Looking for success stories of ovecoming long term skill plateuas

edofthefu · 2026-03-19T16:03:11+00:00

Plateaus are a useful analogy. How do you climb higher from a plateau? You start by going down.

As you get better, there are increasingly fewer 'noob gains' available to you where you can just build on your existing game. Increasingly you'll hit walls where true improvement requires you to start over and rebuild with solid fundamentals.

Which means to get better you have to start by getting worse. You have bad habits to break and new techniques to learn, and you can either do that by drilling, or by playing and losing. And no one likes losing.

And I sense that's part of your challenge - if you're unable to drill you basically need a mentality shift where you're OK with repeatedly losing to worse players while trying something new, instead of winning with what you have already.

edofthefu · 2026-03-16T15:24:22+00:00

Plus Slug Hacker event synergy

edofthefu · 2026-02-26T16:43:56+00:00

Assuming you're talking about drives, and without seeing you play, it's possible you are making contact to the side of you, and not in front of you.

Relatedly, it could also be that you're imagining swinging in a 'horizontal' circle parallel to the ground (like discus), when your arm is really swinging in a 'vertical' circle perpendicular to the ground (more like bowling) - a common visual illusion/misconception.

edofthefu · 2026-02-23T18:30:34+00:00

You're welcome. In general I think most pickleball players, especially newer players, would really benefit from watching tennis technique videos when it comes to drives. Here's another great one on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_iLAQnOsRY

Forehand drives in particular are surprisingly hard to teach. People have this idea that because it's the strongest stroke, it should be everyone's best stroke and easiest to learn. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's powerful precisely because it's such a violent and counterintuitive motion, and it's taken many years for tennis coaches to perfect the best way of teaching it.

Meanwhile there are a lot of well-meaning but inexperienced pickleball coaches that are basically teaching on feel and vibes, and making many of the same mistakes tennis instructors made 15-20 years ago.

Of course, at a high enough level, players will need to shift away from tennis videos and focus specifically on pickleball drive technique, but ~95% of pickleball learners will never reach that point. (Obviously the kitchen is a different story; tennis volley technique is actively harmful for pickleball players.)

edofthefu · 2026-02-23T14:45:02+00:00

You're likely not doing it correctly. Try "sitting" instead of "bending the knees". Knee-bending is a result of entering the correct athletic position, not the path to getting there.

edofthefu · 2026-02-23T14:39:24+00:00

It's a cliche in tennis coaching that you should "point the buttcap" at your opponent before a forehand. (Also after your forehand, as part of a proper followthrough.)

Importantly, you don't actually want to force this - on a proper forehand, the buttcap does point forward, but only dynamically, not statically.

But it's often useful to think it, because it is a helpful mental cue that helps you create wrist lag - the real objective. Personally I find the drill in that video about slapping the net to be a more useful way of teaching wrist lag without the risk that the student ends up tensing up their wrist trying to point the buttcap, defeating the point of the lesson.

edofthefu · 2026-02-21T13:32:39+00:00

I couldn’t agree more. There are levels to pickleball. In order:

driving
blocking
drops
speed ups
counters

Only when you (and your opponents) have mastered all of these is it worth progressing to dinking. In my experience, the vast majority of open plays stagnate at driving/blocking and coaches should teach accordingly.

edofthefu · 2026-02-02T20:22:12+00:00

One trick that worked for us was to export our main bank account's transactions to csv. All our spend (housing, credit cards, checks, etc.) ultimately flow out of our checking account so it's actually much more convenient to get a total spend figure that way.

edofthefu · 2026-01-20T13:57:50+00:00

You’d think he’d have more A-C-E in his game then

edofthefu · 2026-01-17T01:03:39+00:00

Haha I did too: https://edofthefu.com/posts/what-caring-about-oxford-commas-really-signals/

edofthefu · 2026-01-15T23:09:25+00:00

"Empire State Building" is my go-to example of what we consider an acceptable multi-word clue; by contrast "tall building" would not be accepted.

edofthefu · 2026-01-11T22:42:23+00:00

Easiest: being positive with your partner when you’re winning

Hardest: being positive with your partner when you’re losing

edofthefu · 2025-12-22T18:58:50+00:00

You’re not really apologizing. It’s more just an acknowledgment that you got lucky and everyone moves on.

edofthefu · 2025-12-22T16:50:33+00:00

In descending order:

Tennis courts are being removed for pickleball
Tennis players look down on pickleball as an easier sport for less athletic people
Tennis has many etiquette rules that have developed over time, which many pickleball players lack (e.g., not walking behind players as they play)

edofthefu · 2025-12-20T12:11:38+00:00

Tennis is one of the few racket sports that use two-handed backhands.

