A New Year's Serve

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Tennis Persons Who Stare out of the Screen and Just Talk to You

Brent Abel and Jeffrey Jacklitch have been doing it lately, so too Chris Lewit but at a different level in that he might include his kids and his dog in the presentation and then also give you miles of free video in which he's doing one-on-one instruction with a young prodigy.

I defy anyone to watch with full attention such a session with Lewit and not be affected by it in some unforeseen way. It is a bit like watching Brian Gordon with his young students-- that has affected virtually everyone who subscribes to Tennis Player.

The great instructors can have great effect in direct proportion to how simple and straightforward and immediate they decide to be.

But of course in the age of the selfie phone it's too easy to put out video. I myself have enjoyed staring into my phone while waving my arms about.

And everything is in flux; I understand that. What's free now may come with a price later. I don't care-- I'm enjoying the flux; e.g., from other video and written material I thought the one-hander Lewit was teaching was too elaborate for me to handle.

But as I watched a young teenager hitting it over and over (and running around a cone) just a few weeks after having acquired that stroke, I wanted to lengthen both ends of my own tract (at 79 years of age)-- very counter-intuitive.

Suddenly I was getting around on the ball as never before.

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Probation Serves

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...ice_serve.html

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The Difference between Brian Gordon and All Other Teaching Pros as Far as I can Determine

The others all say experiment less. Brian says experiment more.

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Lesson Acquired in Old Age

I bring attention to Chris Lewit's general principle gleaned from Spanish tennis. Hitting with one or two feet off the court combined with a prolonged hip turn creates a parabolic and more effective racket path than one that goes straight.

One thinks of the lifetime of thought that used to go toward inside out swing paths in golf and wood racket tennis forehands, how it always had to do with clearing the body and turning the hip.

Apparently, the same principle applies when one gets one foot or more off of the court only more so.

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Pancho Segura to the Rescue

No down together up together for him. His ha and his ta (in alphabetical order) went in opposite direction, and I can use this formula for my own special need of getting my elbow extra high even in a probation serve.

My elbow can wait high (the probation). But it can rise even higher as my ta goes down.

The move can be cued by forearm parallelism to the court.

Wait position: forearm parallel to court.

Higher position: forearm parallel to court.

Longbow position: forearm tilts from bod re-arrangement alone but still feels parallel to court.

Leg drive and torso twist with full bod extension all the way up to the ball then = 1) an elbow snap-down combined with some ESR which 2) spills over to sweep racket tip rightward and 3) elbow snap-up that naturally stops to passively straighten the arm.

Snick longer with leading edge.

If elbow snap-down (motion dependent) added power to the serve, elbow snap-up (a muscular investment by you) can too.

Hit some serves on the leading edge (purposeful mishits).

What's the point of frequent service sessions if you don't keep your edge?

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Banned in Sweden (no kidding!)

(http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-...oll-baby-kazan)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gBX1znpd3k)

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtcITOEdePg)

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Sanskrit and Swahili 101

ha = hit arm

ta = toss arm

If you cannot grasp this distinction, you'll never have a good serve.

But keep ha up once you get it up. If your psycho-physio system, conditioned to down together up together serves, gets any whiff of ta going down, ha is apt to go down as much as two feet, hence casting you back into bad habit. A Leni Riefenstahl like triumph of the will is required.

Made a movie not yet ready for prime time because of this defect.

New snow closing in threatens the production of a better such movie tomorrow.

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Sanskrit 101

ha = hit arm

ta = toss arm

If you cannot grasp this distinction, you'll never have a good serve.

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Vampire Serves

How about doubling the length of one's toss in a probation serve? Because one doesn't start with both hands linked on the racket, one's ta should be free for a bunch of experiments, could jiggle or lift and lower a couple of times before lifting again, could backswing way up to the left then bowl down into a transition into one's normal toss.

Similarly one might decide that the BENDING of ha should be given humanoid status and declared a villain henceforth to be banished from one's tennis.

There would in other words be NO BENDING just BENT.

Given the excess of Anne Rice vampire novel spin-offs, we might then declare the elbow a vampire but a nice one.

Compressed elbow to spin tightly but fully in the same rustled space within a coffin.

Too much snow may make a trial of this scheme difficult.

I nevertheless shall make my attempt while hoping that a unified 180-degree inversion will deftly have taken elbow

1) down

2) to right

3) upward to combine with torso twist to drive ha straight.

