A New Year's Serve

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Locked Hands Gone

Wasn't as important as I thought. But contributed to a new path for the backswing. I just start with racket crooked to right now, which still allows left hand with ball to rest comfortably next to throat. A sidetrack but one I don't regret.

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Consider all the Permutations and Different Take-Aways Most Likely to Occur from Locked Hands

First you figure out how to lock the two backs of your hands (I ventured a reason). Then you figure out how to unlock them quickly and cleanly.

Tilden advised throwing rackets for distance.

In the Compton, California place where they lived, Venus put Serena in grave danger with rackets skittering down the hallway.

But Venus didn't have locked hands. And you, reader, probably don't either. But I do. And I want to explore this further.

The hitting hand can drop a little. The tossing hand can go up a little. Or stay at the level it started while hitting hand goes down then around a slightly uppercutting path. The curve of it could make it more organic. Straight squeeze to the side of neck seems robotic, mechanistic.

The fact is however that one can bypass the whole locked hand thing and just start with cocked racked nestled close to one's neck like a shot-putter.

Tossing arm won't care much; not if you carry it bent while holding ball in a light ice cream cone grip.

Just toss-- however it is that you toss-- and hit.

Some eccentric teachers will insist that the student hold to this routine for five years.

No, no, I am more impatient. Lock the hands out front and slightly to the left I say. Then separate them however you think best. Put emphasis on early bod turn. You know where bent arm is going, right? To side of neck, right? Just a question of where along the curved path you choose to toss.

Anywhere, anywhere! Even toward the end with squeezed arm already keying racket down. Keep the possibilities open. What better do you have to do?

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Make Room for Wrist Throw, Pronation (Forearm Turn), Turbo-charge (ISR)

We'd like for pronation and ISR to be as last instant as possible but on the other hand we have reasoned that way for so long that there is a chance of nothing happening on the ball at all.

To this I add another essential-- as I now see it-- in the arm work. That would be a tightening of finger pressure due to the research Stanley Plagenhoef once did on mph in firm grip vs. loose grip at contact of the same serve.

Once one buys this, one naturally ought to look for the best place to have it happen.

Intuitively, one might like to firm grip while arm is straightening at elbow and wrist.

But the just outlined sequence precludes this. It's at the beginning of the famous ISR that the ball gets hit.

Try tightening during pronation (forearm turn) then, I say, to make sure one has firmness at beginning of ISR.

Firm up the grip too soon and you destroy whole motion's looseness and fluidity.

Another ephemerid to add to the same equation: external rotation of the forearm as if throwing a curveball in baseball. Could we accomplish this while elbow and wrist straighten? Or would we do better to save wrist straightening for the pronation (forearm twist)? Whatever works. Most of the serves people have are really lousy. So if you keep searching you are likely to come up with something better although that is not guaranteed-- the serve might remain lousy but one's high five become more potent, even dangerous, a hell of a thunderclap.

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Serve

Not only the wrists are lodged together, now, but the back of the two hands as well. A broader swatch of contact in other words. Not that this is essential. It is a curiosity.

I've just decided that one wastes an awful lot of energy and concentration in determining when the wrist should lay back as I believe it should at some point in every serve.

So I get that item out of the way.

The next thing is to keep the hitting arm bent through the first half of the serve.

People give you a hundred reasons not to do this. A counter-argument is that when your arm is in the shape of a giant key, you may be able to fool your humerus into twisting farther around (axle-like) than usual.

But I don't believe in throwing from a right angle-- not if you are "rotorded" or limited at the back end of humeral twist.

You'll need to squeeze the two halves of the arm together to generate a bit of extra motion up to the ball.

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Prescription for When Forehands Go Stale: Bending Arm 243's to Straight Arm 243's

Let me explain. A 243 is a waist high neutral stance forehand in which the operator remembers and respects the giant clock of Welby Van Horn perfectly described in one of the best tennis books ever written, SECRETS OF A TRUE TENNIS MASTER.

One visualizes a giant clock that is chalked on a blackboard or better a bangboard directly in front of one.

If one can't visualize anything, then one needs to use actual chalk. Go ahead now and draw the clock. Make it big and symmetrical with 12 large numbers in place.

We're not going to look for high balls, low balls, curvy, quick, skidding, hoppy, off-speed balls hit by a diamond thief. We relegate all distraction to the future.

The oncoming ball we examine bounces and sets up for us at 3 o'clock-- waist high-- perfect.

What did we do to get ready? Took racket up to 2 . Straightened arm to take it down to 4 . Re-bent arm using the biceps muscle (!) to re-bring strings to the ball at 3 o'clock. Finished at 11 with arm still at a right angle and racket face slightly closed.

We now hit or mime a hundred of these smooth job round loop forehands, basking in the neat weight transfer they seem to engender.

