A New Year's Serve

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Blocking vs. Sticking a Volley (2)

To block a volley, one skates from below. The racket work? A slow glide of the racket head forward from body with pace to be created only from speed of the oncoming ball.

To stick a volley? Answer not so simple. But this ought to be done less often, so, at the end of some match one could be said to have volleyed well even if one never learned how to stick.

For sticking, I like the forehand volley of Lew Hoad exactly as shown and executed and commented upon in the following video. And the backhand volleys of him and Ken Rosewall.

For curiosity and perhaps subsequent prescription, it's fun to compare these backhand volleys with the full backhand sliced groundstroke of Ken Rosewall seen in the same video.

In his full slice, Rosewall raises his racket head, then loops it down to blend into a level but rolling swing.

In stick volley, backhand, the same double roll is apparent, miniaturized, but with racket head rolling UP to level (or slightly descending) phase.

Lew Hoad does the same thing as he hits the same shot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR7kvBGntW8

Note: Admittedly, Hoad's racket head rolls more from directly behind the ball, Rosewall's more from under the ball. Many backhand volleyers though never use double roll at all so maybe that is the best contrast.

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Blocking vs. Sticking a Volley

A stupid person does one or the other all of the time.

So what's the best ratio?

Nine to one? Five to one? Two to one?

The answer depends on the speed of the oncoming ball. In fast doubles one sticks less, and a less confident volleyer sometimes will hit the best volley of a whole match.

Because the ball will come to him or her very fast, and he or she will therefore try to do less.

This theory only works however if the blocking volleyer, confident or not, is as firm as a flying buttress in architecture.

So, can a scared volley be a great volley? Absolutely. A king cobra rises six feet from the long grass in East Africa.

Freeze (!) as the ball zings from your racket into the open court.

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Biggest Discovery of the Year

On a John McEnroe forehand convention, end delicacy at top of the backswing.

Then fire everything at once. In the case of your arm, that means it plunges vigorously down.

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Good if remembered to keep elbow back in first part of the throw.

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Late Arm Bend for Gimpy-Legged Rotorded Servers?

Who is an example of a good server who bends his arm late? Stanislaus Wawrinka comes to mind.

Oh yeah, Stan the man. Roger Federer's gold medal doubles partner. The guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over Novak Djokovic.

Forget all that. Which is at least what I like to do. When I pick a high profile player to discuss, I usually don't plan to suck up to his celebrity but rather to identify some useful convention in his technique.

I could pick one of the doubles players who narrowly beat us in the Crooked Run open club championship in Virginia and whom I subsequently beat in singles.

But who knows him? Everybody knows Stan Wawrinka.

So down together up together with racket inverted to stir a house pan of spicy sauce. How quickly do I want to reach this position, though? What's the hurry? Think I'll time to coincide with thrust out and backward rotation of hips simultaneous with backward rotation of shoulders from gut.

I love the idea of circular rotating clock pendulum on both forehands and serves. The circular pendulum never stops, just changes direction, like a crazed merry-go-round that doesn't know enough to keep going in the same direction.

This puts backward racket head momentum to work rather than discarding it by the wayside.

What could be wrong with starting a natural throw from so far back? I'll try this now.

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Philosophy of Inside Out

What is the role of roll? I think a lot of forum people were surprised when Don Brosseau started talking about inside out possibility in slice (or was it in volley or in both)?

Any shot in tennis can be crossed from the outside, thus imparting sidespin and bounce to the outside.

Harder (pun), but desirable, are very well hit inside out shots.

Racket head comes from the inside to travel a small distance with ball and then returns to the inside.

That's contrary to the belief of those who think that strings should cross to the outside.

If we can accept all that, we'd be justified in asking next whether ideal racket head trajectory is caused by arm trajectory or by roll of the arm which doesn't affect arm trajectory.

The ATP Forehand teaches us that hand can come from behind the ball and not from either side.

Inside out quality then is caused by racket head flipping to the inside and then rolling, or ("wiping") to the outside.

Today, I wish to apply this motion notion to Rosewallian slice, a tennis convention "well worth study" according to the narrator of the following film, one of the wisest tennis instructors ever and even more brilliant if he put this film together and chose the camera angles, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR7kvBGntW8

Ken Rosewall's slice, in these two sequences, starts with elbow down and racket head up.