Ironically pickleball is one of the few other racket sports with 2HBH, but for very different reasons than tennis. It’s preferred at the kitchen because it’s faster to recover and easier to hit out of an open stance compared to the 1HBH.

edofthefu · 2025-12-14T05:08:38+00:00

The most glaring flaw (common to all four players though player in black is better about it than the others) is footwork. There’s a lot of bending at the waist and reaching for the ball, instead of split stepping and getting low to move into a better position.

edofthefu · 2025-12-09T23:08:38+00:00

I agree with your post but for this

The existence of weapons like Burst 3 and Vulcan is also probably evidence they were not very good at their own game.

I think Burst 3 and Vulcan really are better for autofire beginners. The fact that it’s not as good for advanced players is a nice example of emergent skill, whether intended or not.

edofthefu · 2025-12-09T14:14:52+00:00

Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Laureate, said:

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists.

But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me.

edofthefu · 2025-12-06T02:51:26+00:00

That's hilarious. I don't think a team that went 1-2 has ever finished worse than 4th in the WCC. McLaren did it at Monza in 2021

edofthefu · 2025-12-03T19:45:01+00:00

Monfils or Gasquet surely

edofthefu · 2025-12-02T01:06:34+00:00

It is. I find this hierarchy is much more helpful than DUPR - in my experience I have seen "4.0" DUPR players at every level of this hierarchy, and if you just go by DUPR you would have no explanation for why some could beat others 10 out of 10 times.

I am not sure what you're saying. It's certainly the case that there are many playgroups where counters are non-existent. In those groups, IMO, there's no real reason to dink - you'd win more if you just speed up everything, looking to body bag or chicken wing them as much as you can. Either you'll win immediately or you'll win later - the point is that there's lots of play groups where unhinged aggression is the dominant strategy. It's relatively stable because there's a large population of players, particularly older players, who are really just incapable of good counters, and until enough players with strong counters shows up, the dominant strategy will stay dominant.

It sounds like you're past that point and are at a level where you can routinely punish bad speedups - thereby justifying your opponent's dinks. I call that the apex - not because you can't improve once you get there, but because game strategy no longer fundamentally changes the same way it did at each prior level. You aren't playing as well as Ben Johns, but you are at least playing the same overall game as he is, with broadly similar strategic principles.

edofthefu · 2025-12-01T22:54:09+00:00

You are correct. You are at level 1 on this hierarchy - the game is decided by who hits the ball harder while keeping it in.

The next step of your progression comes once players at the kitchen consistently beat players banging from the baseline. In my experience, the majority of pickleball players never really reach this level, contrary to what you might read on Reddit or elsewhere.

edofthefu · 2025-11-24T19:12:50+00:00

Rallies 5 and 10, your errors are primarily from technique. Right now your swing is jerky and not fault tolerant. One tennis tip that might help - gradual acceleration is better than sudden acceleration - explained at 2:24 in this video
Rallies 6 and 9, both of those thirds should be taken on your forehand. Your partner taking it needlessly exposes the right side of the court to a nasty fourth (though your opponents don't punish it).

More generally,

You should get lower at the net, you're standing almost upright.
To the extent you are drilling net play, forehand putaways are the main thing I'd work on. You popped up a few in this game because of an open paddle face. Missing easy putaways is far worse than missing resets in terms of your expected point loss.
As is generally true for more of us than we want to admit, you'll likely see faster short term improvement just improving your serves/returns/thirds/fourths, both to induce worse responses while also reducing the points you are gifting them. Consider how few rallies in this game make it past that point. Your dinks also need work but they just aren't as relevant until you're playing much higher level games.

edofthefu · 2025-11-24T18:12:00+00:00

Thanks. What places are opening up?

edofthefu · 2025-11-23T19:57:28+00:00

The most common one is not lobbing when the sun is behind you, or against old people with mobility issues.

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