A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Re # 1379

All the Swiss ever invented was the cuckoo clock, said the Orson Welles character to the Joseph Cotten character as the Welles character, purveyor of false penicillin, insulted the people of Bavaria's Black Forest at the top of the giant Ferriss wheel in the Prater, Vienna, Austria in the Alexander Korda produced film THE THIRD MAN.

[bottle]

A Danger Not Endemic Only To Seniors Tennis

It is easy to underestimate the strokes of any player with slightly impaired mobility.

In our geezer tennis, from not being in perfect position, I hit an overhead into the net.

So I soon saw another lob from the same guy, hit the same overhead a bit better but it landed short across the net.

On third lob I made sure to swing OUT from the sweet spot. The poor guy never saw the ball. It hit him in the side of his jaw. Fortunately, as an instinctive athlete, he turned his head and received a glancing blow.

Later, I told about the pro who advised me, early in my tennis, that if I saw a short lob across the net, simply to turn tail and run.

"I've seen you, John," he said. "I'm telling you this for your own good."

All three guys seemed to accept this. But I notice that they didn't invite me to play today.

[bottle]

Grounded Kick

Although his method is different from mine, Ron Waite uses grounded kick in this YouTube video called “Kick Until They’re Sick.”

http://www.tennisserver.com/turbo/turbo_09_09.shtml

The young Hungarian in the following video called “Naomi’s Sick Kick” is obviously using not grounded but airborne kick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds6CZ4qCXD4

My grounded kick is still not up to the standard of my grounded “flat” and slice serves.

The kick is okay. There just isn’t enough of it with sufficent pace/buzz and therefore it can get drilled or dinked or drop-shotted.

So today I’ll continue with the threshing heels idea.

In flat and slice the threshing heels are essentially used to load the arm.

In kick, the threshing heels actually provide the rhythmic frame in which the ball is struck. By the time front heel has descended as rear heel has elevated the contact has occurred.

In an effort to generate more racket head speed I’ll add a front foot pivot in the middle of the windup.

Slice and flat: knees-back-knees-forward is really one motion, smooth and continuous.

Kick: knees back, pause (with all kinds of stuff happening), extension of both legs.

I want more power. So I’ll add upper body rotation from the gut to the normal 85-degree hips rotation naturally caused by combining purposeful legs extension with the threshing heels. To do this, I’ll need to add more stance, i.e., turn body around more during the serve.

Report:

More pace and sometimes faster spin occurred as well. Obviously however there is no automatic solution to the challenge I have posed for myself. Great kick comes from light grip and “feel” more than logic.

Note 1: All three serves start from same tall body sway and identical toss two feet into the court. The most success with the kick variation depends on thorough delay of final arm throw.

Note 2: Smoothness of backward front foot pivot can be adjusted through pressure of front foot's toes against the court. Simulteinity over sequence has to be a goal.

Note 3 upon returning from the court: I don’t think one should always crank from the gut. One should try simply threshing heels for 85 degrees hips rotation per usual but from the new more turned position.

[bottle]

Pull Hard on an Old-Fashioned Toilet Chain

Forgive me, but I've been reading TECHNICAL TENNIS by Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsey again.

Those guys say, of airborne serving, "Actually, liftoff occurs while the player is pulling the racquet upward from behind the back, but the player can then remain airborne by pulling down on the handle."

In a threshing heels kick serve then (grounded all the way), the body weight going down can then accelerate the racket head immediately after body apogee.

In threshing heels slice and flat serves the body weight going down can help accelerate the racket head immediately after second body apogee which occurs just about the time the rear leg comes through.

If one can prolong flight (and accelerate racket head) by pulling down an airborne serve, one can prolong apogee of body rising on front toes for a second time the same way in a grounded serve.

So-- try to time the pulling down with second front heel apogee and see what happens.

And try the same thing on first front heel apogee for kick.

[bottle]

How Does "Tomahawking" the Ball Translate to a Tennis Serve?

One is apt to think "That's very good advice" and envision the forearm accelerating at the ball.

That happens but, in fact, the forearm decelerates before contact because the racket butt pushes backward at your hand.

Forearm extension is one tomahawk. Racket chopping from the hand is a second tomahawk.

Keep this view of a double lever uncluttered, i.e., temporarily forget about all the other arm and hand stuff one so likes to think about.

Use the racket butt's slowing of your hand to add power to your acceleration of the racket head.

They say (they being Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsey in the book TECHNICAL TENNIS), that, slowing down of the forearm shouldn't be conscious.

But feel of the racket butt pushing your hand could be made MORE conscious.

The goal: No decels.

What I found personally: Because I had been serving with pinky off of the racket for a long time, the plastic butt cap dug mightily into the soft palm-- a good because decisively painful signal.

This led to new experiments with more hand on the racket, including-- even-- gripping the handle halfway up.

Face it. If one kind of serve places toss over the baseline (A), and the other places toss two feet beyond the baseline (B), the physical limitation of rotordedness is minimized, at least, for anyone who chooses (B) and then teaches himself to hit significant upward spin in (B).

The learning sequence would appear to be 1) figure out how to generate upwardness of spin and 2) increase the RPM's by sending racket upward with enough force that you can hang on it.

Why do great servers bend their arm so soon after contact? Could it be because they already are pulling down or chinning themselves to keep their body airborne for longer? ("Bottle, you're chinning yourself on the oar," the coxswain of our crew would sometime say. Maybe I wanted to be a tennis player.)

