Where Hand Speed Actually Comes From

Updated October 7, 2026

Ask four professionals where hand speed comes from and three of them will tell you the wrist has almost nothing to do with it. The fourth is one of the fastest hands on tour.

Hands battles at the kitchen line decide more points than any other exchange in doubles, and they are the part of the game recreational players most often try to fix with effort rather than mechanics. The instinct is to swing harder and faster. Almost every pro on record says that is exactly backwards.

What they do not agree on is what to do instead. There is a real, documentable split running through 2026’s coaching content about which joint produces the speed — and a second, more interesting argument about whether you should be initiating at all.

The case for the wrist

Hayden Patriquin sits fourth in the PPA world ranking and is marketed by the tour on exactly this quality. Asked by pickleball.com in August 2025 how he generates his speed, he was unambiguous: “A lot of people use a lot of shoulder, but I use more wrist, and I think that’s the way I get a ton of power.”

His setup is conventional — feet about hip distance apart, small bend in the knees, paddle held in front of the body on the backhand side. The thing he stresses beyond mechanics is recovery speed: being ready for the next ball is, in his framing, most of what fast hands actually is.

That last point turns out to be the one everybody agrees on. The wrist is where it falls apart.

The three who say the wrist stays out of it

Connor Garnett, described by The Dink as a top-ten professional, gives the opposite instruction in as many words: rotate with your palm and knuckles, not your wrist. Forehand side, you push the palm toward the ball. Backhand side, you lead with the knuckles. His image for it is pushing a bowling ball that is sitting on a shelf — a movement that comes from the body behind the hand, not a flick at the end of it.

Blaine Hovenier, a touring pro The Dink places in the top 25 in men’s and mixed, lands in the same place from a different direction. His rule is that the wrist stays stable during an exchange and only moves if you are the one initiating the attack. Everything else is a compact punch forward. His phrase for the size of the motion is the most memorable coaching line of the year: “You want to give them a nice little love tap.”

Tyson McGuffin, a multiple-time national champion, is the most absolute of the three. Teaching his tip-down technique in September 2026, he said of the wrist: “the wrist does not flex. It does not flick. It holds.”

Three against one, then — and the one is the player with the fastest hands. That is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

What is probably going on

Our read is that Patriquin and the others are describing different phases of the same exchange, and the disagreement is partly about vocabulary.

Hovenier’s rule contains the reconciliation: the wrist stays quiet when you are reacting, and moves when you are initiating. Patriquin is a player whose whole game is built on initiating first. Garnett, Hovenier and McGuffin are all describing what to do when the ball is already coming at you fast, which is the situation a 3.5 or 4.0 player is in for most of a hands battle.

There is a useful bridge in Ben Johns’ instruction on the topspin drive — a different shot, so do not blend it into this argument carelessly. He allows a little wrist but says to lean on the twist of the hips for power “because that’s much more consistent.” That is the whole principle in one sentence. The wrist is available. It is just not repeatable enough to be your engine.

Practical version: if you are defending, lock it. If you are the one starting the fight, you have earned the flick.

The second argument: should you speed up at all?

This one is sharper, because both positions come from players currently winning.

Richard Livornese Jr. is unambiguous that aggression wins: the team that speeds up first, in his framing, usually wins the match. His advice when it is not working is not to stop — it is to change the location or the pace and keep hunting neutral balls to accelerate. His governing arithmetic: find a pattern you win 55 to 60 per cent of the time and you win the match.

Anna Bright, second in the PPA women’s world ranking, argues for restraint as a skill in its own right. Breaking down her own decisions for The Dink in August 2026, she describes passing up a speed-up because the ball was too low to generate real power and the opponents were set and ready — pushing a crosscourt dink instead. Her governing question is not “can I attack this?” but whether the decision “maintains my advantage, or risks giving it away.”

She is also specific about direction in a way most coaching is not. Jammed on a low ball near her body, she went middle rather than up the line — deliberately, to keep herself positioned on her forehand side for whatever came back.

