Wednesday – April 5
I don’t have any pickleball lined up today, other than my ladies drill group. Hopefully, I’ll get to drill some with them. Rather than be idle I got out of the house and did a little lunch time work out.
I got back on that elliptical and holy cow, I went so much faster than the first 2 times. I know that an elliptical is not running. But the smart me says, you can’t run, you have an artificial knee. So I go with the swooping motion of an elliptical and I still get my heart rate up. I change the level of intensity to get stronger and it felt good.
I did couple of different leg exercises and decided to do my shoulders today. Holy crap, shoulders are hard. Why are shoulders hard? I think I did 10 pounds and was barely able to crank out three sets of 12. I did the leg press and then I did the calf raises.
The way the machine is set up I can tell that my left heel, I guess it’s my heel, is super tight. I wish they had like a one of those wedges that you could stretch out that area.
I feel pretty good about getting to the gym and while I was there out there apparently decided to rain, A big storm is coming at 2 o’clock and is supposed to be scary. Hopefully we’ll all survive it.
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I finished up the ladies drill group, which was small tonight. We only had 7 people so I got to drill with one of the groups, which is exactly what I wanted. We did have 2 fellas there and they were a good mix for the group.
We focused on dinking and drops. I fed them balls because I like to change it up so they don’t get the same drills every time. Today I kind of elected to do speed feeding and let them work on specific shots. I wanted to have a little bit different pace, different movement and have them aim for a target. They all did well with it.
One gal beamed me right in the chest. I guess I was the target? It was hilarious. We finished up with the net zero and the third shot drop game and in the third shot drop game I actually drove a third shot. Talk about lack of focus. Geez, that was embarrassing.
But it was a good drilling group and good night. I’m super happy that I got to hit balls and that we all survived the storm.
Tuesday – April 4
Today I did some drilling. I was going to go to my favorite rec center today but my schedule didn’t really allow me to drill with my regular guy any other day so I scheduled a drilling day.
We want hard but we didn’t really practice anything except dinking and volleys.
I watched a video with volleys and wasn’t sure how it would work for us. They basically volley to each other doing what I would consider defensive slides in basketball, side to side on the court. Once you get to one end of the court, you start sliding the other direction, back and forth while hitting volleys.
We decided just to do volleys first and see how many volleys we could hit. I think we got 67. Thank goodness he counts because I could never count that high going as fast as we were. We decided to switch to the backhand and got 64, eventually.
We really thought we should be able to get 100 so we kept going and ended up with something in the 80s.
Once we did that we moved on to doing it while moving. The hardest thing about that was changing directions but man did it get the heart rate up fast. It was pretty entertaining honestly, because we were hitting the balls all over the place but we could still catch up to it and would keep going. It was pretty fun and I do think it helped with a lot of different things.
We were working on control, on moving and on our hand speed. It turned out to be a pretty fun thing to try and it did consume a little bit of our time.
The rest of the time we worked on dinking and, of course, I loved that. I had a very good day dinking and I hope that does not leave me anytime soon because I was fire with the dinks today.
