What is up athletes?
In today's video, we're covering the five most common mistakes that
might be sapping your power when it comes to the serve.
This video is gonna be dedicated to one of
the most important aspects of power on the serve,
and it's also one of the most misunderstood parts as well.
That's right,
we're talking about
none other than
the thumb.
I'm just kidding.
We're talking about body rotation,
and until you properly learn how to actually use this action,
talking about loading away and rotating in,
chances are you're missing out on a huge potential for power on your serve.
So, let's get into the five common mistakes,
one of which you might be doing right now,
and let's learn how to fix it.
The first common mistake I see players making all
the time is not getting enough body rotation,
and this is especially if your stance is too open.
Getting the proper rotation away from the net
will be quite difficult.
Now I get why this happens a lot,
and when I was just starting out,
I often did this as well.
When we open up to the net,
our chest,
our stance,
we feel a greater sense of control because
naturally we're facing the direction we're trying to hit,
so hitting a basic serve is much easier.
But then of course we don't have enough space to rotate in and accelerate,
and this leads to a very arm dominant shot or over rotating at contact.
Now maybe you've watched a few videos,
maybe including ours,
that said
rotate your body more away.
(What was that?) (LAUGHTER)
And maybe listening to this advice you've closed your stance off a lot more.
If you did,
chances are you might be making common mistake number 2.
When we think about players who have a lot of body rotation on the serve,
who do we think?
Maybe Sampras,
definitely McEnroe,
perhaps even Federer.
We've all probably tried to emulate these players at one point.
And
I must admit
I spent about 10 years too long in the Federer copy land
trying to emulate every single thing he was doing,
including the routine.
And what happens when you copy these very extreme
stances is exactly that, it ends up being very,
very extreme.
Now, of course, this isn't necessarily incorrect,
it's just a lot more difficult to pull off.
Let me explain.
Federer and Sampras had some of the best serves in history,
and the closed stance helped them to generate more spin
and access greater angles.
But for most rec players,
this extreme stance often tends to just
lead to more difficulties with coordinating because if
your chest and your hips are faced all the way to the back fence here,
there's a much greater distance now that we have to rotate all the way in
if we want to reach our contact point.
And a lot of the times in order to do this we end up sacrificing a good swing
and a good contact point and this counterproductively decreases a lot of power.
Now by this point,
I know what you're probably thinking.
Datre,
this is ridiculous.
How am I supposed to rotate away but not rotate away too much?
I totally get it,
and this is one of the core challenges that Datre and I had on the serve as well.
And it wasn't until we developed this
crucial concept
that we really started to dial things in.
Developing an elite serve is kind of like walking a tightrope,
because if you lean too much on one side or the other,
it harms your performance and you end up falling
probably
to your death.
And just like that,
everything requires balance on the serve,
otherwise known as the middle path.
(INDISTINCT)
you must walk the middle path.
So, to solve this,
we first need to know that there are two main types of rotation on the serve.
The first is the full body rotation.
Like we mentioned earlier,
you can see some of the like Sampras doing this with the back foot offset,
the pelvis rotating further back,
and the rest of the body following,
the entire body rotates away further from the net.
Another modern player you can take a look for this is Shapovalov.
You can see he gets a lot of body rotation away for a pretty effective sir.
Now the second type of rotation is called the hip and shoulder separation,
and this is like the forgotten younger brother,
the Datre... (LAUGHTER)
But arguably it's a more fundamental element of the serve as well.
The hip and shoulder separation refers to
the separation angle between
the hips
and your shoulders.
So, imagine I've got these two rackets and this is my upper body,
my line of my shoulders,
and this is the line of my hips or my pelvis.
Now full body rotation is when my entire body turns away as a unit.
Hip and shoulder separation means my upper body is rotating further away,
and what happens when we do this is we actually end up creating a stretch
in our core that allows us to explosively snap it back in for contact.
Why did I do that?
Now to see this effectively being done,
you can take a look at players like Tsonga,
Kyrgios,
or Ben Shelton.
You can see that they don't nearly get the same
amount of full body rotation as somebody like Sampras,
but they're still able to utilize rotation as a powerful element on their serve.
You can see that even though they're moving their back leg toward the right,
which creates more of an open stance,
they're pulling the hitting elbow back in a way,
so they're getting tremendous rotation in their trunk and
again a lot of that hip and shoulder separation.
Now what I recommend this if you have mobility issues and spine issues,
or
you're 100 years old?
Probably not.
This is because the greater hip and shoulder separation angle you have,
the more strength
and mobility you're gonna need in your spine and back.
So, even players who are more athletic or younger,
I still recommend at the very least building your body up first
so you can develop the tolerance for that amount of load.
So instead,
as a starting point,
I recommend following this. For your stance,
if you've got a platform stance,
you can align your back foot roughly to the midpoint of
your front foot just like so about shoulder width apart.
