A New Year's Serve

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The Big Experiment

The big experiment is scheduled for this Wimbledon quiet morning while my partner goes to church albeit not in Wimbledon. I remember the Wimbledon churches as my bus rolled through (and you may have thought Wimbledon was just a tennis complex and not a big old town embedded in the outskirts of London) . Last Sunday I went to church but today I’ll go to my favorite tennis court down by Lake St. Clair in Michigan. And I’ll go with expectations. Will they be frustrated or confirmed? Experience tells me there’ll be at least one surprise. (First surprise: no connection to internet so all this Sunday talk will become Monday talk after the technician arrives.)

The experiment: Agglomeration of design features from all recent posts having to do with Federfores. First to try: All body “pulling on a rope” to make the racket butt spear toward the ball for as long as possible with scapular retraction finally occurring to prolong the spearing even more. Immediate scapular adduction combined with non-forcible wrist action to provide the sudden change of direction which imparts most of the spin.

I’m very interested in furniture # 17 in the seminal article http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...ehand_part_02/. To find furniture # 17 you start at top and count down through the visuals. One actually needs then to perform the portrayed action with thumb and forefinger, not just look at it. Because the same action will be performed in the full stroke only with more hand on the grip which will convert to more easy upwardness if I correctly understand the assertion in this part of the piece.

In following Brian Gordon’s pre-load philosophy (derived from or supported by his hard research), do we need to pre-load in every possible place in the body we can? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m wondering in particular about activating the oppositional muscles that retard backward twist of the upper arm as if it's an axle—which happens or should happen in a SERVE. On the forehand, now, is conclusion the same? Or does furniture # 17 demonstrate a mechanism that needs to be discrete and pure? In other words, will said mechanism work better if uncluttered? Or can both of these described mechanisms sum with each other?

At the court, I simply dropped balls and hit them, but it was very important that I bounce the balls farther in front or farther to the side than I usually do to create proper suddenness in change of direction.

And it was very important that forward body motion start while hand was still headed toward right rear fence post. Without that there would be no reverse action whip all the way through inward circling and flip and transition. Sounds complicated but if everything is in place it’s a nice swing and probably easier in nature than whatever one did before.

Finally got to court. The ball didn’t care much which way I hit it. But how can that be a definitive result if the person has been hitting the ball more one way than the other? So one has to continue the experiment. Same thing with finding the best verbs. I strongly feel that all tennis instructors must become English majors.

All shots seemed improved by more stepping into them, however.

On kick serve made progress with the old hand behind neck cue. Or rather got hand closer to back of neck than where it had been, a good idea perhaps for a rotorded server. Did some reverse wrist action serves producing a slightly different bounce. Just a matter of turning the wrist one way instead of the other at the same point in the preparation.

On an adjacent court was a father who I felt was beating the stuffing out of his little girl. “ Stop stop moving your feet like that.” The advice wasn’t bad but I felt that with each extra step she took she didn’t earn a dollar. Rather, another puff of air hissed out of her balloon ensuring future losses. Like many tennis parents, he tried to balance his negative criticisms with lavishly extravagant praise: "THAT'S THE BEST BACKHAND YOU HIT TODAY!" The only trouble was that he wasn't aware of his own tone. Since the tone of his negative statements was more penetrating than the tone of his positive statements was soothing, he produced a net conclusion in this observer that the overall session with his daughter was a downer.

Personally to me, however, this father turned out to be a nice man. “That’s quite a big hopper you have there.” “Yes, I picked it out of a garbage can. I love it. I gave up my modern, sleeker one. The weight of it picks up the balls by itself.”

More information than he wanted, perhaps, but it’s always a good idea to try and stretch any consciousness in Grosse Pointe.

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Verb Contest

Teaching pros need language that will lodge in the brains of bleary eyed babes.

"Balance, babe!"

"Set, babe!"

"Relax!"

"Wait!"

"Prop!"

