Amazing to hear!! :)

I like it after a little bit of "break in" when the worst "plasticness" has been worn away. They might have made the newer batches rounder also, the first ones tended to not be 100% round. As always I think an important factor is what do people in your area play with in general, but yeah, I have ended up liking the BV550c in the end. But where other balls are perfect brand new, this one is perfect maybe 2 weeks in of use.

Nice, awesome to hear! Hope it holds up long term with the sunflower oil! :)

Absolutely! :)

Thanks! I hope it helps! :)

The one used mostly in your area. But if there is no games going on in your area, maybe I'd recommend getting the VLS300 because it should be cheap nowadays and it handles water well. But most places won't use that ball anymore.

Hello! Unfortunately I have yet to create the online courses.. So at the moment only online coaching and offline coaching in Europe available. There are some clips that will be parts of future courses available in a Patreons only Facebook group that I have. During Covid I started a Patreon and promised that anyone who donates money through it, will be able to use that money as "credits" in the future when I launch the courses. So technically it's possible to donate 5 Euros or whatever through the Patreon and get access to a few videos that the public doesn't have access to, and claim that 5 Euros in the future as prepayment. The videos in there are not in any sort of order though, just videos that I recorded because circumstances happened to be convenient to record them and I knew I need to record them sooner or later anyway. There will be a really good deal for about the 50 first people once I launch the online courses. I'll announce it first to Patreons, then to people who have communicated special interest in the courses, then to my email list, and lastly on RU-vid and Instagram, until all 50 spots are taken! This is at least the plan, which could change, but probably won't! www.patreon.com/learnbeachvolleyballfast is the Patreon, email newsletter can be joined at www.learnbeachvolleyballfast.com, and to tell me about special interest in the courses, email me at alex@learnbeachvolleyballfast.com :)

You're not the only one, it's simply physics and mechanics doing it's work! 🤩🤠

Makes sense! Never heard about the look away from sun and serve receive with peripheral vision thing, I'm gonna try that next time I play in those conditions! I also do believe that it would be good practice for someone like me (who does rely a fair amount on hard attacks) to play the game with a personal rule to only do pokeys for a full game for example. The awareness, vision and understanding you gain from those reps I'm pretty sure won't hurt your future game!

Nice! More videos around the topic probably coming this summer! :)

Always happy to take a quick look! Normally people who describe your problem, get it fixed by learning the wristsnap technique in this video, but of course there can also be other problems. For a longer in depth analysis and step by step instruction how to fix it I have to refer to my online coaching options (www.learnbeachvolleyballfast.com/coaching), but happy to have a quick look and write a few sentences of what I see, might give a good clue on where I think you should start! :) Upload the video somewhere and send it to alex@learnbeachvolleyballfast.com ! :)

Haha yeah it might! The tricky thing with beach setting is you kinda want to have your hands as wide apart as possible, but not too wide. Which creates for a perfect "slip through" opportunity at least for Mikasa balls that are wet from water or sweat.. Gotta try to be aware of it when theres a wet ball incoming..!

My guess then is that it has a hole in the actual bladder, and then the air comes out around the valve so air is trapped between bladder and outer leather and sips out next to the valve if you put the ball under water for example.) The only way I know how to fix that is cut up maybe 5 cm of the leather, pull out the bladder, find the place with the hole, fix it like a bike inner tube, put it back, sew the outer layer together and pump it up. It will leave the ball with some extra stitches but hey, a ball is better than no ball right?

