Thank you so much! I am the same, my skin gets itchy (😅) from watching simplified answers with no why explanation on complex questions.. Even worse if it's around a topic you don't really know much about which easily leads you to believe in it and leading you down a path that will ultimately be false and waste a lot of time in your efforts to improve. Trying to not add on to that problem which seems to be everywhere in beach volleyball coaching normally..! :) (However also I evolve as a coach all the time and sometimes I do need to eat up my old opinion so always dare to question also my stuff no matter how convincing my explanations might be..! And please tell me every time you disagree with something, that is one of my best learning sources to become an even better coach!)

Yess! I think I saw your video on setter neding to see the rhythm of the attacker to get to the next level, and I agree fully with that also. Choosing the rhythm and location of the set based on attackers placement and momentum seems to be a much more "realistic", "adaptable" and "flowy" (maybe I can call this dymanic?) than some sort of predetermined stuff. There is a time and place for more or less predetermined stuff also but I'd say thats for after having learned to set the "dynamic" style first. Being able to set dynamically, with a body language that the attacker can read, with a consistent tempo are probably the 3 most important traits for a good setter beyond the ovbious of not committing double contacts or lifts. After that comes a bunch of details about handling various wind directions for various sets.

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast yeah brother… I agree with you on all this! When you are an ELITE setter, then you can vary your location and height, but not many setters are that good haha. I’ve definitely found that keeping the hitter in rhythm results in the most aggressive attacks and best shots. Btw… did you ever figure out how to hit the hard driven roll shot on the way up? I’m very interested to get your input on that as a taller player.

@@menehunebvb Yess seems like we are on the same page here! Regarding the roll shot, no I completely forgot! Life has been super chaotic in the last month+ with moving and trying to find a good place, but thanks for the reminder, I need to try it out!

I agree! 😉 And if I'm going to be 100% honest I didn't create this video ONLY for educational purposes, I also created it in hopes of maybe in the future needing to deal with slightly less people that are unaware of the tempo-consistency-importance! 😅

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast And that's why this is such an important video for anyone to watch. Even great players who come from indoor, where the sets are completely different, need to see this video. Thanks again.

@@spgtenor Thanks alot for the kind words! :)

That's amazing! Hope it helped. Did you see the other videos I made around setting? Quite a lot of them are about handsetting but there is at least one about bumpsetting as well! :)

Cool! I hope it helps! :) And I am a bit sad it might indeed be an unique point of view. Might be good to get your partner to understand this too once your tempo has gotten more consistent, especially if they haven't developed a consistent rhythm to their approach..! (Which I am guessing some people don't develop as long as they always play with height-inconsistent-setters.)

Thanks man, so glad to hear! :) Literally I am trying to create the project and type of content I wished had existed when I started playing and really wanted to learn as efficiently as possible, and it's so rewarding to hear that that vision of mine is starting to happen in reality! :)

Thanks! Sounds awesome! Yeah, this video is like partly a tutorial, partly just a thought-starter hahah. When I say people think differently I really mean it, I have already had at least one coach disagree with the height consistency being the most important, and that's what I am saying, different attacking styles have different needs. When I play no jump games (Eric Nygård tomahawk style) where I don't need the approach, I basically couldn't care less about setting height or the consistency of it haha. It's almost like an advantage to play with inconsistent sets because I almost feel like I can adapt to anything while the opposing team might get confused by the weirdness of some sets haha. Run some experiments and play around with it, it will most probably lead you to something that will help you! :)

I have been thinking about this lately because now that I’m playing more indoor (due to it being too cold outside), I feel like good setting comes when the setter is good enough to see how each player is approaching... fast or slow. Maybe if you are playing with a new team or the setter is not so good, it might be useful just to say, “ have a consistent height” because that takes away some variables and then you can start working on finding a good rhythm. If the setter is good and the hitter is good they should be able to non verbally communicate the type of set, for example, if the setter is able to notice a quick approach then he or she would want to set lower and if they notice the hitter taking a moment before the approach then, of course, they would need to set it higher.

