The 15-Minute Pickleball Warm Up Routine a Top 10 Pro Uses Before Every Match
- A six-step, 15-minute pickleball warm up from top 10 ranked player Connor Garnett moves from active stretching through dinks, drops, drives, volleys and serves.
- The routine treats a consistent contact point as the real goal, building it through low-pressure repetitions before the scoreboard turns on.
- Reflex volleys at the kitchen line and a full serve-and-return set close out the sequence before players start real points.
Six Steps Stand Between a Cold Start and a Fast One
Most recreational pickleball players treat warming up as an afterthought: a few soft shots hit back to each other, then straight into the match. Then the first two or three games go sideways while they sort out their footwork and contact point in real time.
A six-step warm up built around the habits of Connor Garnett, one of the top 10 ranked players in the world, is designed to solve that before the first point is played. It takes 15 minutes and works through every phase of the game in order: body, dinks, drops and drives, volleys, then serves and returns.
The idea isn’t complicated. Pickleball rewards a rotating hip and a repeatable contact point more than raw athleticism, and both need reps before they show up reliably under pressure. Garnett’s routine gives players those reps in a sequence that mirrors how a match actually unfolds.
Two Minutes to Loosen the Body
Every phase of the routine builds on the one before it, starting with a few laps around the court and active stretching rather than static holds. The target is a torso that rotates freely: most of the power in a pickleball swing comes from that rotation rather than the arm. A lot of players skip this step when they feel fine going in, and that is a common mistake. Tight hips and a stiff core show up eventually, often on a wide ball or as an injury.
Straight-Ahead Dinks Before Crosscourt Ones
For the next two minutes, players hit dinks straight across the net, not crosscourt yet. The purpose isn’t to warm up the arm. It’s to get the feet moving and the legs into the low position they need for a match. Garnett’s cues for this phase: line the ball up with the back leg before contact, stay low and get behind the ball rather than reaching for it, and keep the contact point consistent from shot to shot. That contact point needs to sit in front of the body and inside a player’s own hitting zone, never off to the side or behind it.
Four Minutes of Crosscourt Dinks
The routine then shifts to crosscourt dinking for two minutes per side, four minutes total, which more closely resembles real match play. The approach starts safe and finds a target, then mixes in wide dinks that pull an opponent off the court along with tighter dinks that land near the T. Two things get drilled in this phase. The first is pace consistency, so a partner can predict the speed of the ball and the player can dial in their own feel. The second is distance control: mixing shallow and deep dinks to find a limit before it comes up in a real point.
Drops and Drives at a Controlled Pace
Four more minutes go to third shot drops and drives from the baseline, an area Garnett says most recreational players waste in their own warm ups by either smashing drives as hard as possible or chasing a textbook drop. Instead, the routine calls for drops hit at a controlled pace, followed by a read on what the partner has to do with the ball. If they have to hit up on it, the drop worked and following it in makes sense. If they can hit down on it, the drop sat too high and staying back is the better call.
Drives come in at 60 to 70 percent power, not full send. The point isn’t hitting winners. It’s feeling the arc of the ball and understanding where it peaks. A ball dropping as it crosses the net forces an opponent to hit up, and that is the advantage a player wants.
There’s no fixed rep count in this phase. The approach is to keep hitting until the shot feels right, staying longer on drops after a miss and moving on after three or four clean ones in a row.
Reflex Volleys and a Full Serve-and-Return Set
The fifth step, two minutes of reflex volleys at the kitchen line, is the part most players skip and the one Garnett treats as the most important. Partners trade volleys at a moderate pace, keeping the ball at chest height, building a consistent contact point and match-speed reflexes. Two mechanics get drilled here. Flared elbows throw off both contact point and power, so keeping the elbows in stays a priority throughout. Players also stay grounded, timing a small split step to their partner’s contact rather than rising onto their toes.
The routine finishes with five to ten serves and returns per side. It starts with two or three slower serves to find a feel, then targets three spots: wide, body and the T, landing about two steps inside the baseline. Once warm, spin or loopier serves come in if they’re part of a player’s regular game. Returns focus on depth: a deeper return leaves an opponent less comfortable on their third shot. The other focus is smoothing the kinetic chain, the transfer of energy from the legs through the core and into the paddle.
An Extra Minute for Overheads on Rough Days
On windy or sunny days, the routine adds one more minute for overheads, having a partner feed a few balls above the head and focusing on the torso twist that lets the body rotate through the shot. Working through it early establishes where those variables sit before a lob catches someone off guard in a real point, and it helps a doubles team sort out who takes the lob before the match starts.
A Sport Growing Faster Than Its Own Coaching Content
Warm-up routines like this one fit into a broader shift in how instructional pickleball content treats the recreational game. Pickleball-specific outlets have spent much of 2026 publishing detailed, professional-level technique breakdowns, covering everything from paddle-face angles on the backhand flick to ready-position fixes for defending hard drives, aimed at club and rec players rather than tour pros.
That shift tracks with how fast the sport has grown. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s 2026 participation report counted 24.3 million pickleball players nationally in 2025, up 22.8 percent year over year and up 171.8 percent over three years, with the number of core players, those playing more than eight times annually, climbing from 1.4 million to 7.5 million over that same stretch.
A structured pre-match routine costs nothing and takes 15 minutes, which makes it one of the more accessible upgrades available to a rec player caught up in that growth curve. Most equipment and lesson-based improvements come with either a price tag or a learning curve of their own. A warm-up sequence just requires showing up 15 minutes early and running through it, which puts it within reach of anyone signing up for a club ladder or a Saturday morning open play session for the first time.
The message for players who skip the process is simple: a match against a well-warmed opponent starts uneven before the first point is even played. Players who spend the first few points of a match finding their footwork and contact point have already given away free points to whoever bothered to prepare.
Running the full six-step sequence before a rec league match or a Saturday morning open play session takes the same 15 minutes it takes a touring pro to get ready for a title match. The routine doesn’t change based on who’s on the other side of the net. It just makes sure whoever ran it is ready before the first serve.
Sources:
- The Dink: https://www.thedinkpickleball.com/6-step-pickleball-warm-up-from-a-top-10-pro/
- Sports & Fitness Industry Association, 2026 Pickleball Single Sport Participation Report (sfia.org)
