A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Breathing in One Gravity Dominant Serve (Mine, Today)

Breathe in, through the nose, while lifting racket to eye level and shrugging shoulder-blades upward.

Breathe out, through the mouth, while ball arm and racket begin their fall. Body may turn slightly backward to broaden this fall. The two shoulder-blades can fall and come together to produce scapular retraction as well.

As the arms start up, begin inhaling through the nose. A not so fanciful idea here is that, through inflating two balloons (your lungs), you give gradual strength to the initial scapular retraction all the way to near contact, at which time scapular adduction contributes spring to the other sources of power.

Exhale sharply through the mouth from contact.

[bottle]

A Quieter Version of # 736

Breathe in and out and in through the nose to contact, then exhale sharply from the mouth.

[bottle]

~

Among other possibilities is doing what I have always done: Don't think about breathing at all.

Nobody has to do anything, in tennis. That's important. A reasonably engaged player, however, will always be on the look-out for an idea to improve any aspect of his game.

[bottle]

Fine Points

Don't lift both arms too equally. The tossing arm releases the ball and points while the racket arm bends to bring the racket tip in a timed way to a rhythmical catch-up, i.e., a zero-gravity moment in which front arm and the racket length are roughly parallel.

Similarly, don't be too literal-minded in connecting initial downward fall of the arms with exhalation.

A person could start inhaling while racket was near the end of this drop-- how would that harm the serve?

Shouldn't one keep one's breathing as natural as possible? There is a correspondence, we have indicated, between breathing rhythm and specific service action, but one can overdo it with too much attention to niggling, left brain detail.

[bottle]

Breathing During One's Best Serve, Continued

I'm happy with all of these ideas, but some of them are in flux-- that often happens, I think. There was an interesting article in the past Sunday New York Times which I find germane to this discussion. The golfer-author spoke of reading Ben Hogan when he was young and taking it all very seriously. When he got older, however, he realized that what Ben Hogan was talking about applied to Ben Hogan's game and to nobody else. From that the author eventually reached the conclusion that advanced golf cannot be taught by anybody in a generic way that will apply to a lot of people!

I wonder if that's true in advanced tennis. I think I've always resisted the teaching pros I knew-- just a little bit-- and that's how I settled on the idea of this column. I'd just report on my own experiments and ideas and not try to be generic. Amazingly, people like to read this stuff-- at least the tennis players who are real experimentalists like to. Maybe they relate to my quest even though they themselves work with a completely different set of details and wouldn't agree on a lot of stuff if we were in a coffee shop talking things over.

Honestly, though, I would like to break the rule of generic impossibility once in a while, maybe here on the issue of breathing during a serve. I know a lot of top pros, among others, do different things. Have you ever looked at Andy Roddick's cheeks all puffed out during contact, reader? What's that about? Do you know. Do you even have an idea? And why have I never heard that discussed?

Usually, when people don't talk about the things in tennis I want to talk about, I simply retreat into my own experiments, i.e., I have the discussion I want only with myself.

At the court today, I found that my ideas on breathing in a gravity dominant serve were a little off-- a little off at least in the context of my own speculative thought.

What was really cool, I found, was yes to drop the scapulae as part of the initial racket drop but not to start inhaling too soon. If I waited until the racket was roughly even with the back of my neck to inhale, I came up with a maybe very promising construction.

That would be: 1) arch as part of the drop (I'm using "scapular retraction" as synonymous with arch-- a bit controversial in itself) and 2) complete the arch as elbow and everything else is on its way up to the ball...complete the arch with simple inflation of the two balloons which are one's two lungs.

When one inhales one lifts the sternum more, and lifting of the sternum is part of Chris Lewit's definition of a good (and healthy) upper back arch.

[bottle]

Betting the House on a Single Frame

I don't mean a tennis racket frame but rather a tennis video frame, viz., 33 clicks in on Don Brosseau's computer in California, and 33 clicks in on my different kind of computer in Michigan. At first I thought I was coming up with a different number, but that is because I wasn't yet disciplined enough to click backward with my left arrow all the way to the correct starting point and do this every time.

Is such discipline important? You bet it is! We don't just want disciplined, uninhibited tennis. We want disciplined ways to apply the new technology to our game.