I will also add that a good set is one that is not outside of the hitters approach. The moment a hitter has to adjust their approach, to a set, they lose options and power and are more easily blocked. A good set is one that accelerates the hitter into the middle of the court.

@@theFoot95 I think you are completely right about the "non verbal communication". That's like the next level to this, when you start to get used to eachother and start to know what one situation and body language means in terms of setting tempo, height, location etc. Sometimes two players "click" instantly and it works on this level immediately, but I believe mostly it takes a bit of playing time together before that starts happening. We discussed this a little bit on a coaching course I attended this weekend and I gave myself mentally the task to think about this more and find maybe more efficient ways to practice this. What pops up in my mind first is to actually communicate together and discuss through a bunch of situations about what the hitter wants etc and then drill those situations.. But maybe there's something even better? I need to do some more thinking! :) However, I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's kinda hard to reach that level of setting if one can't learn to set a consistent height first. And when playing with a new partner it might be smarter to try to just set a pretty consistent height all the time rather than the "situational setting" that used to work between you and an old pertner of yours.. Unless maybe you are lucky and you guys "click" and it just seems to work! These things that I've written about here I have honestly not thought tons about yet so there's a chance I'll come up with something better in the future..! In terms of setting outside the player, I of course agree in extreme cases, but I'd also say that as long as it's not A LOT outside, it's usually fixable as long as you have the timing/tempo neded to do your approach non-rushed. Different techniques of course are different in terms of how easy it is to adjust sideways. But of course it's important to also make the ball go to the location tou want to and not only consider the consistemt setting height.. However, I see way too many players out there that can't keep a consistent setting height nor can their partners, and then they wonder why they are having such big problems learning to hit. Changing hitting technique is already pretty challenging, it can become near impossible if you have a setter you can't trust even on when you should start your approach..!

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast Makes sense to me that a good first place to start is to set to a consistent height and then there's a million other things to get in order to set well, hahaha. I think its fair to say that the game of volleyball is setting. Might be a bit of a bold statement but so much the game comes back to how well someone can set the ball.

Thanks! Hope it helps! :) And feel free to comment here if you end up disagreeing or whatever, discussions almost always end up teaching a lot! :)

Awesome question! My answer is sort of twofold: Firstly, you do need some degree of technical proficiency to even have a chance of getting a consistent setting height. If your handsets slip apart so that the ball slides through your hands or your platform is so badly formed that balls bounce in all directions for example, it's going to be tough the have consistent setting height, I think this is pretty self-evident. However, once some degree of technical skill is achieved ("perfection" is absolutely not necessary), I believe it becomes a more mental issue/skill. If you think about anything except the flight path/arch of your set as you are setting, your accuracy in your setting goes down. That means that if you are thinking about the score in the game as you set your accuracy will go down. If you think about that your last set was not as good as you would have wanted as you set, this one will probably also not become as good as you'd wish. If you think about the reaction your partner will have if you deliver a perfect set as you set, you will probably not get to see that reaction. If you think about your setting technique (this is a tricky one because sometimes when you change a setting technique, this is actually what you need to think about!) as you set, your accuracy will probably go down.. etc etc. In an older video of mine about bumpsetting accuracy (link in the description for this video) I talked about this visualization of the flight path/arc, and that part I think is the same whether you handset, bumpset or set some other way. Now there is one crucial point: Many people have trouble "accessing awareness" of what they are thinking about in the split milliseconds of the actual setting action/ball touch. That in combination with the whole theory above sounding sort of "fluffy" or "woo-woo" that can bring out skepticism in even trying to gain awareness of one's thoughts in that split moment leads many people to never gain it. Try to be more curious than that. I learned this awareness from playing discgolf and it is common in golf too. Golf/precision type of games might have more direct consequences if you don't master the skill of only having your goal/flight path into goal in your mind at the impact moment, so it might actually be easier to learn this skill in golf/discgolf/darts/other precision game than in beach volleyball, and once you have learned what it feels like then bring the same feeling into beach volleyball. Hope that makes sense.. Now the technical problems one can have that will keep one from setting at a consistent height are many in numbers and harder to explain in text so they will have to be future video topics instead of something I'll write about here. But in my experience the vast majority of players (intermediate players that are better than beginners but worse than advanced players) seem to have a good enough technique to be able to at least bumpset with a consistent height, but still aren't doing it and in that case I think it's pretty much always a question of not having understood the importance of a consistent setting height or lack of the visualization skill I talked about above or both. Hope that helps!

