A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

oliensis: that film is great

and the perfect illustration of everything I say

[bottle]

Wrist and Forearm First before Elbow Inversion

Just remember that I'm related to the late MC Escher of Holland who knew plenty about the moebius strip-- simplest pattern of all.

Saw progress this morning in relaxing tract through elbow inversion-- a place where other servers including myself have pre-loaded the upper arm.

But in the M serve the tension or torsion needs to happen only as arm forms the right angle/tomahawk/meat cleaver.

From behind, as in the case of certain other servers who compress the two arm halves together before opening them out to the right (square) angle which will then accelerate energy in a new direction, McEnroe's hand and racket tip move pretty much at the same deliberate speed in the last little bit of travel (to the right angle).

This parallelism seen in the videos means to me that forearm is not winding/cocking/coiling-- it wound/cocked/coiled before.

In any case earlier twisting out from forearm feels good and simplifies the upper arm pre-load about to happen and described and illustrated with colored arrows and animation so well in Brian Gordon's serving treatises in this website.

Whether muscle is still needed to form the right angle with so much to-the-outside momentum available I won't know until tomorrow.

Simplicity of pre-load, however, has to be a virtue.

You don't want much else going on just then other than upper arm twist back contesting against your catapult.

-- John Escher

[nabrug]

Try to find the Bottle service / A different perspective.

Try to find the Bottle service / A different perspective.

Fase1: imagine the 1st/2nd service ball trajectory. Let’s concentrate on the 1st service. The ball trajectory is a straight line.
Fase 2: from which point does that trajectory begin!!!!! This is in my opinion the crucial thing you should concentrate on during your preparation. I would describe that point as the point where both the body and the racket of Bottle are paralel to each other and make a 90 degree angle to the ground. The racquet is in front of your body like Bottle likes it most. (Most of the time it is the same distance what YOU have in your FH.)
Only visualize this during preparation of your sevice and not all your 5.000.000 (joking!) other remarks (How can you do that? KISS!). You already made up your tactics.

I hope you will try it.

Nico Mol
Amsterdam
Holland

[oliensis]

helluva serve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZwc2cdaqU

helluva serve

[bottle]

M Serve: One Hell of a Swoop

Once you (correctly!) figure out the intricate parts of John McEnroe's serve--
an almost impossible feat for which you will get little or no help-- you don't get to the next level unless you combine everything into a single, flowing arabesque.

I know that tennis players aren't supposed to talk this way but rather grunt,
"Stick dat volley. Which way to da beach? I play very good today. Tennis very good to me."

I yam who I yam, however, and Alec Bechtold of Queens, Long Island, New York told me that when he was little he'd go to the playground for some hoop and there would be this dumpy little kid sinking threes from a quarter mile away.

To learn the dumpy kid's serve (or any stroke for that matter), go for:

.creation, not imitation
.feel, not thought
.kinesthesiology (sensory verbal cues to consolidate complex physical acts)
.film and words both
.the Jonah Lehrer book "Proust was a Neuroscientist" rather than the Leonard Shlain book, "The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image"-- at least until you've read it.

Jonah Lehrer, editor of Seed Magazine, examines ALL the senses. He speaks of experiments in which hand beats eye in recognizing imperceptible bumps (not to mention hand with a racket in it to recognize imperceptible chumps).

Wouldn't it be great if one's hand, not too tight, could be the teller rather than one's skull about how to personalize a John McEnroe serve?

On eyesight, exclusion of excessive visual detail, and the painter Cezanne, Lehrer points out that fibers going from eyes to brain are one tenth as plentiful as those going from brain to eyes.

The same visual cells are fired by a detailed mountain or the same landscape suggested by a single curved line as Cezanne does.

There is a huge and underestimated interpretative component to eyesight in other words-- we mostly make stuff up. If we can't or don't do this we
get a chaos of light and smear.

So whom did I model on before? Gonzalez, Budge, Newcomb, Lendl, Phillippoussis, Navratilova, Ashe, McEnroe, King, Wade, Roger Taylor, Venus Williams, Sharapova, Kuznsetsova, others I forgot. So why McEnroe again and now? Because those other serves didn't work well enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I thought the hitting arm was coming up in a pendulum. This misperception spoiled everything. Then one of Yandell's videos from a special angle surprised me by showing how the arm baseballs around.

So, start by watching some video of John McEnroe serving. I recommend especially the ones entitled "serve and volley" not least because they show how the ball bounces after it hits.

Then go to a court with your basket. Get arms straight with back heel up.
Keep arms and body a solid unit through the first significant step which is rocking rear foot flat while rotating the upper body an amount which though small is a BASEBALL CUT that continues with independent arm motion. And willfully continue the animated hand through its entire complex pattern to balanced landing and travel into the net.