So what verb will work best to facilitate the perfect transition phase of a type three forehand?

Sweep? Bowl? Sling? Jankovic?

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My New(tral) Forehand

My 2000th forehand may work best in neutral stance.

Its relaxed flip and bowl is from shoulder ball and not shoulder housing, although shoulder housing (scapula) retracts during the bowl. And while I've just posited relaxation as essential, the pre-load of arm twist muscles is a different subset of relaxation in that it builds up tension.

Now for a choice, learned from state tax forms and ophthalmologic exam:

A) My new open forehand, a first cousin, works best if I slingshot rather than bowl the spear. Conclusion then: Open forehand is WHAMO slingshot while neutral forehand is the DAVID brand.

or

B) My new open forehand works exactly the same as the neutral version. The only difference is that neutral bowl is longer, and, beside everything else, puts linear weight on the shot since it involves more leg travel toward the net.

I'd like to say that B) wins the contest between itself and A) but actually the opposite is the case.

And I'd like to say that A) wins the contest between itself and B) but actually the opposite is the case.

Trial yourself, reader, and decide which screen is clearer-- I dare you. Yes, make a decision! I know better than to ask you to report back, but if I haven't heard anything in 30 years I'll decide all by myself.

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The Courage of One's Convictions

Oscar Wegner has always emphasized the sideways component of arm and hand travel in generating considerable topspin in a forehand.

This has led to much contention in the tennis world.

But here is Brian Gordon saying the same thing in a slightly different way of course but telling us that a Roger-Rafa-Novak forehand must be hit so much in front of the body (or away from body?) that the sideways arm component can kick in.

Of what does this sideways component consist? Of up to one half of available wrist range, one would think, but of wrist used non-forcibly and for aim only.

And of arm going sideways to likewise get the hand out of the way at the very last instant, but with this done in forcible fashion.

So that's my thinking from reading the first two Gordon-Yandell-Macci articles.

Today therefore I shall delay my ongoing scapular retraction-scapular adduction experiment set piece until late in the forehand cycle.

Length of backswing can certainly be adjusted (probably shortened) to facilitate this.

And scapular retraction (with body whirling) will make the spear fly straighter.

My idea here is to utilize my own distinction between upper arm motion caused by shoulder housing and that caused by shoulder ball action within "the house" (the whole scapula with attached muscles).

Shoulder ball action within the housing (bowling) then to make the racket shaft spear at the ball.

Shoulder housing action to create the sudden change of direction Oscar has spoken and filmed and written so much about-- a very vigorous slingshotting action indeed.

Perhaps such thinking will place "slingshot" too late. (Note: I'm discussing here the DAVID rather than WHAMO brand of slingshot I use in discussions of my rotorded kick serve.) If so, I'll back off by slingshotting rather than bowling the spear again.

My only goal since everybody in the discussion (except for me) has great reputation-- and trying to add to or subtract from anybody's reputation would be utterly stupid-- is to generate maximum topspin with maximum ease. Right. For ME to do that.

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More on Luke Jensen

One can imagine what the female tennis players at Duke, UNC or Wake Forest must think if through superb play they manage to climb the NCAA ladder once again and now see Syracuse University listed as their next opponent.

Assuming the coach has done his homework, the Wake Forest women will look for something very specific in the doubles point.

The coach will have gravely warned each doubles team member with even the slightest weakness of serve to expect a drop-shot short in the alley followed by a firm cross-court volley near the same spot.

For this is what the Syracuse women's coach Luke Jensen was recently teaching in his clinic at the Grosse Pointe, Michigan Yacht Club as regular pros there manned different ball machines.

Luke himself, demonstrating once only, hit the perfect combination of the two shots. None of the club members, male or female, however, could emulate him very well.

Somebody hit the drop-shot with bite but followed it with a flaccid, blooping volley. Or either shot would land too much toward the middle of the court.

