Pickleball forever

Pickleball is easy to learn, but difficult to master.

As avid pickleball players ourselves, we know that playing pickleball well requires a multitude of physical and mental skills, physical endurance and mental stamina. And, whatever your age and skill level, you know you want to play well. It’s just more fun that way!

Whether you are competing in tournaments, trying to progress from 3.5 to 4.0 or 4.5, or just trying to be the best version of yourself on the court and have fun, you want to be at your physical and mental peak.

The physical skills that are important in pickleball are speed, agility, balance, hand-eye coordination, power and cardiovascular fitness and endurance. To be able to return tricky dinks or shots driven at your feet, you need agility, balance, and coordination. To put away smashes with authority, return deep drives with speed, recover lobs, or to skillfully place dropshots in the kitchen from any position on the court, you need all of these skills, plus strength and power in your legs, core, arms, wrists and hands.

To sustain these abilities over the course of a match, you need physical endurance, including cardiovascular endurance and the ability of your muscles to repeatedly execute quick and accurate movements without tiring.

The mental abilities and skills play as important a part in pickleball as the physical skills. If you were ever soundly beaten by much older and slower players, as we have been, or have beaten much younger and fitter players yourself, you know that quick reflexes, and rapid decision making about where to be and where to place the ball, are paramount in winning pickleball matches and having fun while doing it!

Pickleball, as all racquet and paddle sports, requires instantly reading the trajectory of the ball, the movements of your opponents and partners, and thinking through the tactical challenges on the fly. Do I dink, drop, drive, or lob, given my position on the court and those of my opponents and my partner?

Then, there is anticipating what shots your opponents are going to attempt to beat you, given your return and your position on the court, reading the spin on the shots, and calling outs correctly. And then there is the score-keeping! Are we on the first serve or the second??

How do you improve your game?

First, as they say about getting to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice. Playing often, with a variety of players of different skills levels, and with a purpose to focus on honing a particular skill, is important.

However, with aging it becomes more difficult to learn new skills and to sustain mental and physical effort.

Last but not least, you need physical and mental energy to sustain high levels of physical skill and mental focus during long rallies and matches. To become a better pickleball player, you need to play it day after day, for hours, often in hot and humid weather under searing sunlight.

Unfortunately, Father Time waits for no man or woman, and these physical and mental abilities and endurance decline in every decade after about age 30. Beyond the third decade in life, the younger your brain is functionally, regardless of your chronological age, the more quickly you can react and solve the complex spatial and tactical equations on the court.

What can be done about aging?

As neuroscientists and diehard pickleball players, we know that reaction time and processing speed decline as we age, as do agility, physical speed, power, and endurance. While playing pickleball is itself a great way to slow down the decline with aging, there are biochemical processes at play in aging that make us physically and mentally slower and lessen our endurance with every passing year.

These processes are present in every living organism and have to do with a critical chemical called NAD+ (which stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) that mitochondria in our cells, and indeed the cells of every living organism, use for energy. Without it, we would die in mere moments.

Unfortunately, aging involves a steady reduction in the levels of NAD+, and therefore in our energy levels, beginning in our 20s. At age 50, on average we have about half the level of NAD+ we had in our 20s. This decline, aging scientists believe, is due to this reduction in NAD+ levels, which make the cells in our cardiovascular system, lungs, liver, and brain less effective and susceptible to the diseases of aging - cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment and age-related dementias, and diabetes.

The problem is, NAD+ is not easily assimilated by the body via the oral administration route, such as pills.

However, recent scientific studies have shown that the building blocks of NAD+, called NAD+ precursors, are effective in restoring NAD+ levels and, in effect, turning back the clock.

The most effective of the NAD+ precursors is NMN, which stands for nicotinamide mononucleotide. In scientific studies, NMN has been shown to significantly improve cardiovascular health, cognitive and spatial reasoning, and physical endurance.