I refer to post numbers 733-4, which are about a David Ferrer forehand-- here's the clip. The frame in question shows so much distortion, of, yes, racket frame, that, it's a kind of benchmark of where maximum acceleration ought to occur in the modern forehand.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/david_ferrer/df_forehand/df_fh_arm_action/df_fh_arm_action.html?DFFHCenterArmActionRear4.mov

I'm remembering now Ivan Lendl's best instruction book-- his collaboration with the late Eugene Scott. The photography in that book concentrates on the exact same spot just below and before the forehand contact. Again and again, Ivan Lendl's racket frame displays distortion identical to that of David Ferrer.

So what, you say, unless you're seriously interested. Well, I tried to imitate Lendl's forehand-- a disaster. Then I tried to imitate Federer's forehand-- less of a disaster.

In Ferrer's forehand, I have discovered-- and declared several times in these posts-- there is a single frame in the present Tennis Player videos where racket in response to already whipping body is solid with the body, i.e., is moving at the exact same speed.

Please chill out, here, reader, in anticipation of all the frames in the next sentence. That the key frame is the same frame where racket frame distorts most, photographically speaking of a certain camera speed, may come as a shock.

We struggling, confused tennis players-- perhaps all tennis players-- tend to be entranced by funky terms like "windshield wipers." If we could only get the wiper up to cloudburst speed, we think, or if, before that, we could only delay mondo in order to make it reach warp speed, our forehand would be truly great.

All wrong. Frames 31 and 32 show mondo. That's twice as much time as 33, the singular frame of maximum distortion. And Doug King, when speaking of twirling a baton, urges his students to "keep the racket in hand," to retain a modicum of slowness and control. That would be frames 33 to 43 .

That leaves # 33, the frame we most want to discuss. My belief is that the elbow is out from the body a very small bit but to all intents and purposes is firmly glued to it. This implies, then, incredibly quick hip and body turn, which any chimp can learn.

[tennis_chiro]

Clarity is king

I don't mean a tennis racket frame but rather a tennis video frame, viz., 33 clicks in on Don Brosseau's computer in California, and 33 clicks in on my different kind of computer in Michigan. At first I thought I was coming up with a different number, but that is because I wasn't yet disciplined enough to click backward with my left arrow all the way to the correct starting point and do this every time.

Is such discipline important? You bet it is! We don't just want disciplined, uninhibited tennis. We want disciplined ways to apply the new technology to our game.

I refer to post numbers 733-4, which are about a David Ferrer forehand-- here's the clip. The frame in question shows so much distortion, of, yes, racket frame, that, it's a kind of benchmark of where maximum acceleration ought to occur in the modern forehand.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/david_ferrer/df_forehand/df_fh_arm_action/df_fh_arm_action.html?DFFHCenterArmActionRear4.mov

I'm remembering now Ivan Lendl's best instruction book-- his collaboration with the late Eugene Scott. The photography in that book concentrates on the exact same spot just below and before the forehand contact. Again and again, Ivan Lendl's racket frame displays distortion identical to that of David Ferrer.

So what, you say, unless you're seriously interested. Well, I tried to imitate Lendl's forehand-- a disaster. Then I tried to imitate Federer's forehand-- less of a disaster.

In Ferrer's forehand, I have discovered-- and declared several times in these posts-- there is a single frame in the present Tennis Player videos where racket in response to already whipping body is solid with the body, i.e., is moving at the exact same speed.

Please chill out, here, reader, in anticipation of all the frames in the next sentence. That the key frame is the same frame where racket frame distorts most, photographically speaking of a certain camera speed, may come as a shock.

We struggling, confused tennis players-- perhaps all tennis players-- tend to be entranced by funky terms like "windshield wipers." If we could only get the wiper up to cloudburst speed, we think, or if, before that, we could only delay mondo in order to make it reach warp speed, our forehand would be truly great.

All wrong. Frames 31 and 32 show mondo. That's twice as much time as 33, the singular frame of maximum distortion. And Doug King, when speaking of twirling a baton, urges his students to "keep the racket in hand," to retain a modicum of slowness and control. That would be frames 33 to 43 .

That leaves # 33, the frame we most want to discuss. My belief is that the elbow is out from the body a very small bit but to all intents and purposes is firmly glued to it. This implies, then, incredibly quick hip and body turn, which any chimp can learn.

Bottle,
I thought you might be really on to something here. I started to think about trying to capture the picture with my 1000fps Casio camera. Like maybe the tennis racket shaft actually bends a lot more than we thought, like a golf club that bends before kicking back.