[bottle]

Immediate On-court Thoughts and Modifications

1. Start completely leaned over. Shoulders can slowly start rising up even before toss arm has reached low point; 2., the cadence of toss may be different from what one is used to: I think of the science classroom device where a metal ball swings down and hits another, that then takes off. This toss is really three counts, not two; 3., I see a transition between backward and forward travel along baseline where front leg is straight and still while upper body continues up, then the knees start bend/glide just before release assisting height and direction of toss; 4., When arm opens to right angle it is important to keep elbow pointing in constant direction or you lose your pre-load; 5., Turning both palms outward on one brain impulse is easier than I thought since hitting arm is already back at ball release and therefore doesn't have much to do; 6., I am struck more and more by the distinction between servers who "bend the two halves of their arm together" in the words of Ivan Lendl, who advised it, and those who don't. But even these arm compressors need a section of arm work where there is a right angle, which means that upper arm from shoulder can twist and have it mean something.

Mark Phillippoussis besides John McEnroe is an example of somebody who first squeezes arm completely together then forms the right angle. And of course there are many others. And then a bunch who never do this at all, don't compress much beyond a right angle in the first place.

[bottle]

1. INITIAL BODY. Use John McEnroe’s stance only you can keep your bent arms address if that’s what you have. Also you probably don’t need to lean over as far while getting same effect by taking some extra body angle forward with the (a) straightening and drop of tossing arm palm vertical and (b) straightening and separation of hitting arm with palm at setting it naturally wants to be and so that the two hands become at least a yard apart and (c) push of hips backward and (d) turn upper body backward in a baseball pitcher’s way enough to remove rotational slack from LOWER BODY and put downward part of toss to RIGHT of left knee. It’s all smooth and simultaneous and unhurried. I am right-handed.

2. TOSS is assisted by body angle transfer forward to backward at end of hips travel along baseline. Rising toss hand revolves inner edge so palm just gets horizontal for release and once the ball is gone the palm reverts back to vertical. The hitting arm since it is so far back to start has little to do thus making it less likely to interfere with smoothness of toss (a physiological possibility apparently). Like tossing arm it revolves the palm up and that is the main thing it does accompanied by a very small rise of itself. The two palms thus turning outward can lead to the romantic notion that one brain impulse serves all. If there is a little sequence one way or the other I can’t see the harm.

3. THE BEND. (Sit down on imaginary seat and shift knees for front foot take-off.) The hitting arm, thanks to the palm having revolved, can now compress completely on a low, trophied elbow, assuring that saved elbow will rise a maximum amount as it twists upward in the next step. But, as arm bends this way, your wrist also humps (a very natural feeling, this, to do both things at once). This assures a maximum amount of loose wrist from humped to open in the next step.

4. THE BODY THRUST AND CATAPULT now takes place; i.e. the rest of the serve. Although I have read about radical rotation I don’t believe there’s that much at least for a second serve. McEnroe at contact has shoulders turned back at about 60 degrees rather than the 45 degrees that is usually prescribed. I’m sticking with an idea from reading Brenda Schultz: UBR (upper body rotation) only starts from contact. Contact is over the head.

5. ARM MOVEMENT: One should take tennis interpreter Jeff Counts very seriously when he describes all the players who neglect to twist their forearm out when they serve. In John McEnroe’s case, this movement flows out of the wrist shift from humped to open as part of the motion we all do inverting our elbow up basically in response to leg drive but sometimes in response to UBR or catapult. McEnroe: leg. But what happens immediately after that?

A next frame will probably show McEnroe’s arm in a right angle, which means it’s about to twist as if you are throwing a tomahawk (straight up in the sky, someone said after watching McEnroe’s slippery racket fly). It sends the arm on a new slant as well. EVERYBODY needs this extra power. It’s the device by which even the most rotorded player can bounce a short overhead over an adjacent fence.

The trouble occurs when we rotorded ones move this power position backward for an upward spinning serve. I myself shunned it for a while because I thought I was giving away racket angle. But when you study McEnroe closely you see the loss is not very much.

In one frame he (M) has arm compressed, wrist opened out, forearm parallel to the court. In the next frame he (M) has arm right-angled, wrist opened, forearm still pretty much parallel to the court though pointing in a different direction more toward rear fence.

This tomahawk or right angle is what Brian Gordon points to as the main source of centrifugation. And with less or more than a right angle (and I am the one opining here but you knew that already), the tomahawking movement, in which upper arm violently twists, cannot be efficient: a simple matter of maximum leverage.

The active tomahawking can passively straighten a spaghetti arm for sure accelerating it faster than any other way.

So how to get from compressed arm to right angle? By using triceps? Tried it. Best for me is just opened wrist flowing into muscular twisting of forearm in same direction, with this forearm twist sufficient to open arm desired amount in an entirely passive way.

P.S. It’s raining. Otherwise I’d be doing this stuff rather than writing it.