Body shift including forward hips rotation then activates simultaneous arm straightening and roll or "flip" of the arm, but not so much that racket head sinks below the ball.

Racket head chimes in for level swing as forward arm roll adds acceleration.

We (I) have posited before that arm rolls to contact but doesn't roll from contact.

Combining everything said so far, we should now as right-hander be able to hit outside in or inside out from the same basic swing.

A greater margin of error will exist on the outside in version (making ball bounce usefully to the outside of opponent's deuce court). We could create such bounce either with roll happening, with roll just stopping, or with roll having already stopped and racket now returning to the right.

The successful inside out shot could mean that roll was just putting strings on back of ball when contact occurred or that non-roll just started.

Will ball break to inside? I doubt that. But it ought to carry huge backspin and sizzle and bounce extremely low.

This is what I want to try in self-feeding today.

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Vijay Serve: Who Cares If It Works?

I mean, "What Does It Matter Whom It's Named After, If It Works?"

Applying my own simultaneity idea to my gimpy-legged serve, I remain tall as I sway forward on the toss and then use “threshing heels” as central structure of the stroke.

The first part of the thresh combines bowing out of the front hip with backward rotation of same and a raising of front heel on its toes. How about bending elbow (which is far back) to desired palm down pose at the same time?

The second part of the thresh combines forward hips rotation and forward belly rotation and triceptic extension and upper arm rotation—and everything else that comprises vigorous throw from beginning to end.

The simultaneity design supposes that player attains mystical kinetic chain benefit when firing everything at same time to let larger muscle groups naturally overpower (i.e., pre-load) the smaller groups for timed release.

The palm down machinations of Vic Braden thus come back into play with a vengeance to create a new recipe. Leg injury may be necessary for a stubbornly obtuse player to finally absorb the wisdom of coaches who have always told him that vertical leg thrust, educationally speaking, screws up a serve before it helps it.

Rotordedness, to my mind, is part of the equation too. One wants, ideally, upper arm to twist the racket straight down to counter leg thrust up.

But when leeway for this isn’t available in the rotor compartment, one must invent. One may ask, what vector is opposite to the force created by hips and gut in what is basically a whirligig serve?

And what is a whirligig anyway? It is, according to my favorite unreliable source for all information, Wikipedia, “a kinetic garden ornament” that can even be “designed to transmit sound and vibration into the ground to repel burrowing rodents...”

Of course it also might, as in the infinitely sad South American movie, “The Green Wall,” attract a 10-foot bushmaster.

Anyway, how successful can a player be in changing horizontal force of a whirligig into upward racket head path?

That’s difficult but not impossible.

As has recently been pointed out, I’ve changed my serve much too much throughout my tennis career. (But always for a reason, I would assert. A tall person with a weak serve makes no sense.)

Chuffed by huge success both in re-conceiving Rosewallian slice and in alternating ATP Forehands with McEnroe imitation forehands, I think that the people eager to steer everybody away from the intricacy of stroke mechanics are making a chronic mistake.

The players who fail to discover the best stroke mechanics for themselves, before or after professional instruction, usually haven’t given this effort enough of a chance.

As Rick Macci has suggested for people who might be “in the zip code” of The ATP Forehand, they may only need a judicious tweak or two to suddenly make everything work.

And how, I ask, does such a tweak occur? Through science, intuition, fooling around, informal conversation, professional instruction, self-feeding, bangboard, ball machine, simple hitting, recreational matches, tournament matches?...any and all.

If there weren’t rain outside today, I’d try a down together up together serve with upper arm parallel to court like a yardarm toward rear fence. With racket tip pointed down as if stirring a sauce in a look like Vijay Amritraj.

The simultaneity of horizontal whirligig throw will then, if I’m lucky, use up the looseness of upper arm twist I have instilled with just enough play left to send pre-loading tip somewhat down.

As in Beethoven: "Fate shall not drag me entirely down."

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Non-judgmental Transportation of Two Ideas from Rowing to Tennis

The first idea is that, in rowing, when you simultaneously fire legs, back and arms, the legs overpower the back which overpowers the arms and you thus obtain your desired sequence.

Applying this to kinetic chain in tennis, if you simultaneously fire hips, belly and arm, the hips with help from the legs overpower the belly which overpowers the arm and you thus get your desired sequence.

