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What is up athletes?

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In today's video, we're covering the five most common mistakes that

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might be sapping your power when it comes to the serve.

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This video is gonna be dedicated to one of

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the most important aspects of power on the serve,

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and it's also one of the most misunderstood parts as well.

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That's right,

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we're talking about

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none other than

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the thumb.

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I'm just kidding.

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We're talking about body rotation,

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and until you properly learn how to actually use this action,

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talking about loading away and rotating in,

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chances are you're missing out on a huge potential for power on your serve.

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So, let's get into the five common mistakes,

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one of which you might be doing right now,

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and let's learn how to fix it.

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The first common mistake I see players making all

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the time is not getting enough body rotation,

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and this is especially if your stance is too open.

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Getting the proper rotation away from the net

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will be quite difficult.

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Now I get why this happens a lot,

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and when I was just starting out,

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I often did this as well.

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When we open up to the net,

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our chest,

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our stance,

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we feel a greater sense of control because

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naturally we're facing the direction we're trying to hit,

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so hitting a basic serve is much easier.

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But then of course we don't have enough space to rotate in and accelerate,

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and this leads to a very arm dominant shot or over rotating at contact.

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Now maybe you've watched a few videos,

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maybe including ours,

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that said

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rotate your body more away.

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(What was that?) (LAUGHTER)

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And maybe listening to this advice you've closed your stance off a lot more.

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If you did,

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chances are you might be making common mistake number 2.

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When we think about players who have a lot of body rotation on the serve,

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who do we think?

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Maybe Sampras,

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definitely McEnroe,

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perhaps even Federer.

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We've all probably tried to emulate these players at one point.

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And

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I must admit

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I spent about 10 years too long in the Federer copy land

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trying to emulate every single thing he was doing,

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including the routine.

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And what happens when you copy these very extreme

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stances is exactly that, it ends up being very,

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very extreme.

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Now, of course, this isn't necessarily incorrect,

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it's just a lot more difficult to pull off.

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Let me explain.

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Federer and Sampras had some of the best serves in history,

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and the closed stance helped them to generate more spin

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and access greater angles.

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But for most rec players,

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this extreme stance often tends to just

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lead to more difficulties with coordinating because if

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your chest and your hips are faced all the way to the back fence here,

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there's a much greater distance now that we have to rotate all the way in

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if we want to reach our contact point.

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And a lot of the times in order to do this we end up sacrificing a good swing

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and a good contact point and this counterproductively decreases a lot of power.

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Now by this point,

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I know what you're probably thinking.

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Datre,

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this is ridiculous.

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How am I supposed to rotate away but not rotate away too much?

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I totally get it,

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and this is one of the core challenges that Datre and I had on the serve as well.

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And it wasn't until we developed this

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crucial concept

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that we really started to dial things in.

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Developing an elite serve is kind of like walking a tightrope,

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because if you lean too much on one side or the other,

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it harms your performance and you end up falling

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probably

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to your death.

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And just like that,

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everything requires balance on the serve,

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otherwise known as the middle path.

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(INDISTINCT)

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you must walk the middle path.

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So, to solve this,

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we first need to know that there are two main types of rotation on the serve.

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The first is the full body rotation.

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Like we mentioned earlier,

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you can see some of the like Sampras doing this with the back foot offset,

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the pelvis rotating further back,

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and the rest of the body following,

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the entire body rotates away further from the net.

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Another modern player you can take a look for this is Shapovalov.

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You can see he gets a lot of body rotation away for a pretty effective sir.

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Now the second type of rotation is called the hip and shoulder separation,

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and this is like the forgotten younger brother,

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the Datre... (LAUGHTER)

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But arguably it's a more fundamental element of the serve as well.

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The hip and shoulder separation refers to

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the separation angle between

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the hips

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and your shoulders.

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So, imagine I've got these two rackets and this is my upper body,

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my line of my shoulders,

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and this is the line of my hips or my pelvis.

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Now full body rotation is when my entire body turns away as a unit.

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Hip and shoulder separation means my upper body is rotating further away,

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and what happens when we do this is we actually end up creating a stretch

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in our core that allows us to explosively snap it back in for contact.

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Why did I do that?

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Now to see this effectively being done,

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you can take a look at players like Tsonga,

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Kyrgios,

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or Ben Shelton.

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You can see that they don't nearly get the same

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amount of full body rotation as somebody like Sampras,

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but they're still able to utilize rotation as a powerful element on their serve.

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You can see that even though they're moving their back leg toward the right,

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which creates more of an open stance,

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they're pulling the hitting elbow back in a way,

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so they're getting tremendous rotation in their trunk and

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again a lot of that hip and shoulder separation.

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Now what I recommend this if you have mobility issues and spine issues,

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or

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you're 100 years old?

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Probably not.

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This is because the greater hip and shoulder separation angle you have,

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the more strength

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and mobility you're gonna need in your spine and back.

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So, even players who are more athletic or younger,

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I still recommend at the very least building your body up first

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so you can develop the tolerance for that amount of load.

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So instead,

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as a starting point,

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I recommend following this. For your stance,

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if you've got a platform stance,

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you can align your back foot roughly to the midpoint of

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your front foot just like so about shoulder width apart.