Then I remembered we have 500fps high def shots right here already. Yes, 1000 fps might show a little more racket deformation on impact (it does), but what we are looking for in what you are pointing out here should be obvious at 500fps. I can almost see a little flex in the racket, but not the optical/photographic anomaly/illusion we are seeing in that blurr we are talking about in frame 34(1+33).

However, it is true that to hold the ball at all, you have to accelerate through impact. And if this image works for you, that's all that matters.

don

To see how this is a photographic anomaly, see the following clip 80 to 70 clicks (left arrow depressions) before contact. This is not yet the high speed part of Rafa's stroke and yet the racket seems to be deforming before our vary eyes. It's just an illusion created by the angle of the shot.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/phantom/Rafael_Nadal_HD_HS/Forehand/RN_FH_Center/RN_FH_Center.html?RN%20FH%20Center%20OpenStance%20Side3%20500fps.mov

[bottle]

Thanks once again, Don. The Nadal clip certainly is closer to what actually must happen. Is what we're seeing there some actual bend of the racket backward and then release of that tension so that it bends forward?

The lower speed videos, where there is more of the anomaly, have to interest me the most, however-- me whose focus is on building the best killer forehand, at 71, that I can.

If there is anomaly, shouldn't we try to see it in its most exaggerated form since it's a marker? It certainly has some kind of definite relationship to acceleration-- so that we can count on it as marker if we can figure that relationship out, no?

Does maximum acceleration in the Ferrer model occur at 33 or 33+1 or 33+2 ? That's my question and it's a tennis question.

I'm open to all three possibilities and have hit forehands all three ways. But maybe just talking about it will make me more aware of these subtle distinctions. Guess which one I then would use?

Yes, the one that worked best long before I ever came to a proper understanding of how the tip got so much faster than the handle in one photograph that dismemberment of the racket occurred.

Currently, I'm concentrating on hips and body just then (at 33), also as a marker.

[bottle]

Underthinking, Overthinking, and Just Right Thinking about Racket Head Lift

Did I say this post is about one hand topspin backhands? I guess not.

If one buys into my premise that a three-quarter, i.e., slanty body swing is the strongest yet potentially least disrupting way to first get the racket head both down and around, one then may be ready to take on a certain mental challenge.

What we want to happen next is preservation of body heft through the ball (Momentum A) while, at the same time, we lift both ends of the racket at roughly even speed.

If we stand in the middle of the court and brush the strings and handle up against the net we accomplish half of this goal.

We've postulated shake hands distance of racket from body, however, which means the racket built up circular momentum as it swung around.

Again, we want to preserve something, specifically THIS momentum (Momentum B).

Can a player transition from a circular swing to a straight ahead lift? Yes, but not easily.

So what additives are going to make the transition efficient?

Slow roll of the arm is one option. (The roll also controls racket pitch as the elbow slides out toward the net.) Residual body rotation is another. The arm could continue its roundabout path just a little, too.

I don't have the answer but suspect it lies in some combination of these three factors.

Perhaps one should eliminate all of them for a very pure inside-edge-of-the-ball backhand down the line in which one ends with a roof over the head.

[tennis_chiro]

About that bending racket...

Bottle,

I tried to do my little experiment to see what I could see at 1000 fps. Interesting, but you can't really see the frame bending. But I thought you might enjoy seeing it. This is one of my students hitting a good forehand, probably around 60 to 70 mph. The field of vision of the 1000fps drops to 224 x 56 from 480 x 360 for the 210fps video. That's the reason for the limited view. Unfortunately, I can't get the video to loop back and forth on youtube like it does in the Quicktime player and you can't go frame by frame. Still pretty good!

Just the area immediately before and after the contact point:
Doyeob_FhCntctPt_1000fps_halfspd.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-py4TLc1Y

The full stroke at 1000fps:
Doyeob_Fh1000_composite.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orgbcE6rZ4A

View of Fh at 210fps:
Doyeob)FhDS_210fps_8_5_11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfhlIk9kK4A

don

[bottle]

Federer, Okker and Navarro

One interesting feature of Steve Navarro's (don_budge's) clear declaration of Roger Federer's ideal foot position-- and how Roger works to achieve it last instant even when his feet were nowhere near where he wanted them to be-- is how close the preferred position is to the square or slightly closed topspin forehands that Tom Okker used to hit.

(But I know Okker hit and has taught open topspin forehands as well.)