Time now for some Federfores. These will be taken farther away from the bod. But we'll use the same silky smooth loop. The real difference will be that the arm stays straight once it reaches 4 o'clock. With hand follow through at 11 before going farther around. So what lifted racket head from 4 up to 3? The beginning of a windshield-wipe designed to remove any mist in front of one's eyes.

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One Thing about Verbal Tennis Serve Design

You're never going to control and describe everything that needs to happen. For instance, the rain needs to stop. If starting the serve with a big linked turn, how is that going to affect the vector of the tossing hand? You'd like both hands just passively to follow the bod, but that could worsen toss depending on initial stance and other possible factors. Should one lag hands? Straighten hitting elbow to create a better direction? As with so much in the inception of any stroke, one simply needs to mess around. The words then become a device, albeit a necessary one, to put one in the neighborhood of either fabled or real success.

Back to a down and up roller coaster. But the up is a low up of the elbow as in Narim's serve. And the second part of his wave flows directly into opening out of the wrist near the ear.

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One Thing about Verbal Tennis Serve Design

You're never going to control and describe everything that needs to happen. For instance, the rain needs to stop. If starting the serve with a big linked turn, how is that going to affect the vector of the tossing hand? You'd like both hands just passively to follow the bod, but that could worsen toss depending on initial stance and other possible factors. Should one lag hands? Straighten hitting elbow to create a better direction? As with so much in the inception of any stroke, one simply needs to mess around. The words then become a device, albeit a necessary one, to put one in the neighborhood of either fabled or real success.

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What's the Hurry?

One wants an easy action, but the new pathway this discussion has embarked upon naturally raises the question of how long one's hands should remain linked.

Has turning one's body during the toss ever improved a toss any more than bending the knees during a toss?

An idea or three: Turn body before the toss. Bend body as part of the toss. Start with knees relaxed and lower them a little as you turn.

A slow, thorough bod turn to start serve will establish sufficient rhythm and raise left heel-- one more thing out of the way and not requiring further thought.

Hands to start can be connected just in front of one's wrist bones-- that feels good and one can still wear a watch if one chooses.

The total change in all this replaces the mirror sliding over top and back of head but that is just as well. It was a bit fancy.

One can think of Djokovic's bent arm controlled whirls during Wimbledon 2018 and how well they worked.

I expect that my own arm will not just be bent but will have to be bending more. It's okay.

What concerns me more is the dead Luxilon copoly in all three of my rackets. John McEnroe uses longer lasting natural gut, right?

(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...-all-the-above)

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Whole New Reference World


The new serve opens up a body of new references, a different drop-down menu.

New cues will be forthcoming unless I decide somehow that this new serve isn't very good.

Here's a nicely grotesque cue (one of the best kind since less forgettable).

Instead of opening wrist toward right ear one can aim at top of head then back of head.

Put Braden's imaginary mirror in palm of your hand.

First you check for cooties on the top of your head. Then on the back of head. Then legs fire to lower hand still more.

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Touchstone in Tombstone

Paveloader finish and opening is the touchstone for future service experiments. Full range of wrist movement is the ne plus ultra. Carved serves are the tombstone-- or so we've been told. You don't peel the ball. Nobody peels a ball. You peel an onion, an apple, an orange.

But contact is 4 thousandths of a second. So the peeling idea is okay, just a directional thing so long as you don't peel at supersonic speed. And it's only for soft serves in a certain direction.

It's the opening part from these exercises that is most useful.

Start with wrists crossed and lodged together, off to left. Make the arrangement comfortable, with toss arm resting on top and avoiding wrist strap contact with lower arm on this side or that.

Turn of the shoulders is the ne plus ultra. Oh, sorry, now we have three ne plus ultras. A black strainer is the important object-- the only object other than pictures on my wall.

Right arm, the hitting arm, is well situated for gravity assisted getting out of the way.

The elbow turns up and compresses a little as wrist humps. This used to happen behind one, now it's in front. The shoulders are turning.

Everything discussed so far is a half-move. Whole move is the toss as hitting hand winds up with palm slowly opening toward ear. The thing looks like a geezer serve that isn't a real serve-- so what? Instead of making a foolish value judgment, count. I count to one.

Count two is when the ball starts coming down. Blooey! That's the non-sound of legs firing to cock the upper arm, i.e., twist the humerus like an axle some more. Hand therefore plunges down more, always a bit more than planned.

Count three is rest of the serve.

Did body bend backward when you tossed? It should have. You want to get most body bend out of the way
to make sure a little more of that happens, too.

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The Original Church Lady in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

"She would have been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/a...ence-of-grace/)

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Two Breakthroughs

It's not what Plagenhoef's book cover shows (there's really NOBODY in whom totally to believe although I would take Plagenhoef's one hand backhand any day and have).