Me, I watched from behind the fence, the only person doing that although people offered to lend me a racket and invited me in. Finally, Luke came over to see what I was about.

Syracuse University only has a women's team, he told me. But I knew a male varsity player at Syracuse. His name was Richard Woodley and he was the reporter sitting next to me at The Middletown Press in Connecticut.

Richard was a lefty, the city champ of East Hartford. He had a withered right arm and an overdeveloped left arm and was very smooth on and off of a tennis court.

Because Richard was a sort of tennis prodigy, the Syracuse men's coach had offered him a scholarship. And had given him a better racket purchased just for Richard at his (the coach's) personal expense.

The first time Richard played with it however he smashed it after hitting a bad shot.

So the coach kicked him off the team. And Richard left Syracuse to play basketball as a point guard at CCNY. And that was the end of men's varsity tennis at Syracuse.

Well, I don't know about the last sentence. I like theory of fiction better than historiography, you see.

And I didn't tell this story to Luke Jensen, reader, only to you.

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Continued

Great feel and synthesis is possible if one keeps the total action compact and unified.

The sequence is unit turn, then raising of the racket tip, then moving the elbow, then straightening the arm.

Develop these steps by keeping them small, then forget them, i.e., let them blend?

The totality of this "backswing" or rather "diagonalswing" will then not be a "swing" at all but rather a succinct easing of the racket toward fence post to prepare for a perfect flip every time.

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Gordon, Williams

As a person who is always trying to figure out stuff for himself, I have to say, that, while my bailiwick is unexplored country and maybe even the ammonia whirlpool at the top of Saturn, a single individual, if persistent enough, will find the natural limit to what he can or even wants to learn.

This is how I feel about both Brian Gordon's new intelligence about wrist in a Federfore, and Geoffrey Williams' expertise in hitting with only one side of the racket strings.

I'll do the new forehand thing-- have every reason in the world to try it-- but won't give up my flying grip change to eastern-and-no-more on my backhand. I never will hit as much topspin as Geoff or my youngest brother Echo-- I know that-- but will and already have achieved a good mix of topspin and pace thanks to Geoff's advice about pivoting hips straightening a slight relaxed bend out of the arm for lift-off racket acceleration.

So what makes me think I can use my wrist in a forehand as Brian Gordon not only describes but prescribes (or reports as advantageous from researching a large data base)? My answer should be entirely personal and individualized, as should yours, reader.

When I started getting more serious about tennis with Jane C. at 16, I was all hips and wrist and very wild. Once in a while I subdued that wrist. It still moved but didn't snap. Result: Did better. (Samuel Beckett: "So you failed. Good. Fail better next time.")

In addition, a month ago I hit with a real kid, someone generating huge pop and topspin, and he was pushing me around too much.

After trying every single remedy I knew, I started to use a bit of wrist.

Good experience.

In learning new forehand technique, however, progress isn't linear even when the transitional stroke path is.

The item of greatest difference is apt not even to have been included in the teacher's or writer's explanation that intrigued one that day.

The teacher (Gordon) will have generated/stimulated it, but nobody can achieve anything other than the player himself.

On my Federfore-- on which I spent years or decades trying to figure it out (even dropping balls on ice in Maine)-- I no longer consciously close racket right after its high point.

The closing rather happens naturally from taking elbow slightly away from body on a shallow rise approximately toward right rear fence post.

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Meeting Luke Jensen

"I don't know if they listen better, but they ask more questions."

This was Luke Jensen, born in Grayling, MI, on a favorite subject of both of us-- women.

"You're Bottle?" he said. "The one and only Bottle?"

Maybe he was conning me, but these questions along with other interactions I noticed around a bunch of Har-Tru courts reminded me of the great advantage an ambidextrous teaching pro and French Open doubles champion has if he is a cut-up.

It's my theory that light patter provides a batter in which the strawberries known as tennis tips can swim.

