Life Time leaders believe they have developed a better pickleball.

The Chanhassen-based fitness giant announced last week that it has filed a patent for the “ultimate pickleball,” an updated version of the standard whiffle-like ball used in the sport. Though the company has developed exercise equipment in the past, this marks its first product for a specific sport.

Life Time officials argue that the existing pickleball has “inconsistent speed, bounce, and durability.”

Since 2021, Life Time has endeavored to be at the forefront of the blossoming sport, now with more than 700 permanent pickleball courts in its clubs across the country. But the company wants to be more than just a place to play. “Part of us being a lead in the sport is identifying where the problems are, where some of the core issues are, and helping provide solutions for it,” Life Time executive vice president and chief digital officer RJ Singh told TCB.

As more advanced players begin to enter the scene and push the threshold of the sport to more professional levels, things like a served ball that either dies on the court or inconsistently bounces left or right get noticed. Spearheaded by Life Time’s founder and CEO Bahram Akradi, who’s also an avid pickleball player, Life Time began to engineer an improved pickleball about six months ago.

“A clear opportunity that emerged was to advance the quality of gameplay and participants’ experiences with a vastly improved pickleball,” said Life Time CEO Akradi in a news release. “[I] am excited to launch our ultimate pickleball as a solution to offer the combination of improved weight, speed, hole distribution, and material to support consistent play and durability.”

Through many different engineering designs, molds, and tests, engineers found that the ball’s holes had a huge impact. Typically, a pickleball has 40 holes scattered around its plastic surface. Life Time engineers found that if the holes were not the right size and were not spaced consistently, the ball wouldn’t provide an equal surface area, leading to an inconsistent bounce.

Life Time’s ultimate pickleball, however, has 48 holes, making the ratio between the holes and the spacing between them more even. From a durability standpoint, the engineers also made the holes have more of a rounded edge versus a flat edge, extending the ball’s longevity against micro-cracks.

Life Time plans to roll out its ultimate pickleball over the next month. At an event in New York on Aug. 19, the ultimate pickleball will make its debut in the hands of Andre Agassi, the former world No. 1 tennis player and chair of Life Time’s pickleball and tennis board. The event will be livestreamed through Life Time’s digital app. The ultimate pickleball will also be seen at Life Time clubs, used at all Pickleball Classic tournaments, and will be available for sale at Life Time’s racquet sports pro shops and its online store. Eventually, Life Time hopes to sell the ultimate pickleball at other retail stores.

Currently, Life Time doesn’t have plans to engineer its own pickleball paddle or dive into other sport-specific products. Although engineering a pickleball and submitting a patent, which is still in process, is a bit out of the norm for the fitness giant, officials say it’s an initiative that’s interconnected with the rest of its pickleball strategy.

“This is really a foray into a very different dimension for Life Time … getting into product manufacturing and product invention is a big deal for us,” said Singh. “But we feel that we have an obligation to not just take pickleball beyond [being a trend] but to be its true leaders. [We want] to help grow the sport, grow the formats of the competitions, and whatever that looks like, including the products.”