Nice! Yeah, I have yet to see a good defender do what some of the coaches out there say you should do (start with a big step with the leg furthest away from the ball), but I'm always open to see proof of things being otherwise. But so far, no real game footage of a player doing that, and lots of game footage of players doing what I describe here! :)

I hope it helps! :)

Trust me, you are not the only one.. This is fairly common, especially amongst guys. There might be ways to stretch to make it better for some people, but for me personally even though I have done a fair bit of stretching already, I still need to use the asymmetrical platform for best results in beach volleyball.. Try it out and see! :)

Did it work

@@user-hj8lf4ys7spersonally for me, I was struggling to angle the ball since it felt like one side had more surface area than the other so I just went back to the regular platform and put as much emphasis on recieving with the extact center of my platform

Hey! Hahah yes, thank you! I do recognize your username here, I think you have been commenting earlier also? Always fun to meet people who saw videos in real life, maybe next time there will be more time for a chat! :)

Hahaha, good to hear!! That's what happens sometimes! 😁

You just have to be really careful when you insert the needle again to fill in more air. Have preferably a thin needle, use valve oil or at least spit to lubricate the needle, and aim inbetween the rubber band and the valve edge. If you happen to still have rubber band sticking out of the valve, hold onto it while you insert the needle. Hope this helps. In the worst case, you end up pushing the rubberband all the way in, and the ball will forever have a bit of a rattling sound, and you'll have to refix the valve..

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast thanks... But i applied vaseline and IT WORKED!!

@@rehaninayat Nice! I am a bit unsure if its vaseline that is supposed to break down rubber long term or not.. If you by any crazy chance remember this in a year or so and wanna come back and give an update if the valve is still good with vaseline, feel free to do so! :)

You are not the only one.. It's very unfortunate, but maybe we can't expect anything else from the ones who naturally had a good platform? I don't know..! :) Glad you found your way here at least!

Hey! Nice, thanks for the comment! Yes it's interesting this thing with attacking.. Personally for me, so far, I have been going for the style where as long as I get to the ball correctly (so I need to know my setters tendencies etc) and see the blocker in the periphery, this is more or less enough for me to score. Of course there's more to it also, but that is according to me what produces 90% of my attacking success. But probably there could be something to learn for me to for example try to play with a less aggressive approach, and do these semi shots/semi hits and just try to get them a little bit out of the reach of the defender.. My philosophy is that the more playing styles you have mastered, the better in a sense because it means you have more ways to adapt when the circumstances for whatever reason make your number one choice of playing style not work..! Did you actually take a walk, that made you enjoy the walking podcast, or how did you listen to it? :)

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast I have taken walks over some previous podcasts, however this was driving to and back from my sat am vball session ^^ (45 min out, 1h back)

Good question! There might be other opinions (often associated with other philosophies of how the game is played compared to mine), but I'll give you some of my thoughts! So in the outlay of my future handsetting course, I have umm like a first part goal to have a handset that the referee is happy with, and that's it. If the referee isn't happy, nobody is. But once that is mastered, the evolution goes in two different directions: 1 - To also make the partner happy, and 2 - to still make the referee happy even if the setting situation is more difficult (think shanked serve receive, a very low and quick ball, a high and spinny ball etc.) And then the ultimate combo is when you can make both the referee and your teammate happy, even if the setting situation is more difficult. So setting well when the situation is difficult leads to a whole library of different techniques, how you need to do to deal with this ball and that ball etc, but just as an example certain low balls you might for example have to prioritize the set quality over your ability to still stand up after you set the ball, so you have to learn "falling sets" because if you try to set and stand on your legs afterwards in these situations, the set will be bad. (I think the last video in this video-series talks about that a bit!) There's way more to that with different directions etcetc but that will be in the course since its a whole bit to go through. On the other hand, making your partner happy with the set (and not only the referee), depends of course on your partner. And different partners think about attacking in different ways, and what is important for them is different. For some players, it is very important that the setter is facing wherever he/she is intending to set, for me that doesn't matter much at all I'd say, but another way of "telegraphing the intentions" of the set is crucial for me if I am attacking. So for example for me, I "need" to be able to read the set location and tempo from the setters body language, regardless of where they are facing. The thing is, all truly high level players I have ever played with (professional or almost professional players), have had this ability in their set. So I don't know. There are lower level players that use other systems to sync up between the setter and the hitter, but the one I personally prefer, seems to exist among professional level players but many lower level players don't use it or aren't aware of it even. So on one hand I don't want to say that I'm right and everybody else is wrong - after all what you need is a system between setter and hitter that works, and whatever does that job is good enough, on the other hand it seems to me that the specific system I like, also professional level players seem to like (whether they are deliberately aware of it or not), so that could maybe be seen as an argument that it's a system that also works on the highest levels. Hope that makes sense. So yeah, a bit longwinded here maybe, but for me, and expert setter is someone who can deliver good and predictable (for the attacker) sets both in good and less good situations. And then the less they can handle difficult situations, and the less their partner can tell where and how the ball is about to go, the less of an expert setter they are..!