My source for saying that about Okker's closed topspin is the old book MASTERING YOUR TENNIS STROKES which I don't have in front of me. I just remember the Okkerish look as he hit his full closed topspin-- semi-sitting and very similar to Roger.

I've always been looking for a connection between Okker and Federer and think this is it. Also, Mark Papas at Revolutionary Tennis teaches closed forehands in which front foot doesn't go directly toward the net but a bit to the right-- like Bill Tilden.

Steve's treatise, to which I refer, is at "Westcoast's Ground Game." We've seen some of these materials before but maybe not in such a strong context. Also, there is the problem of reader comprehension. Me, I'm supposed to be a good reader, but I needed time for all of this to soak in.

Also, I'm remembering that the one pro golf lesson I ever had, at the age of 16, was all about Ben Hogan (used here by Steve to talk about tennis, golf and baseball all at once). The teaching pro kept invoking the name of Ben Hogan as he taught me to use hips and knees to lower my 6-iron into perfect pre-release position.

Later, I owned a great book, THE ART OF GOLF, by Percy Boomer (of Scotland) that taught the exact same thing. That was my favorite of my sports books until a nasty girlfriend stole it to give it to her brother.

Good teachers like Steve should be awarded green light to repeat themselves all they want even though the internet already permits that.

Because rich stuff requires repetition along with time afforded to permit everything to soak in.

[julian1]

A lot depends on stiffness of a racket

Bottle,

I tried to do my little experiment to see what I could see at 1000 fps. Interesting, but you can't really see the frame bending. But I thought you might enjoy seeing it. This is one of my students hitting a good forehand, probably around 60 to 70 mph. The field of vision of the 1000fps drops to 224 x 56 from 480 x 360 for the 210fps video. That's the reason for the limited view. Unfortunately, I can't get the video to loop back and forth on youtube like it does in the Quicktime player and you can't go frame by frame. Still pretty good!

Just the area immediately before and after the contact point:
Doyeob_FhCntctPt_1000fps_halfspd.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-py4TLc1Y

The full stroke at 1000fps:
Doyeob_Fh1000_composite.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orgbcE6rZ4A

View of Fh at 210fps:
Doyeob)FhDS_210fps_8_5_11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfhlIk9kK4A

don

A lot depends on stiffness of a racket
A racket can bend three different ways.
If you drop a racket vertically down it will bend.
I have a demonstration at one of Babolat Team's meeting

[bottle]

As I say, the photographic anomaly that Don and I discussed is what most interests me. Because it directly helps me achieve my goal.

[bottle]

Ha-ha, Reader

After this experiment, my potent serve will finally be ripe, armed and fully prepared.

Sure, reader, you know that's a lie and so do I.

Nevertheless, I'll do it. A while back I fooled around with lateness of arch, which obtained some wildness.

Well, I want to go there again. Why? Didn't learn the lesson? Nope.

Why would I even re-consider? Because Chris Lewit, that reasonable man, advised not to arch too early.

Did he analyze this idea to death? No, he simply wrote that one shouldn't arch too early. So I won't.

I'm hoping that the combination of scapular retraction and intake of breath, done late and simultaneous somewhere around pro drop, will keep the serve wild yet pacified at the same time.

And hope is what a serve is all about.

[bottle]

Scythe Every Backhand Drive

This idea starts with one hand topspin down the line, in which the player hits the inside edge of the ball, as recommended by Justin Gimelstob.

Is this the only way to pass down the line? Of course not. If you're really good, you can hit something closer to a normal cross-court. The path of the ball is outside the line. Ball swerves into the court at the last instant. Happens all the time among great one hand players.

But Pat Rafter and others could hit the inside edge alternative, never learned,
contemplated or even comprehended by millions. The racket work is simple. Some forward body turn and then the scythe. The racket forms a roof over the court, after contact.

Okay, if that's working, try more scythe cross-court, too. I don't care if this is Wawrinka or not or anybody else. The roof shot was working well, primarily because it had the great feel of a perfectly balanced 19th century scythe, and I've decided to build on that today, thus following my philosophy or rather ethic of endless change.

The way I'll hit it, with barred arm, is three-quarters body swing downward and around (both), followed by some horizontal shoulders swing and then the scythe. There will be no independent arm swing of any kind until the scythe.

On the cross-courts or down the line outside the line there will be some arm roll during the scything upswing as well.

Thank you for considering this shot, which is menu item 999 .