pickleball

While still early in learning the game, I’m fortunate to have a variety of paddles to play with. I noticed something the other day while using a CRBN 1X – my arm felt dead towards the end of the session.

Early on, the CRBN 1X was fun to play with. Hitting drives felt effortless and the ball has unsuspecting movement when hit hard with this paddle. But after several games, the paddle felt very heavy and sluggish to move.

So I guess that is meant by a paddle’s swing weight. Selkirk has a good explanation of swing weight and how it differs from a paddle’s static weight and twist weight. From the article:

In simple terms, swing weight refers to how heavy a paddle feels when you swing it. It’s influenced by various factors, including the weight distribution, length, balance, and shape of the paddle.

The CRBN 1X is an elongated paddle with a static weight of 7.8-8.1 ounces. But according to Pickleball Studio, the measured swing weight for the 16mm version is 123 which is on the heavy side. Pickleball Studio uses these ranges for reference.

• <100 VERY low swing weight and the paddle will feel extremely fast in hand
• 100-110 still very fast in the hand and where most square paddle shapes average 110-120 is where a lot of elongated paddles average. Once you pass about 115, that’s when you may start to notice a small compromise in hand speed.
• 120+ These paddle will feel quite slow in the hand.

So I have to guess that my dead arm feeling was due to the heaviness of swinging the CRBN 1X and my arm not being conditioned to extended use of this awesome paddle. When looking for paddles in the future, I’ll have to keep this metric in mind with the tradeoffs of a high swing weigh.