Luke Jensen was in Michigan performing a demonstration at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club. I wasn't sure where that was but recognized his bald head as I zipped past on Lake Shore Drive. So I did a U-turn and conned my way past the Club's guard.

Luke still was coaching the Syracuse women. His almost half-dozen year's experience doing that, he suggested, has proved an immense reward.

There was a huge group paying good attention this afternoon. When a woman hit a great shot, Luke asked who her favorite teams were.

In demonstrating and correcting volleys, he made everybody's racket path go slightly up.

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Here is a full and very good article on Luke Jensen:

http://www.tennis-x.com/xblog/2010-05-17/4195.php

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Don't Throw Your Racket; You Might Injure Your Elbow

My Detroit baseball sources tell me that pitching coaches now are teaching kids first serve technique from tennis to avoid Tommy John Syndrome.

The kids are apt to injure their elbows from improper release of the ball, but a tennis person doesn't have to worry about this since he keeps holding on to the handle of his racket to the end of his motion.

The kids, as I understand it, are learning to pitch without release, at least for a while.

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Forehand part: Good but with a different feel from the expectation built up in the previous post. A lot of parallelism occurs as elbow goes out on a diagonal but racket head keeps up with handle (travels at the same even speed as it naturally bevels). I'm not sure that my arm and racket didn't feel like a hand mower in which the blades automatically twirl in reverse.

Serve part: No good at all, at least for me and my spinnyistic goal. In fact, the rotorded kick serve I've been developing seems to work best with a slightly open stance similar to Tony Roche, which shortens not lengthens the overall motion (which I was trying to do). Probably open stance restricts and simplifies knifing, slingshotted elbow to pure scapular adduction with no independent travel from shoulder ball factored in.

Implicit in this view is the idea that arm can move about the body in two different ways: 1) the whole shoulder housing moves, 2) the upper arm moves within the housing.

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To Better Proprioception

We all suffer from too much information, with the remedy appearing self-evident: Slow down and concentrate on one thing at a time.

I'd call that taking a kinked problem apart, unsnarling the fish line, breaking some overall challenge down into palatable bites.

Sometimes, however, we ought to aim for synthesis over analysis, and I want to apply my late discovery of scapular adduction (i.e. slingshot) to more than one stroke.

Most tennis players, preferring mystery, aren't apt to do something like this. Very romantic, they are. For mystery contains one dollop of wondrous strangeness to three dollops of dunno and never will.

Instead of turning the arm to close the racket on a forehand (if you do that), simply position the elbow higher for same result, only do so with one half scapular retraction.

"One half" means that only the hitting shoulder does a stretch.

The opposite arm and shoulder rather is providing stability right then along with insurance that shoulders have fully rotated with arm pointed across.

The better the athletic movement in any sport, the more the seams of it will blend together, which makes the problem of seeing them more difficult.

More sequence than usual is visible in the following video of Roger.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/phantom/Roger_Federer_HD_HS/index.html?dir=Forehand/RF_FH_Arm_Action&stroke=RFFHInsideOutArmActionSide2_500fps.mp4

I see 1) a unit turn in which racket holds position, 2) racket tip rise up, 3) elbow move out from body (scapular retraction) achieving desired racket position while closing the strings, 4) straightening the arm, 5) slingshot to load the flip in interesting ways.

This is a different sequence from anything that players and teaching professionals usually talk about.

If it's a valuable teaching tool, it can be applied to service as well (see post # 1181).

While the correspondence between forehand and serve isn't perfect since arm is straightening in different ways, in both cases I see elbow moving behind hand and then slingshotting ahead of hand. (Whoops, I later changed my mind about this with regard to the kick serve I've been developing.)

Why not explore 1) forehands struck this way in which arm straightens and stays straight for contact, 2) in which arm straightens then scissors at contact, 3) in which arm stays bent throughout.

Why not explore serves struck this way in which arm 1) straightens in the down of down and up, and 2) stays bent throughout the preparation and only straightens for contact.