These are not really opposites. Livornese is describing a strategic posture across a match; Bright is describing shot selection inside a single rally. But if you have ever lost a game by attacking every third dink, Bright is the one talking to you.

Where to aim it

Garnett is the most concrete pro on record about the target. He wants three things true before he attacks: the ball is at roughly knee level or higher, he can drive his weight through it, and his court position supports it. His default target is a spot just right of centre, roughly where the opponent’s paddle already sits, forcing a forehand-or-backhand decision they have to make in a fraction of a second.

He treats pace as a tool rather than a goal, varying it by opponent instead of hitting everything as hard as he can. Beyond that he works three lines: straight, deliberately slowed with spin against a weaker attacking stroke; middle, the conservative opener against someone unfamiliar; and diagonal, which he treats as the advanced option.

Defending the one you did not start

McGuffin’s tip-down principle is the most transferable defensive idea in the current coaching cycle. Drop the paddle tip toward the court before the ball arrives rather than as a reaction to it. His argument is that it gives you a cleaner contact point and a natural upward path, so you can lift the ball safely instead of scrambling to square a late paddle face. When he is defending rather than attacking, he targets shallow — near the kitchen line — not deep.

His coaching cue while drilling is worth repeating to yourself mid-game: “less, less, less.” Stop reaching for the ball.

Hovenier adds two habits that cost nothing to adopt. Recover the paddle to the centre of your chest after every contact rather than leaving it where the last shot finished. And use one neutral grip from the baseline to the kitchen — no switching mid-exchange, because there is no time.

The drills they actually name

Patriquin gives two. Rapid-fire volley exchanges at the kitchen line, hitting as many as fast as both players can manage. And a figure-eight pattern with a partner: you hit a forehand to their backhand, their backhand comes to your backhand, and you go back to their forehand. The point of the second one is that it forces both wings under time pressure rather than letting you groove your stronger side.

Garnett’s addition is not a drill but a discipline: set your paddle position from the opponent’s ball momentum, then react once the ball has actually left their paddle. That is anticipation as opposed to guessing, and the distinction is the difference between covering a speed-up and being wrong-footed by one.

What to take from this

• Shrink the motion before you try to speed it up. Every pro here, including Patriquin, describes a compact movement. None of them describes a swing.
• Lock the wrist when you are reacting. The three-against-one split resolves cleanly along the reacting-versus-initiating line, and you spend most of a hands battle reacting.
• Aim at the paddle-side hip, not the open court. Garnett’s just-right-of-centre target beats a bigger swing at a wider gap.
• Ask Bright’s question before you pull the trigger. Does this keep my advantage or risk it? A dink that holds a winning position is not a passive shot.
• Get the paddle back to your chest. The most common cause of losing the second ball is finishing the first one badly.

For the shot that puts you at the kitchen in the first place, see our breakdown of what four pros say about the third shot. Current standings for every player named here are on our Player Rankings page, and the wider tour coverage lives in the Pro section. If your paddle feels slow in exchanges, the number to look at is swing weight, not static weight — we explain the difference in this guide.

Sources. Every quotation above was published by the outlet named beside it, transcribing video its own team recorded — we did not conduct these interviews. Hayden Patriquin, pickleball.com, 28 August 2025. Connor Garnett on fast-hands mechanics, The Dink, 28 August 2026, and on speed-up strategy, The Dink, 18 February 2026. Blaine Hovenier, six hands-battle habits, The Dink, 18 June 2026. Tyson McGuffin, tip-down dinking, The Dink, 1 September 2026. Ben Johns on the topspin drive, pickleball.com, 12 September 2025. Richard Livornese Jr., The Dink, 27 January 2026. Anna Bright, The Dink, 26 August 2026. Ranking positions are the PPA world ranking as captured on 3 September 2026; descriptions of Garnett and Hovenier as top-ten and top-25 are the publisher’s, not ours. Pickleball Insiders is not affiliated with any player or outlet named here.