Hey! Nice writeup, and I agree with you, good tactics! Now, I don't remember exactly all the words I said in this 40+ minute video and I won't relisten to it all just to write this comment (after all there has to be a limit on my perfectionism somewhere! 😅), so sorry if I'm repeating some points from the video but I do have some points that could be added! :) My main one is to become a good setter before becoming a good hitter (assuming you are not good at any of those from the beginning), because this makes it possible to find a higher level training partner to go practice attacking drills with. This will hopefully both make you a better attacker and build relationships within the higher level players, both things that help you get out of that "stuck" place. Another obvious one is find a good coach who can help you strangthen those weaknesses and flaws in your game thats keeping the high level players from accepting you into their group.. (Insert pitch for my coaching here..? 😅) The idea I had when I was stuck at that level but never actually put in action was to sometimes (say a couple times per year for example) pay 3 high level players a bit of money to play with me, 3 games (so everybody plays with everybody) and then ask them after the games for honest opinions on what is lacking from my game for me to be able to one day actually play at their level. Thinking about this now, maybe I could try this strategy in pickleball just for fun, to see what it would be like (I'm currently like a high intermediate/low advanced pickleball player.) The argument against this strategy could be that its already obvious for you what skills you are lacking so you don't need 3 additional guys to tell you what you already know, but sometimes people might highlight aspects of the game that are new to you (higher level players often view the game a bit differently), and regardless the sheer experience of experiencing the higher level, faster and more intensive game every now and then can be valuable, just so the body gets to experience what we are preparing for. Probably another tactic that I made up in my mind now is to get into a practice and play partnership coalition with a player at the same level as you. Together doing drills for your weaknesses, but also getting really synced up in terms of how you play the game, where and how sets are supposed to go, communicated etc, helping eachother mentally etcetc. A big part of skill in this game (especially at higher levels) is sync between partners, so two high intermediate players who get really synchronized might be able to compete with even advanced players who are just thrown into new temporary constellations because maybe they don't have a long term partner. Lets say you and your partner would get to play against advanced players as a team for a few months, over time people will start calling you also as an individual player to join them probably..!

I'm not sure you commented on the right video here..! 🤔🧐

Hey! Thanks for the commemt, I had to look it up because I had never heard about the ball! It seems to me (actually this website says so: sportraffic.com/product/mikasa-training-beach-volleyball-ball/) that this is the new version of the VXT30 ball.. VXT30 was like a cheaper version of the VLS300, but not a ton cheaper and not super bad, it was still a very playable ball! So yeah, when it comes to you and what you should do, I'm not quite sure! If the quality is similar to the old VXT30, it's definitely a playable ball, except that some people maybe wont play with it just because its not the official one.. On the other side, for example Wilson tends to make these cheap "replica" balls that are cheap copies of their real balls, and these tend to be really plastic etc and arent really nice at all to play with.. Not sure if I'm helping you with your decision. Does the surface of this ball have the dimples, in the same way as the Mikasa indoor balls and the BV550c?