But there is a service vector in which to believe. With elbow raised and wrist opened right next to ear-- all the subsequent straightening of joints is going to create racket head momentum upward but from left to right to before ISR continues it only more sharply to right.

Where exactly in the arm action one should apply hyena's jaw fingers compression I haven't figured out yet and maybe never will or want to, but it happens, is going to happen, must happen.

On forehand, we are again indebted to a book, MASTERING YOUR GROUND STROKES, Tom Okker division. Okker and Okker's editors impose black arrows on the photos of Okker hitting forehands.

The black arrows, drawn on Okker's knees, show those knees pressing through every contact rather than leaping or even straightening.

To hit the ball this way yourself, I suggest that both knees not always press toward the target but rather along the line formed by the splayed front foot wherever that points.

The front knee thus is pliable in the direction for which it was built but stiff or resistant as far as any new rotation is concerned. (A significant amount of knees rotation happened on flat feet an instant before torso rotation in the same neutral stance shot.)

The rear knee meanwhile has pivoted inwardly to end up closer to the other knee and press in the same direction as arm begins its blood-filled solo.

Note: A trouble with big guys who overcook neutral stance forehands is that a replacement step (of the rear foot) always happens and tends to be overly large. Welby Van Horn didn't preach against it, but the good choice he saw was no replacement step or a small one.

In a forehand somewhat like Tom Okker's but with the huge rear end loop lopped off, the knees and torso can fire in rapid sequence to straighten the arm. Kinetic chain principle says the torso firing will slow the knees (and hips). Already then we have the chance of improved balance. But that chance should get even better if right heel comes up at end of torso firing as hips rotate into braced front leg. With arm to take off as parallel knees fold forward through the ball.

Immediately one sees the option of a smaller forehand in which one does not try to hit so hard. Just don't turn out right foot thus defying the orthodoxy of unit turn. You won't get as much backward turn but you won't have to make an effort to get the knees parallel to one another either.

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Incapacities of Serving

What if one isn't as physically impaired as one thinks and doesn't have a five-cent computer instead of the usual ten-cent computer in the top front of his brain, as one also thinks?

I now try (today) serves in which, after Narim's wave, one squeezes the two halves of one's arm together while opening the wrist.

Remember, we've done extensive experiments in which we-- full range-- close and open the wrist all over the place, here, there, no there.

Now the hand, menacing, approaches the ear. And if we lay it back so palm faces the sky, Braden tells us, we won't get good spin. Palm needs to be parallel to ear and side of the head, Vic says, so we try it, but this time rebel against the first part, that wrist can't lay back.

No, we've opened and closed wrist in different spots all over the place, which has empowered us. We feel free to try wrist closing or opening at any point we want. We'll try an opening but still get the palm parallel to the side of the head.

Next we apply finger pressure to the racket handle like the jaw of a hyena. While proactively but not too violently straightening the arm at all of its joints. While violently clenching the scapula. While pacifically attacking the right edge of the ball.

Until ISR takes over to hump the wrist to the right of contact.

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Straight Arm Forehand Simplissimus

Flip wrist open with left hand and take racket back level as left arm pointing across assists the unit turn.

Step or step-step-step or hit the ball off right foot. Perhaps, third forehand struck today, I was following the #4310 prescription.

Ball, loaded with pace and spin, lands deep in crosscourt alley.

Comment from geezers: "That's from 50 years of playing tennis."

Actually, I'm very sure that this forehand was a completely new invention that I never hit before in my life.

Haven't tried it in self-feed. Haven't had a hit with anybody (Iryna went back to The Ukraine). It worked well for the duration of the two hours, but nothing was as spectacular as that third shot.

So, the racket is back level. Me, I've got thumb loose Top Dead Center, an old automotive term. Both knees rotation and torso rotation, in sequence, are used to straighten arm. Thumb presses down a small bit too. My excuse for doing this if I need an excuse is a boyhood fracture of my right arm radius in two places from crashing while skiing down the alligator shaped burial mound in Granville, Ohio.

Next comes arm throw with or without a twist (circular wipe with strings at one pitch).

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Tweaking a Narim-inspired Service Using Plagenhoef Wrist Reversal while Giving Self a Chance to Learn it

The wrist reversal, pretty technical, is described in #4309 and perhaps elsewhere.

The challenge, as in any serve, is to master the infernal kernel up over your head.

I suggest moving the wrist opening down from four fifths of arm extension to one half arm extension.

This provides extra time to activate subsequent wrist action through massive tightening of the fingers.

But ISR will need to start early too.

The ball should land in the service box.

The serves may not be terrific but could be good.

As these crucial beginning actions become more ingrained one can push them up closer to the ball.