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Elbow high: Now you won't have to get it high. Elbow needled. Now you needn't needle it. ha completely relaxed. Now you won't have to relax it.

I fool with my probation serve and see many more possible wait positions than most people imagine.

Leon Trumbauer, a doubles opponent and partner, says that my erratic arm positions and waggles unnerve him. That has to be good, but, how long will it last since Leon is very smart. Leon will catch on. Whatever I do must embody some basics that will persist beyond a novelty sure to wear off.

Anyone who tries a probation serve abbreviates. Well, would it be a sin to abbreviate the abbreviation?

The next time I get to a court or should I say work my feet down through the snow I want to try all three items described in the emboldened title of this post.

To properly coil the bod, it seems to me, one needn't cue with anything that ha does.

Just let ha do everything you want to form address and then let ta take over the task of cueing the body coil.

So where at toss is the body weight? And what is the body/bod doing? Staying still? Moving forward? Moving slightly forward? Will work that stuff out later.

ta goes down then up releasing the ball and coiling the bod.

Just as body coil finishes, the needled arm keys racket upward five degrees.

Rear leg drive takes over from there. That is the plan.

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Report

Mostly held with this probation serve never tried before in either competition or practice. I believe there is variety available in where and how one hesitates. Brian Gordon has told us a lot, but one of his simplest ideas is go to a probation serve for working on sync between body going up and racket going down. Switching back and forth between this phase and fuller windup phase may take forever but so what? The switching could pay off soon, too-- how can one know? Better to be a little dumb about it? It's great to have such a solid program in mind for when one is dissatisfied with the serve one has. And everyone should be dissatisfied in timely fashion? There isn't a serve in the world that can't improve. But there is a time and place in which to make it happen-- of course.

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ha: Brandishment in a Probation Serve Requires Effort; Natural Droop none

ta: Put effort into finding best starting height for the toss, the height that encourages a slight downswing and rhythmic heave into rainbow trajectory. I vote for straight arm to do this today.

ta: Will do its thing first.

ha: Will do its thing second

ta and ha: Despite the strict sequence will work together.

ha: The best ha movements are ESR with a bent arm, ISR with a straight arm, passive straightening of the arm between ESR and ISR, the pro-active short jolt of rising elbow to produce that straightening.

ha: The droop place is too far right of head to do good, so one can reel racket in by needling the two halves of the arm.

The racket next works down and to the right. To do this however the elbow twists rising in one slot then jolts to the left of that slot to accelerate ha straight.

When palm fires, to be effective, it grazes the right ear.

ha: All other arm movements, used before for positioning, to be extracted and deleted from the equation.

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Probation Serves from Different Starting Points

Strings on head, left shoulder, back. under right ear-- why dismiss anything? You won't if you empower yourself to be interested in the various possibilities.

Ice cream cone structure for ta can produce new options. If one is able without spilling to carry two drinks in either hand through a crowded room one probably doesn't need the crutch of both hands on the racket for starting address.

Today I want to start a probation serve not with racket tip raised but with it drooped as far as it can naturally go down toward right fence with ha bent and its elbow held high.

What one will have done is maximize the amount of ESR available to one. People especially who are stiff in the rotor, who know they can't twist the humerus as far back as they would like should be careful to turn the stick (the humerus) in the opposite direction just in order to know the range of ESR available to them whether that ESR is in the right/wrong place or not.

And then, from the "droop" position I propose, ask, just how much or little of my ESR do I need to raise racket tip to a reasonable place for the start of my leg drive?

Could one throw in this way? Probably. Serve in this way? Probably.

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Toss Higher

Make more time for coil of bod and arm. The serves I hit were too abrupt where that is supposed to happen. Recorded but am not yet ready to show a recording. It seems that one can adjust toss (upward) in one pattern of serve, but when the pattern gets altered, even if only a little bit, one must learn the toss all over again.

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Steady on or Eureka!

I choose "steady on." This method has worked well for me in tennis discovery and for my crew in eight-oared rowing: 29 strokes per minute compared to the 32, 34 or 36 of Penn, Cornell and ten other crews from both coasts and the country's middle in a three-mile race. One has to know some Aesop.

Ease of production should figure in the personal service design that one hits upon and ultimately develops. It's good to be spurred, I guess, if you are a horse with tough flanks, but all in all it's better not to be rushed. You don't want to build up lactic acid.

A sit-down movie is so easy to do now and here it is. This is certainly better than a lie-down movie. When you lie on your back, your arms are in wrong relation to your bod.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M51ulza_to)