Hope it helps! :)

Hahaa! :) Very good question that's been on my mind a lot lately! My current answer is both work, and there are pro's out there doing both. You can learn to hit hard with both and you can learn to hit at the top of your jump with both (ok people with lower verticals are probably forced to use a higher elbow to be able to hit quick enough to hit at the top of their jump). The major difference as it seems to me right now is that higher elbow is much easier to learn, there is just so much more flexibility of how you can do it and still make it happen. Hitting with a low elbow but fast enough to hit at the top of your jump is way more dependant on getting all the details right in the movement, otherwise you will be too slow.. So it just requires more work on fine details before it becomes functional, at least for me. It seems like some peoples bodies are more naturally built for a low elbow though, and I have yet to coach anyone to a low elbow hit that is fast (I am literally just figuring it out for myself) so my ideas might change in the future with more experience..! But ultimately I do believe the low elbow has a bit of a higher potential in terms of hitting power and hitting those balls that are so fast that the defender literally has no time to react even if the ball comes straight at them, and looks cooler (😎😅). Does that answer your question at all? :) I'll be making several videos about this in the future!

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast Yes that helps a lot, thank you! I'm a barely 6 foot guy who can just about touch 10 feet... should I load with a higher elbow? I find that it's hard for me to think about loading when I'm spiking and I feel like I'm not fully loading and I don't have enough time. Could you recommend someone to watch that would be suitable to copy with the physical attributes I have? Isn't there also a certain point (I remember you had a video on this) where if the elbow loads too high we can't load properly? Thanks so much there's not a lot of people I can ask these questions that I have about beach volleyball :)

@@joshz6236 Hahah! :) I am currently working on a video that helps tons with creating power with a high elbow swing, hopefully I'll get it done soon. What I believe will happen with my coaching is that I will teach everyone the high elbow swing first even they would want to learn the low elbow swing later because you learn the high contact point much easier so that you know what the ending should feel like. I swung low elbow low contact point for like 2 years until a guy showed me how to do the high elbow high contact and all of the sudden I had tons of angles I hadn't been able to do before hahah. Damn there's so many details to this no way I can type it all out so it makes sense, but my short answer is learn high elbow with a high contact point first properly and play with that maybe even for a few months, if you then later decide to learn the low elbow you'll be well off. By that point I'll also be better at coaching the low elbow, right now I'm still just feeling I'm cracking the code myself! And just to be clear, there are different types of low elbow. The one I used to do (low elbow but late contact with ball often without a fully stretched arm is a worse idea than high elbow high contact even if there would be slightly less speed in the hit. Where are you located?

@@joshz6236 And by the way, the video you are referencing is maybe one of the first videos about analyzing video? Where I analyzed a very very old spiking technique of mine? Because there I know I said the low elbow is better, but that was before I understood how to hit and generate power with a high elbow, so I'd say my opinion about that has officially changed since then, or at least gotten more nuanced. The best hit's in the world still have a low elbow I believe but it's actually quite rare to see low elbow with a high contact on the beach, even among pros (hahah and that's part of the reason I wanted to crack the code for how it's done, when I can coach stuff that 95% of the pro's can't even do then great things are bound to happen!)

@@LearnBeachVolleyballFast Okay sounds good! I look forward to seeing that video :) I do have a relatively high contact point with a straight arm but I don't really "load" or draw back further I kind of like start my draw low but I don't really draw and I just extend my arm and swing. Is there any player who you think has a good draw to watch? I live in America btw