Hope it helped! :)

Hmm, interesting question! Personally, I believe most of the cases where people either mistime or hit with a bent arm so that the contact point is lower than it could be, the root cause is mechanics or technical habits. And sometimes those technical habits are there because one has listened to some not so optimal approach/jumping/armswing advice, sometimes it's just that one has never tinkered withthesethings and one just does what came naturally, and sometimes it can actually be muscle weaknesses/stiffnesses that makethe shoulder not work "fully" so then the shoulder protects itself from injuries by diminishing its movements basically. The root causes for timing being off (just now when I'm thinking quickly) I believe there are 3 most common ones, one is enough for bad timing, but sometimes a player deals with several of them: 1. An armswing that takes so long to perform that one by default cannot hitatthe highest point with this armswing, so the player will always hit on the way down. 2. Inefficient approach mechanics which hinders optimal adaptation to nonperfect sets. 3. Unreliable setting from partner so that the attacker cannot "trust" that the rhythm and tempo of one set to another will be similar to the previous ones. I hope that's at least agood starting point for an answer, this is my immediate answer without too much thinking. I also have to say that I am in no way immune to thesethings, I have (and to some degree still do) struggled with everything I mentioned here as potential problems! 😅🏐 But in general, I believe most humans who have a quick enough armswing and strong/flexible enough shoulder, have an adaptible approach, and can trust their setter will have a good timing. Meaning I don't think the actual timing calculation function of our brains is almost ever the problem, our brains are insanely good at calculating directions and speeds of moving objects and timing things based on that. If we drive in traffic for example, we are very accurate at predicting how much time/space we need to be able to overtake someone in general. However, that relies on the fact that our vehicle has the speed/acceleration capabilities that we assume they have. If our vehicle all of the sudden starts malfunctioning, our calculations crash. Similarlyto if we calculate to hit with a quick armswing, but then end up having a slow armswing (for whatever reason) once its action time. Hope this makes sense and was a good enough analogy! :)

I can imagine the same discussion exists in tennis.. I think what people miss, is that the trajectory/momentum/shape of the hitting object at contact matters in terms of what kind of forces will be sent to the ball, and those forces will be different depending on what kind of movement one is doing. So even if the "snap" doesn't put power into the ball from the actual snap itself (because ball has already left the hand at that point), whatever forces are in the hand at the point of contact will be different if one is intending to "snap" vs "club" the ball, and it's that difference that will make the difference. Hmm, regarding to your second question, no I haven't made a video like that but it could be an interesting video idea actually. In my mind, this changes if one uses the "snap" technique or more of a "hit through" technique. As to what the kids are doing I can't say without seeing it, but it almost sounds like they are "snapping" their wrist with muscle power instead of letting the snap happen effortlessly with the help of biomechanics. In my opinion, with the effortless biomechanical snap it's very easy to vary the contact point between hitting deep into the court vs steep down close to the net. Hope that makes sense!

Good question! First I'd want to say that there are people who already mix this wrist mechanic into their normal spiking technique without knowing it, so to really answer this question for a specific individual, one would have to analyze their mechanics first to really see whats going on. Also if their normal swing is high or low elbow drawback could matter. So I can only answer this question right now with some generalizations, hope that makes sense! But in general, I'd say it's about becoming familiar withthe feeling of the wrist-"action" of the wristsnap, and then mixing the old and the new technique together, which will often feel a bit more like hitting "up" at the ball, rather than hitting "through" the ball (which often emphasizes a big followthrough.) Ignoring the people who say you WILL (without a doubt) hurt your shoulder if you stop it at the top with no followthrough and explore doing that anyway could be a good idea (of course if every rep you do hurts, there's something wrong and you should stop and do some reassessing, but a fully functional injuryless shoulder with the "proper" mechnics can easily bang a ball hard with wristsnap without a big followthrough, without getting injured. I do believe that some players who know how to generate power with their core, will to some degree tend to automatically mix their old power generation mechanics with the added wrist mechanics when they learn the wrist technique, which then basically becomes a mix between the techniques (which you asked for.) Others won't and they will have two very distinctly separate techniques until they learn to blend them together. I hope this answered your question at least somewhat, let me know! I also think my future videos in this series might provide some more insight to the question.. And if one wants the full video analysis and specific answers for ones own situation (for example if nothing else works, there is pain, or one just wants the most efficient way forward), my online and offline coaching info (to be a bit updated soon) is on my website www.learnbeachvolleyballfast.com! :)