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Now if you have a pinpoint stance you can get a little bit closer to parallel

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and from here get your hitting elbow in that throwing like position just like this

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and focus on pulling your elbow back and away just like so. When you do this properly,

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you'll notice

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a powerful stretch in your core created again by that hip

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and shoulder separation angle. And if you do this powerfully,

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you'll be able to uncoil explosively into contact,

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creating that powerful rotation you see the pros doing.

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Like so...

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So, try this out,

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experiment with it,

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and you'll notice yourself developing an effortless,

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smooth,

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and explosive serving motion.

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Now after the loading phase,

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we get into the acceleration

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which leads us into common mistake number 3,

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the overactive upper body.

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This is one of the most common mistakes I see at the rec level.

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It's where you use your upper body to initiate your swing instead of your lower body,

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either

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with the hitting arm,

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which leads to tightness or a shallow racket drop.

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Or for some players you might even be using the trunk muscles just a bit too much.

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If you're doing this,

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chances are you might be completely fine doing warm-up serves,

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but the second you get into a match or you try to add more power,

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this is when things start to feel tighter and the service box starts to shrink.

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This is because when we're actively trying to use our arms,

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we're actually recruiting

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more muscle fibers throughout our arm,

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which means that we're contracting

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or tensing these muscles.

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And counterintuitively when we're more tense,

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instead of having that nice, relaxed swing,

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we end up encountering more enforced errors and less power.

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And this oftentimes leads us to mistake number 4,

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over-rotation.

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The way a lot of players start learning to serve is kind

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of like a forehand where they use a lot of body rotation

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because it's a rather intuitive motion to learn,

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but oftentimes when we don't learn how to rotate the right way,

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this leads us to common mistakes like dropping the off-arm down too soon,

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dropping it too much,

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or dropping it way too over to the left side.

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And if you see yourself do any of this,

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you'll probably notice that this off-arm is actually hindering your ability to

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rotate and it's creating that feeling of more of a dragged slow rotation

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feel, almost like your entire body is being pulled down by gravity.

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Other times if you swing your off arm too far to the right,

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there's nothing you can counterbalance with and it's gonna

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easily cause you to over rotate into contact.

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And this, of course, leads us to a poor contact point,

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not allowing us to utilize as much

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of this powerful internal shoulder rotation motion

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and never learning to get that whip-like release

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of the racket head through the contact.

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And as an effort to fix this,

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you might be falling victim to common mistake

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number 5, trying to keep your body sideways.

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I know,

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I know,

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yet another dichotomy.

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Let me explain.

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If the rotation of the body

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is a tremendous power source that we can actually use,

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we don't want to eliminate it.

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Personally,

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this is one of the things that caused me to suffer on my kick serve for the longest time.

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So instead,

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I was using these weaker movements like elbow extension

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and wrist extension to try and just topspin the

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ball over the net.

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Now don't get me wrong,

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you still don't want to over rotate on the serve because

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that leads to a lot of problems that we mentioned earlier.

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So, then again you might be thinking,

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how are we supposed to rotate

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without over-rotating?

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According to Dr. Brian Gordon's research on high level serves,

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he says that although there's more research required in this area,

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the back leg extension

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might play a major role in generating this

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hip rotation by forcing the pelvis to turn.

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It does this by pushing the right side of the pelvis forward.

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In his analysis of Sampras' serve with John Yandell over at tennisplayer.net,

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they found that Sampras is accelerating his body by leading with his hips.

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Now if you want to check out the full article on this,

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I'll leave a link to it in the description below.

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Now one of the most important parts of creating power is this initial

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push of your hips rotating as you drive your legs through the ground.

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But after our legs actually finished driving to the ground,

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there's actually no more ground reaction force that's propelling

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our body and this means we're gonna naturally

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stop our hips from continuing to rotate in,

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which means that theoretically there should be no issues with over rotation

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so long as you properly initiated that back hip rotation before you began.

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So, any other problems you have with your rotation might have to

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do more with your stance or bringing your entire off-arm around,

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which is causing your body to sway.

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So, next time you're on the court,

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instead of trying to initiate that swing with the trunk and the arm,

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try to create your acceleration by pushing hard from your back

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hip and keep your off arm up for longer,

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make sure that it's dropping into the correct position.

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And lastly focus on accelerating and releasing that

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hitting shoulder up as high as you can.

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Now personally,

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a good visual cue that I like to keep in my head is that

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while I'm actually making contact hitting through the serve,

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I'm actually still ascending.

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Now this isn't exactly happening on the serve,

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but it's a great visual cue to be able to keep ourselves from coming down too early.

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And if you do this properly,

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you'll be able to naturally

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decelerate and you'll get that nice whip like

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release with your hitting arm at contact.

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As you've probably experienced,

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the serve is innately hard.

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There aren't very many motions that are as counterintuitive as this,

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and a lot of the instructions that we hear are overgeneralized

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or don't give you a full description of what's going on.

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So for example,

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while closing your stance off and staying sideways

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might get you 50% of the way there,

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if you wanna actually maximize your potential on the court,

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it's key that you use these techniques that are backed

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by actual biomechanics and then simplify

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them into simpler cues and progression drills.

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And that's exactly what we did in our five-day serve power challenge,

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which is a series of techniques,

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instructions,

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and progression drills,

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some of which you probably saw today.

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And if you apply what we cover over the course of the challenge,

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you're gonna start hitting the most powerful and consistent serves of your life.

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So, join now by clicking the first link in

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the description below and go out and train hard.

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I will see you

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in the next video. (MUSIC)