A New Year's Serve

[tennis_chiro]

Elbow should go continuously up and forward

Is one's upper arm too parallel to court when one starts one's internal rotation of it in one's wide slice serve?

In the following clip one can see Dennis Ralston's upper arm start below parallel and go then above parallel and finally twist with all of this the function of an easy, natural throw.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/famouscoach/denn_ralston/developing_the_slice_serve/developing_the_slice_serve.html

If contact on ball's upper right quadrant is a goal, one may find that goal better enabled this way over others.

Bottle, through the service motion the elbow moves, ideally, continuously up and forward once it completes its rearward motion. Ralston is demonstrating a drill and a way to learn a true wide slice. If you saw Sampras's wide slice, it would appear that his arm was almost as much extended upward as on his regular serve although it would probably be just slightly lower and more in front as Ralston suggests. Once you get the feeling of what the wrist is doing in this lower version slice, the advanced player will have to learn to use that action in a more regular extended motion. But the low wide toss is a great way to get the feel of the wide slice. I have my student's learn to hit a "sidewinder". I show them how to serve from all the way out at the doubles alley sideline. I toss the ball at barely more than shoulder level and way to the right and hit a serve that skims very low but turns a great deal. Try it out!

Also, the motion Ralston is demonstrating is a good model for the club player who wants to add a slice serve to his repertoire.

don

[bottle]

Upper Arm Angle in a Slice Serve

Is one's upper arm too parallel to court when one starts one's internal rotation of it in one's wide slice serve?

In the following clip one can see Dennis Ralston's upper arm start below parallel and go then above parallel and finally twist with all of this the function of an easy, natural throw.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/famouscoach/denn_ralston/developing_the_slice_serve/developing_the_slice_serve.html

If contact on ball's upper right quadrant is a goal, one may find that goal better enabled this way over others.

[bottle]

A Sciaticat's Plan for Leftward Lean

Leftward lean, improperly done no doubt, led to my back problem, which is pretty severe according to one specialist, Dr. Shah from India, the sort of guy who gives spinal injections to lessen pain.

I don't plan to go back for more of these shots and have a book called TREAT YOUR BACK WITHOUT SURGERY that I like a lot although I need time and ambition to do its exercises more.

Still, I want mild leftward lean, want some suggestion of the non-pinched verticality of upper arm one sees in Sampras or Stosur.

To that end, re-consider this video of the young Don Budge.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DB1stSRear.mov

Is his upper arm vertical yet non-pinched? Pretty much so. What especially interests me is the pivot of his rear heel outward as his hips pivot outward while sliding along the baseline and all of this against a braced front leg.

These three "outwards" while shoulders wind backward and go inward toward opposite fence equal grounded leftward lean that won't hurt my back and might not hurt someone else's although you never know.

[bottle]

Don Brosseau...

Thanks for the little video course in anatomy (the four videos in post # 1396). From swinging an axe, a sledge-hammer and a splitting maul on a lonely mountain in Virginia, along with considerable car mechanics, I derived an overly personalized view of the rotator cuff that was much too closely associated with Timken bearings and black grease and the pop-pop of front wheel drive steering gone wrong.

The rotator cuff is much more nineteenth than twentieth century, I now believe, what with its long bands attached to asymmetrical points on the perimeter of the humerus.

And the whole scapular slingshot idea-- oh my gosh. What if best service idea is to push the rib case forward and out of the way (not upward) so a shoulder-blade can cock more fully downward? Would not the slingshot then aim more upward than forward?

I agree that thoughts of inner anatomy probably won't help one's stroke mechanics. On the other hand, they might, and thanks in either case.

[bottle]

A Different Way of Modeling Karsten Popp Ground Strokes

In evaluating Popp's backhand slice, about which there is much information and video in the current issue of Tennis Player, one may come to the sticky question of the double racket trajectory in his backswing or preparation for the stroke.

First he takes the racket back fairly level and then he raises it sharply and then he loops-- finally he hits the ball.

This is a convention of backswing seen throughout tennis history both for slice and drive.

But if a player understands that a flying grip change all in one swoop can place the racket anywhere he wants and at initially estimated best pitch, why bother?

To get personal, which I advise every time, one now has two basic slices. One (I) can take bent arm preparation only back to where one can see an imaginary ring on one's middle finger. This produces a speedy shot if one teaches oneself abrupt change of direction so that clenching shoulder-blades passively straighten the already gliding arm.

Or, one gets the arm straight early and open and high like Karsten Popp and then feels like he's bonking the ball with the heel of his hand from a long smooth radius.