Hmm, not sure what a nivia spot volly is but if it is the same type of valve as most sport balls, then it should work yes! :)

Thank you! :)

Awesome, in that case mission accomplished! :) First there's the "normal" one where the setter hits to the defender, then sets, then the defender attacks. And then there's the ones where the defender actually sets the ball he/she defended, and you do this in two variations, one where ball initiator/attacker starts in the back of the court, and one where he/she starts in the front of the court and needs to create some space after initiating the ball in order to be able to attack. Doing all these from both sides for both players (plus some other stuff if you want like for example the 3 defensive balls to attack in the end) is a good hour or so of pretty satisfying training, even if lets say you honestly were in the mood to play games on that day. :)

Hahah you know these drills!

Hahah you're welcome! :) That's a nice way to see it as a Christmas present! I might be able to get something more up before Christmas also, we'll see! :)

From a small guy for volleyball (182cm) don't steal our kit 😂 Please continue to telegraph hit or shot with your approach and elbow, please hit the ball "hard" instead of "fast and away" so you stay predictable and get tired faster 😂

@@cappehnkrunch Hahahahaha! 😅🤣 Noted!!

Interesting! Never seen this ball, would love to hear from someone who has experience! :)

Thanks! :) There's many reasons I started my own channel, but one of them was that nobody (even the supposedly good coaches) was teaching the stuff I desperately needed to learn, so once I figured things out I thought others might have value out of it too..!

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast Somethimes we need to scratch bits of information together from many sources to get a good picture. Without RU-vid and all the sources it would be very hard to learn Beach Volleyball -- even here in a large city like Berlin. Good coaches are difficult to find! They are rare.

@@cirrus2013 Yess I agree, accurate information is super rare.. I actually have been considering if I should live in Berlin for a summer to try it out, I hear there is a great demand for coaches and I have always had an interest for living in Germany for a few months to upgrade my school-German to maybe something that would be functional in day to day conversations..! Do you have any thoughts of what the best ways to come there for volleyball would be? :)

Hahaha, oh man.. 😅 I'm not quite as negative as you, but in many ways it's a downgrade except for the dimples. I'd wanna see a VLS300 with dimples!

😂 hate that shit (sorry not sorry)

Awesome to hear, happy to help!! And more videos in this video series are upcoming! :)

Awesome, happy to help!! :)

Good points! I very much agree that there tends to be local rules or interpretations of rules. Very often even really good players don't know the official rules, they could end up arguing about their local rule to the teeth (even if they are not in their local area anymore) and the only way to get them to consider anything else is to actually start reading the rulebook with them. And this is not for "interpretation" rules like what handset is a lift and what is not, but actual clear cut rules. Actually I wonder how much other sports "suffer" from this as well, I haven't really done other sports at a high enough level to notice (except snowboarding but there's no rules in snowboarding haha.)

Nice! Feel free to come back and report how it went! :)

Did it work

Thanks a lot! I try to make properly elaborated videos that take into account how complex this sport really is! :)

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast sure thing! One question: even though you focus on beach volleyball, would you say this applies to indoor/olympic volleyball as well?

@@wrlzz Honestly I haven't been hitting many indoor volleyballs in general, and barely any since I learned this technique, but yes I think so. Same thing in indoor volleyball, some people swear by the wristsnap while others (who don't know how to wristsnap) go and look at slowmo video and conclude that wristsnap doesn't exist, strengthening their beliefs since when they try to wristsnap (without knowing how), it doesn't work.. (Not saying this is the exact scenario for all "anti-wristsnappers", but for sure for some, including me in the past.) I'll probably be experimenting a bit more with indoor volleyball in the coming year(s), might as well build that understanding also since its so closely related..!

Awesome, thank you for commenting! :)