Taking this a step further-- in tennis-- the belly and arm are, sequentially, "pre-loading," which is practically the definition of being overpowered.

On the other hand-- in rowing-- there is an exquisitely torturous training required thing involving firm "musculoskeletal corset" and called Rosenberg Style. The legs, very deliberately, drive perfectly straight before the back appears to do anything. The back then applies huge power. The arms, made freakishly strong from all the focused training, prolong the stroke and create a vacuum behind the blade for perfectly clean extraction from the water.

Perhaps because he is an unusually humane man, Harry Parker, coach of Harvard University, sees no contradiction and thinks the sequence happens naturally, but
new software included with indoor rowing machines purportedly makes a distinction in where peak power is applied.

If I go to the new Neighborhood Club in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in other words, and climb aboard a new Concept 2 ergometer, I can soon be peering at a small black electronic graph which appears for every one of my strokes.

With a single glance I can tell whether I attained peak power at the catch, which is how we of the Brown Cinderella Crew used to race ("Hit the catch and don't run into anything") or whether peak power occurred in the middle of the stroke, which is the way that the Allen Rosenberg coached self-conscious United States gold medal eight of the 1968 Olympics used to row.

So, have I learned the Rosenberg stroke so as to run the experiment? Not yet since I am busy as a tennis player.

But here is immediate application, in the form of a question: "To be or not to be," or, more specifically, "to be physical or mental in the production of forehand sequence?"

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Tap the Dog but Don't Wipe it

Here's one alternative to the foregoing. Doubt I'll be doing it much on account of my affection for my continental, but I tried this shot once or twice while self-feeding the other day and detected a clear smidge of promise.

I'm building, as always, on what came just before, and that is backward and forward body rotations with nothing in between.

On every one of my interpretations of The ATP Forehand, I start by abruptly laying hand backward from the wrist hinge. Come to think of it, if I slowed this, it might combine with the other backward actions to push a few more ergs out into the racket tip and thus help with the reversing power loop about to occur.

In this way or another, one should create easy and likely unprecedented racket head speed which then may be applied however one wants.

No wipe then could mean a hit-through-through-through more powerful than classical but in which you use the additional speed similarly to c-a-a-r-r-r-r-r-r-y the ball.

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Down and Up and Hit (Down and Up)

If a ball comes toward me, I try to hit it back. I present the following video, at the end of this post, as antidote to all the poisonous pomposities I've been recently reading about how technique, beyond initial basics, is unimportant compared to trajectory, ball awareness, purpose of shot and a host of other items.

Every associated (and asinine) assertion may contain minimal validity, e.g., "Recreational player, stop imitating the greats. Spend your time more wisely." On the other hand, the items alleged to be more important than such imitations are also more boring-- especially to persons who already know that stuff.

Personally, I am intrigued with technique in tennis, golf, rowing, chess and baseball. Does this make me a lesser competitor in these pursuits or others? It's possible, but will I change? Not a chance. Too much fun.

I liked a recent post in this forum in which the player tells how he occasionally will alternate with his new ATP Forehand some old flatties struck with an eastern forehand grip.

That would be me, too, only I'm trying to get away from my eastern forehand for more continental flatties so useful for low balls and special situations. (I save my strong eastern for my ATP's).

Regard this crazy forehand, reader. Be honest now. Would not it kick your ass?

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_forehand/mac_forehand.html?MacFHRunningCourtLevelRear.mov

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I Won't Let This Idea Go Through Being Ignored

To expand on my so far unresponded to notion-- in The ATP Forehand-- of eliminating all pause between backward and forward body rotations, I wish to draw on a central premise of the old "Czech Book," a government invested instructional tome made in the hayday of Lendl and Navratilova.

The glue in the book's spine wasn't strong enough to hold the pages together.

The central premise I recall here is, that, in any tennis shot, if you take your arm from bent to straight while already swinging it, you increase racket head speed solely from physics.

This would be the same as pushing a satellite farther out in space to make it go farther and faster.

The operative phrase here is "tapping the dog." That's done primarily from straightening the arm, which is like pushing the satellite farther out.

With very little effort from you, you thus are able to get the frame gliding faster in a backward direction just before you pull it forward.