I'm not recommending getting the arm straight on the flying grip change although that remains a theoretical possibility but rather a loop that's horizontal and takes racket butt to the outside and is easily coordinated with forward rotation of the hips.

Similarly, on a flat forehand, one doesn't need a domed backswing if one is bending back wrist a little at a time. One can use the wrist rhythm best in a flat, straight back hand trajectory.

A kind of natural, lower register arm straightening loop then happens as hips ply forward, and one can then preserve one's looped Federfore as an entirely separate and individuated stroke, more sparingly used.

This philosophy says to hell with concealment, choosing instead to strike fear into the heart of one's opponent through the instigation of Federforian loop.

Occasionally, one will hit this shot with the penetration of Roger Federer. More often, however, one will produce "the academic ball."

The real thunder will lie in the flatter, more basic stroke, but let your opponent be the one to figure that out.

[bottle]

Thanks. Right, ulnar deviation or ulnar ululation. Make the motion wail toward the ulna.

[tennis_chiro]

Thanks again, Bottle!

Yes, well, I'm fishing per usual for the kick serve I want. In both serves Sam Stosur "stays closed" to use baseball pitching lingo. The body looks identical. So the difference in swing path can't be there. Nor do I believe the arm is going out in a different direction relative to the body. Could be wrong, of course, but that's what I think right now.

But the amount of forward travel of her head (of her human head) does seem to vary. My evidence is that second serve finish brings left shoulder across the "S" of the word "Southern" to the beginning of the "o." And in the first serve finish the Sam shoulder covers the "o." I'm simply trying to account for the difference between the 45 degrees of first serve and 30 degrees of second serve in a way that I can understand well enough to then take out to the court and try.

As far as "scapular adduction" is concerned, it's just a term I picked up along with "scapular retraction" from Wikipedia. But I thought it an improvement on the tennis instructor's slippery term "adduction" without an adjective. Adduction of what, and in what direction?

Thanks, again. You inspired me to check that Wikipedia reference and the Google search led me to the AnatomyZone.com youtube videos in addition to the Wikipedia discussion on the shoulder movements. Just a reminder for your readers here, scapular retraction = scapular adduction. But if you want a fuller understanding, you really should check out some of the videos on youtube. Damn, I can't believe how great it would be to be studying anatomy for the first time with all these visual aids that let you see everything in 3D and do immediate virtual dissection peeling away all the layers of muscle, etc. It was just 25 years ago, but we had to look at books and go to the labs and study cadavers and models. I imagine you can find just about anything on youtube. I'm a little puzzled I find time to look at anything else. There is so much to learn and so much information available for free. Of course, figuring out which is good information may be another matter.

But back to the kick serve. I'm not at all sure all this deep thought about anatomy is really going to help that much in developing your kick serve; probably just tie you up in knots. You are much better off trying Jeff Salzenstein's "Dirty Daiper" and kneeling serve drill, much as I think the underlying premise about the follow through and reduced internal rotation is fallacious; it's still a good drill. However, I understand that you love the intellectual challenge of visualizing a new approach and trying to execute what you have come up with.

You are largely correct that the difference is not so much in the arm action. It is more in the angle of attack at the last moment which changes the ball toss moving it slightly to the left. Don't overdue that or you can easily strain your back. But the new phrase I want you to start to focus on is "ulnar deviation". Even as the arm is going through largely the same motion on the second serve as the first, the wrist is firing on all cylinders in ulnar deviation to get a little extra spin to the side for an effective kick serve.

suggested youtube videos:

scapular retraction/adduction exercises:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8FZt1_1rjA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fCPCGVU5-U&feature=related

rotator cuff tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfUmN_V-28w&feature=related

shoulder girdle tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bneylG3w10&feature=related

don

[bottle]

Yes, well, I'm fishing per usual for the kick serve I want. In both serves Sam Stosur "stays closed" to use baseball pitching lingo. The body looks identical. So the difference in swing path can't be there. Nor do I believe the arm is going out in a different direction relative to the body. Could be wrong, of course, but that's what I think right now.

But the amount of forward travel of her head (of her human head) does seem to vary. My evidence is that second serve finish brings left shoulder across the "S" of the word "Southern" to the beginning of the "o." And in the first serve finish the Sam shoulder covers the "o." I'm simply trying to account for the difference between the 45 degrees of first serve and 30 degrees of second serve in a way that I can understand well enough to then take out to the court and try.

As far as "scapular adduction" is concerned, it's just a term I picked up along with "scapular retraction" from Wikipedia. But I thought it an improvement on the tennis instructor's slippery term "adduction" without an adjective. Adduction of what, and in what direction?