Now if you have a pinpoint stance you can get a little bit closer to parallel
and from here get your hitting elbow in that throwing like position just like this
and focus on pulling your elbow back and away just like so. When you do this properly,
you'll notice
a powerful stretch in your core created again by that hip
and shoulder separation angle. And if you do this powerfully,
you'll be able to uncoil explosively into contact,
creating that powerful rotation you see the pros doing.
Like so...
So, try this out,
experiment with it,
and you'll notice yourself developing an effortless,
smooth,
and explosive serving motion.
Now after the loading phase,
we get into the acceleration
which leads us into common mistake number 3,
the overactive upper body.
This is one of the most common mistakes I see at the rec level.
It's where you use your upper body to initiate your swing instead of your lower body,
either
with the hitting arm,
which leads to tightness or a shallow racket drop.
Or for some players you might even be using the trunk muscles just a bit too much.
If you're doing this,
chances are you might be completely fine doing warm-up serves,
but the second you get into a match or you try to add more power,
this is when things start to feel tighter and the service box starts to shrink.
This is because when we're actively trying to use our arms,
we're actually recruiting
more muscle fibers throughout our arm,
which means that we're contracting
or tensing these muscles.
And counterintuitively when we're more tense,
instead of having that nice, relaxed swing,
we end up encountering more enforced errors and less power.
And this oftentimes leads us to mistake number 4,
over-rotation.
The way a lot of players start learning to serve is kind
of like a forehand where they use a lot of body rotation
because it's a rather intuitive motion to learn,
but oftentimes when we don't learn how to rotate the right way,
this leads us to common mistakes like dropping the off-arm down too soon,
dropping it too much,
or dropping it way too over to the left side.
And if you see yourself do any of this,
you'll probably notice that this off-arm is actually hindering your ability to
rotate and it's creating that feeling of more of a dragged slow rotation
feel, almost like your entire body is being pulled down by gravity.
Other times if you swing your off arm too far to the right,
there's nothing you can counterbalance with and it's gonna
easily cause you to over rotate into contact.
And this, of course, leads us to a poor contact point,
not allowing us to utilize as much
of this powerful internal shoulder rotation motion
and never learning to get that whip-like release
of the racket head through the contact.
And as an effort to fix this,
you might be falling victim to common mistake
number 5, trying to keep your body sideways.
I know,
yet another dichotomy.
Let me explain.
If the rotation of the body
is a tremendous power source that we can actually use,
we don't want to eliminate it.
Personally,
this is one of the things that caused me to suffer on my kick serve for the longest time.
So instead,
I was using these weaker movements like elbow extension
and wrist extension to try and just topspin the
ball over the net.
Now don't get me wrong,
you still don't want to over rotate on the serve because
that leads to a lot of problems that we mentioned earlier.
So, then again you might be thinking,
how are we supposed to rotate
without over-rotating?
According to Dr. Brian Gordon's research on high level serves,
he says that although there's more research required in this area,
the back leg extension
might play a major role in generating this
hip rotation by forcing the pelvis to turn.
It does this by pushing the right side of the pelvis forward.
In his analysis of Sampras' serve with John Yandell over at tennisplayer.net,
they found that Sampras is accelerating his body by leading with his hips.
Now if you want to check out the full article on this,
I'll leave a link to it in the description below.
Now one of the most important parts of creating power is this initial
push of your hips rotating as you drive your legs through the ground.
But after our legs actually finished driving to the ground,
there's actually no more ground reaction force that's propelling
our body and this means we're gonna naturally
stop our hips from continuing to rotate in,
which means that theoretically there should be no issues with over rotation
so long as you properly initiated that back hip rotation before you began.
So, any other problems you have with your rotation might have to
do more with your stance or bringing your entire off-arm around,
which is causing your body to sway.
So, next time you're on the court,
instead of trying to initiate that swing with the trunk and the arm,
try to create your acceleration by pushing hard from your back
hip and keep your off arm up for longer,
make sure that it's dropping into the correct position.
And lastly focus on accelerating and releasing that
hitting shoulder up as high as you can.
Now personally,
a good visual cue that I like to keep in my head is that
while I'm actually making contact hitting through the serve,
I'm actually still ascending.
Now this isn't exactly happening on the serve,
but it's a great visual cue to be able to keep ourselves from coming down too early.
And if you do this properly,
you'll be able to naturally
decelerate and you'll get that nice whip like
release with your hitting arm at contact.
As you've probably experienced,
the serve is innately hard.
There aren't very many motions that are as counterintuitive as this,
and a lot of the instructions that we hear are overgeneralized
or don't give you a full description of what's going on.
So for example,
while closing your stance off and staying sideways
might get you 50% of the way there,
if you wanna actually maximize your potential on the court,
it's key that you use these techniques that are backed
by actual biomechanics and then simplify
them into simpler cues and progression drills.
And that's exactly what we did in our five-day serve power challenge,
which is a series of techniques,
instructions,
and progression drills,
some of which you probably saw today.
And if you apply what we cover over the course of the challenge,
you're gonna start hitting the most powerful and consistent serves of your life.
So, join now by clicking the first link in
the description below and go out and train hard.
I will see you
in the next video. (MUSIC)