone, since you will need more time to get to the NVZ.

• Your physical abilities: you need to bend your knees, use your hips and shoulders, and use a short backswing and a longer follow-through to execute good third shot drops.

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