[tennis_chiro]

Making me think again, Bottle!!

Any detail in tennis instruction could prove more crucial than the others-- depending on the individual receiving it, I suppose. I'm thinking of one rear view shot in the most recent video of Don Brosseau teaching one of his students the serve. (It appears in a tennis_chiro post in the thread called "Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop.")

The subject of this video is serving rhythm. Within that context the internal arm rotation that Don demonstrates goes slightly from the outside to slightly to the inside-- important because of the scapular additive this enables. Scapular adduction, I think, will work best when it takes racket inward toward the body median.

And yet, in the Stosur first serve we see the action proceeding at 45 degrees to the baseline. And at 30 degrees to the baseline for her second serve.

So the action in each of these two serves is well to the outside-- one of the many paradoxes in the game.

An inside path seems the ticket when speaking of orientation to the body. An outside path occurs in the same serves if one takes one's orientation from the baseline.

This distinction may have relevance only to me or to others as well-- I don't know.

I see the paradox that the motion creates, but before I run to my library for anatomical descriptions in detail of scapular adduction, let's take a really close look at the video of Stosur I mentioned in that post, the third one up from the end of the article

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/tour_strokes/tom_downs/sam_stosur_serve/index.html

where Tom Downs is drawing a clear distinction between the path of the racket in the 1st and 2nd serves, the 30 and 45 degree angle you referred to above. Please note the movement of the head of the racket head as it comes up from its lowest point in the drop. It seems to come almost out of Sam's right deltoid. At that point you can see the head of the racket has moved that far back to the right (outside?) before coming back up to the ball; then in the action after the hit the racket head moves off further to the right and much further for the 2nd serve. Please note the degree to which she achieves full internal rotation.

But is this what you were referring to?

don

[bottle]

Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop

Any detail in tennis instruction could prove more crucial than the others-- depending on the individual receiving it, I suppose. I'm thinking of one rear view shot in the most recent video of Don Brosseau teaching one of his students the serve. (It appears in a tennis_chiro post in the thread called "Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop.")

The subject of this video is serving rhythm. Within that context the internal arm rotation that Don demonstrates goes slightly from the outside to slightly to the inside-- important because of the scapular additive this enables. Scapular adduction, I think, will work best when it takes racket inward toward the body median.

And yet, in the Stosur first serve we see the action proceeding at 45 degrees to the baseline. And at 30 degrees to the baseline for her second serve.

So the action in each of these two serves is well to the outside-- one of the many paradoxes in the game.

An inside path seems the ticket when speaking of orientation to the body. An outside path occurs in the same serves if one takes one's orientation from the baseline.

This distinction may have relevance only to me or to others as well-- I don't know.

[bottle]

Mmmmm. More internal rotation perhaps. A unified throw with the internal rotation perhaps more spread out. Was cold out and have been pushing my tennis a bit so today it shall have remained conceptual.

[bottle]

Kick Plan If Snow Melts From Court

Wind up differently but with standard threshing heels form quickly re-becoming the basis for all of your (my) serves.

Bend elbow early. Needle the damn thing. Get everything cocked during the big thresh.

As front heel rises from court for the second time, sling the arm up and forward straight from behind head, using at least these two muscular sources: 1) upper arm twist, 2) triceptic extension.

This is a lusty blood-filled throw, however, so it has to be loose. Otherwise, oppositional muscles oppose (O,OMO).

Since I have a gimpy front leg to go along with my gimpy back leg, I want the racket head to take the front heel up this second time. A mighty throw will extend front leg and take the heel up, in other words, a comic book throw, utterly melodramatic.

Now the arm is straight and the wrist feels like it's cracking down, although it's probably still taking the racket tip up. "Hit up, snap down," Peter Burwash used to say.

Anyway, here's where I hang on my swing since my body weight has started to plummet increasing speed of the snap.

Of what does the "snap" consist? A combination of wrist extension and ulnar ululation, but no pronation and no "internal upper arm rotation" unless you are a rotorded internist determined never to master his kick serve.

You (I) already did the upper arm twist gig, which was part of the arm throw as body went slightly up.

The wrist snaps in its two delightful ways as the body goes slightly down.

"Fired up. Ready to go."

Note: In reiterating this daydream while taking a shower, I think, that, to let arm throw actually lead the body extension I may need to start it (the short to long arm throw) while front heel is still threshing down.

[don_budge]

Hammocks, Hemingway and Percy...and bottle to boot.

Fascinating post and links...