MO (Mode Of Operation) here: Write first, try afterward. Great relaxation may be necessary to make it all work.

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Hand Still! Relaxing and Enhancing Scapular Adduction

Phylum: ROTORDED SERVES. Hand to remain still during final stretch of the slingshot. The racket therefore will close.

Hand to remain still during release of the slingshot. The racket therefore will open.

In both directions the elbow moves past the hand.

Before, in this pattern of serve, the arm didn't have much to do during its final stretch. Now it has a lot to do.

Note 1: The hand moves plenty during the down and up stretching apart of both bent arms, but then it gets still. This prescription leads to a single motion (as in a baseball pitcher's "motion").

Note 2: There may be room, i.e., time, for experimentation in final scapular retraction as well. The mechanics of this, as we've outlined them ("we" being my head and two feet starting out flat) consist of minimal drive from both legs and internal raising of rib cage.

Why shouldn't this be simultaneous? Or with legs moving first? Or with rib cage rising first? Or with rib cage rising while hands still are pulling apart? Obviously this is added experiment.

Should, then, the experimenter break down all these attempts into two different sessions conducted on two different days? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

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Hades and Hell-- Essentially the Same

I am interested in imaginative response to the Gordon-Yandell-Macci reports.

Such a course can easily lead to a watering down of original content not perfectly understood-- I realize that.

But the ideas themselves aren't impossibly difficult. The true complexity in this work lies in its methodology in decades of scientific research, which as a tennis player I would like to accept and bypass and move ahead from.

If the findings are solid, one can extrapolate from them-- this is how science works.

Already, I found a solution to the problem of rotorded kick.

So I am naturally optimistic about amping up my topspin forehands through shortening them and loading the flip better through additional muscle use in the area of the shoulder.

These after all are the muscles which, in my limited range serve, sent the coyote as well as the road-runner running, and told Sisyphus to go straight back to hell.

"The pleasure of Sisyphus" indeed. I've taken pleasure from my Sisyphusan efforts-- that's true-- but no one ever proved that I wouldn't find something (with a little help from my friends).

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Iditerod Iteration: More Varied Ways of Compressing the Arm

The Iditarod sled-dog race has a beginning, middle and end. So does a Lloyd-kick serve. Lloyd had a kick serve-- can anyone deny it? Me, I'm on the kick of imagining it. Or if not of imagining it as it actually was, then working from the one photograph I have in my possession and imagining how, applying my own strengths, limitations and knowledge to this information, I could, in achieving such a look, create good kick.

One way in any serve a person can compress the arm is keep palm down and rotate the shoulders in two different directions with no pause between. Thus the old video where Vic Braden, continually swinging around his broad mesomorphic shoulders, says, "See-- nice 100 miles per hour serve." Or the two buckets drill where later instructors have a student stand with one foot in one tennis basket, the other in another.

A second way is to take the arm up high and then let the racket fall, folding the arm. Part way down the legs (and back, Allen Fox suggested) kick up.

Others do something similar but seem to key with the upper arm more, i.e., they twist the upper arm as if it's the key in the back of a mechanical toy.

A fourth way is to abandon all notion of arm and body bending together.

One then could start with knees bent. And use an abbreviated down and up toss-hitting arm action with both arms bent throughout. And separate the elbows during the process to form a slingshot, adding final tension to the slingshot's elastic with slight upward pressure-- as little as three inches-- from both legs with rib cage also rising up within the chest.

The hitting arm already was right-angled-- correct? So it doesn't have much to do during the whole down and up rhythm other than arrange itself at perfect throwing level and move back a little only as the result of the two shoulders stretching apart and offering chest to the sky.

Now we let the releasing slingshot compress the two halves of the arm together creating double resistance for ourselves: 1) the folding arm is trying to unfold, 2) the twisting arm is trying to untwist.

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Forehand Contact

I like roll. I like scissor. I don't like roll and scissor together, not today anyway.