"Well, you push the first button down. And the music goes round and round. Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh and it comes out here."

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Edge First (of a Tomahawk)

One experiment may lead to another in endless repetition going nowhere, but I don't believe that-- tennis meanwhile is coming to you.

The rhythm learned from a gravity-infused serve, seasoned by figure eight and windmill exercises, can be transmuted to weird variations if one has legitimate reasons for bringing them into being.

Should one turn the racket head in or out and when, and who has strong opinion on these subjects well enough expressed to persist through decades?

Paul Metzler of Australia comes to mind and John M. Barnaby of the United States.

Metzler wrote, that, for added control he turned the racket in, for added power he turned it out.

Barnaby affirmed, that, a strictly palm down whirligig generates unnecessary mechanical complication that can be circumvented by simply opening out the racket in the vicinity of trailing foot.

I'll try Barnaby's idea again today and tomahawk some serves. After all, just the day before yesterday (see # 1540, "Kid Roddick's Fury") I advocated for myself, "Let forearm wind counterclockwise simultaneous with twist of upper arm."

Now I'm saying to wind the forearm before that. And actually, if you're rotorded and have hand pointed down at that moment, the forearm winding will be CLOCKWISE from your own point of view, as early preparation to come edge-on toward the ball.

The racket on bent arm will get just as far back toward the rear fence with hand away from neck.

Wouldn't it be a fine joke if nobody could ever return my serve again?

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Drawing on Roddick the Kid's Fury

Am talking about service invention. The story goes that Andy got so mad that he decided to hit the ball as hard as he could, and he's been serving that way ever since.

Well, I'm mad, too.

I'm reviving some of my forward travel serves even though I don't plan to push with my front leg very hard, not unless I want a knee replacement.

So I'm ceasing to go exclusively with my rear leg serve, both feet close together, and pretty much in place.

I space the feet more and travel travel travel like Steffan Edberg. I don't jackknife the shoulders forward. No, the travel comes from down below preserving backward/leftward tilt, with head out a bit toward left fence.

If you fire trailing leg while keeping front leg slightly bent, your right shoulder (or the hitting shoulder) can get extra high.

The best serves today occurred when front hip continued toward the net even past the point where weight was over the front foot.

In addition, severely raked down racket head went through a palm adjustment as I drew it up in a late circle. Let forearm wind counter clockwise simultaneous with twist of upper arm, I decided, on the grounds that a rotorded server should get this move done earlier than a conventional server with moderately good flexibility. On the grounds too that if a rotorded server can't get racket tip low he can at least get it far back toward the rear fence with hand away from neck.

All the service instruction I've ever heard or seen is predicated on moderately good flexibility. And stresses a position where racket head is on edge toward the ball and parallel to leftward leaning body.

This position is achieved late in a serve.

Well, I want the bonking edge of my fist and racket frame to knife toward the ball earlier than that. Why? Just to see if that idea works. At the very least it puts more emphasis on maximizing twist of upper arm than on triceptic (active and muscular) or passive (body activated spaghetti-arm) extension of the arm from its elbow. That happens, too, but de-emphasizing it could be a good idea.

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The Difference Between my Eastern Backhand and my Continental Backhand

The continental is about getting racket, shoulders and feet lined up early.

On a 45-degree step-out there's no initial racket roll. Behind one, the racket can be just slightly open as in this clip:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_backhand/mac_backhand.html?MacBHCenterRear2.mov

The racket simply falls where it is as the shoulders level out (with arm still bent though it certainly won't remain that way).

On my eastern backhand with heel of hand on pointy top left ridge, I'm balancing racket head directly above a four/fifths extended arm, way back, a Petr Korda and Wendy Overton type pose that works with wrist firmly cocked and locked (up) throughout. There is a roll activated by hips-stabilizing forward weight shift.

Conclusion of this roll briefly points racket butt in desired direction to the outside, i.e., belatedly lines up racket with shoulders and feet.

Arm and wrist action in the continental is less mechanical and more pliable and later and harder to read and therefore well suited for passing shots.

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A Movement Movement, i.e., Utter Rebellion

Let's just discuss three steps today, right foot, left foot, right foot and hit the ball (with a forehand).

Short version: Right left right to the side with final right getting the body and foot around.

This scheme thinks that turning outside foot first is slow.