Well it is a literary work isn't it...Stotty? It makes you think. Good old bottle. Swinging and hanging...hanging around. I'd hang with bottle any old time. Somehow bringing hammocks swinging on rolling Caribbean seas just off of the shores of Cuba or in the Florida Keys into the equation...evoking visions of Ernest Hemingway and "The Old Man and the Sea". See "Midnight in Paris" by Woody Allen by the way. It's a movie about a writer...or a writer wannabe. It's a movie about love too, of course...what else? The fleeting and illusory aspect of it. Dreams. You will like it...guaranteed. Paris or bust. I'm coming home Ferdinand.

Then there is Don Budge and his golf alter ego equivalent Sam Snead...Snead liked to use the word "duffer". Snead was very eloquent...in a sort of "hickish" way. I can visualize good old J. Donald saying "don't look up like a duffer" in Snead's southern accent...as he practiced and demonstrated his beautiful serving motion barefoot on the grass courts of Forest Hills...just like "Slammin' Sammy" in a parallel dimension, down on the grassy links of some cow pasture or some Virginia farm.

But the links to Percy are equally fascinating...I have always said that I learned more about teaching tennis from playing and teaching golf than I ever learned from playing tennis. Again I feel validated...twice in one day. And the day is still young. It's going to be a glorious day...if only the sun would shine.

She turned her hand this way, then that...in what amounted to the most ambivalent gesture imaginable. It's the kind of gesture that leaves you there standing all alone...gaping and wondering. Empty inside. What did it mean? She loves me...she loves me not?

[stotty]

Great post...

Essential hangings range widely from the punishment enacted by some ancient societies on a leader who took them unnecessarily to war to hangings from subway handles before the subway tunnels were flooded to hangings from bus and trolley handles to sleeping sloths.

The goal in all cases is to keep the head still or perhaps to make it still for the first time and is especially effective in swinging or hitting sports.

In golf, in Scotland, there was a brother combination of teaching pro and champion player named Percy Boomer and Aubrey Boomer. Between them they enacted the principle of dynamic action to keep the head still (maybe sometimes just relatively speaking!) for the extra moment of hang time needed during the ideal golf swing.

In tennis, in the United States, two similar brothers worked out the same principle. One could see it in the one handed backhands of Lloyd and Donald Budge both but it extended to all the other long strokes in tennis as well, and eventually Roger Federer from Switzerland became most famous for keeping his head still during contact in his forehand.

In Federer's case, people attributed his stability of core to his turning back of his face at contact.

Similarly, when one hangs from the handle in a lurching bus, one stills one's head whether one is turning it or not, along with one's body.

When one hangs one's body in a hammock mounted on the deck of a small freighter in the Caribbean, one doesn't get seasick, or, perhaps if seasickness was incipient, one can reverse the slow march to unwanted social catastrophe. (I had this experience on a German freighter on which I chipped rust and then painted over the holes from Auckland, New Zealand to Charleston, South Carolina.)

Who expresses this hanging idea best? I would say Percy Boomer in his book ON LEARNING GOLF. He advises some subtle straightening or lengthening of the human head to ball line just as one hits the ball.

http://golfhuman.com/learn/golf-3863.html

http://www.impactzonegolf.com/percy-boomer/

How could that be? Everybody knows that golf is all about not looking up, and not moving the head, or keeping one's chin down and behind the ball as my father used to say.

But doesn't that sound as if keeping the head still is pure determination to do so without help from anybody or anything?

Actually, the anything that helps is the speed of the head of the club, the speed of the racket head, the centrifugal force that tries to break the sputnik loose out into space as the gravity of the earth, i.e., centripetal force tries to pull that artificial satellite back down to the ground.

One starts a swing and then hangs on it. In the Donald Budge backhands one can see him lean backward against the cleanness of his hit. Two sides of an equation are involved. In his case, perhaps keeping the head still as I already tried to suggest was a relative proposition. If anyone other than Donald Budge leaned as much as in the following video perhaps a very critical teaching pro would say, "Don't look up like a duffer!"

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHRear.mov

The faster the racket head moves the more of a tug there is. The body tries to straighten or lean or husk to create racket head speed but stops or slows straightening because of that speed.

Same thing with a tennis serve. Downward force accelerates the racket which increases hang time. Or in Federer's still-headed forehand. Roger Federer is trying to move body left which only increases racket head speed which helps keep the hub of his swing-- i.e., his turning back head-- more still.

The Percy Boomer talk about great golfers in the links above places head displacement at as little as a few fractions of an inch after the opposing forces have done their thing. I don't see why the same couldn't be true for great or even just good tennis players.

Fascinating post and links...

[julian1]

A post for you

please see

http://www.tennisplayer.net/bulletin/showthread.php?t=2204&page=3

post #22