Same answer to the next question: Why would anyone pull down with the beginning of the descent of their body weight when everybody knows that keeping head still is the big goal?

Abbreviated answer: The better to keep head still.

Summary of answers: Centripetal force.

Listen. I had to hit a good player in the head with a smash he couldn't even see before I realized (again) where my true power is.

Way out front and coming down.

[bottle]

Protracting Mondo Throughout A Stroke

Or, Sanding The Rough Edges Off Of A Flip.

Every stroke is an iteration, i.e., a new opportunity.

Hit the ball with the inside shoulder whether sweeping or topping it. (My subject here is actually forehand backswings.)

Inside shoulder, starting with unit turn, graduates to the ball.

Is this a funny use of the verb "graduate?" Yes and deriving from the adjective "gradual."

For close or jamming balls the graduation will be quick unless you succeeded in starting very soon.

For distant balls the inside shoulder will go back a little at a time as you run.

To sweep, lead with the elbow, keep backswing slow and elliptical, bend back the wrist a little at a time but never so much that there won't be some give left over for the ball.

Come to think of it, the bending of the wrist graduates, too, all the way from unit turn through contact with the ball. For elegant steering you could stick to the smoothness ideal by laying back the wrist less distance or close it to where you want it before you let it give on the ball again.

On this sweep stroke there's very little transition between shoulders turning backward and shoulders turning forward-- maybe only enough for knees and hips to lead the forward movement, which, coincidentally, slightly lowers the racket into the slot to generate the small but essential amount of topspin one will need.

What did the arm do? It extended naturally in very relaxed fashion during the brief transition of lowering racket into the slot.

For topspin forehands, the backswing shall henceforth be different although the unit turn remains exactly the same.

Starting from end of the unit turn, both hands take racket up to slightly over the head. Left hand then smoothly separates and points at right fence to continue the shoulders turn. Coincidentally, the arm starts down although it still is bent. The need for three-dimensional thinking here is acute. One will not go wrong by all the while swinging the elbow around to the outside and then the inside of the slot although the hands do rise and the hitting hand does fall while this more horizontal circular action occurs.

Even if one graduates the wrist bend same way as in the sweep version, there will be a larger transition. Transition in this case refers to that part of the stroke in which the shoulders are still while the arm starts to lengthen down and back from the elbow.

[bottle]

Hangings

Essential hangings range widely from the punishment enacted by some ancient societies on a leader who took them unnecessarily to war to hangings from subway handles before the subway tunnels were flooded to hangings from bus and trolley handles to sleeping sloths.

The goal in all cases is to keep the head still or perhaps to make it still for the first time and is especially effective in swinging or hitting sports.

In golf, in Scotland, there was a brother combination of teaching pro and champion player named Percy Boomer and Aubrey Boomer. Between them they enacted the principle of dynamic action to keep the head still (maybe sometimes just relatively speaking!) for the extra moment of hang time needed during the ideal golf swing.

In tennis, in the United States, two similar brothers worked out the same principle. One could see it in the one handed backhands of Lloyd and Donald Budge both but it extended to all the other long strokes in tennis as well, and eventually Roger Federer from Switzerland became most famous for keeping his head still during contact in his forehand.

In Federer's case, people attributed his stability of core to his turning back of his face at contact.

Similarly, when one hangs from the handle in a lurching bus, one stills one's head whether one is turning it or not, along with one's body.

When one hangs one's body in a hammock mounted on the deck of a small freighter in the Caribbean, one doesn't get seasick, or, perhaps if seasickness was incipient, one can reverse the slow march to unwanted social catastrophe. (I had this experience on a German freighter on which I chipped rust and then painted over the holes from Auckland, New Zealand to Charleston, South Carolina.)

Who expresses this hanging idea best? I would say Percy Boomer in his book ON LEARNING GOLF. He advises some subtle straightening or lengthening of the human head to ball line just as one hits the ball.

http://golfhuman.com/learn/golf-3863.html

http://www.impactzonegolf.com/percy-boomer/

How could that be? Everybody knows that golf is all about not looking up, and not moving the head, or keeping one's chin down and behind the ball as my father used to say.

But doesn't that sound as if keeping the head still is pure determination to do so without help from anybody or anything?

Actually, the anything that helps is the speed of the head of the club, the speed of the racket head, the centrifugal force that tries to break the sputnik loose out into space as the gravity of the earth, i.e., centripetal force tries to pull that artificial satellite back down to the ground.

One starts a swing and then hangs on it. In the Donald Budge backhands one can see him lean backward against the cleanness of his hit. Two sides of an equation are involved. In his case, perhaps keeping the head still as I already tried to suggest was a relative proposition. If anyone other than Donald Budge leaned as much as in the following video perhaps a very critical teaching pro would say, "Don't look up like a duffer!"

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHRear.mov

The faster the racket head moves the more of a tug there is. The body tries to straighten or lean or husk to create racket head speed but stops or slows straightening because of that speed.

Same thing with a tennis serve. Downward force accelerates the racket which increases hang time. Or in Federer's still-headed forehand. Roger Federer is trying to move body left which only increases racket head speed which helps keep the hub of his swing-- i.e., his turning back head-- more still.

The Percy Boomer talk about great golfers in the links above places head displacement at as little as a few fractions of an inch after the opposing forces have done their thing. I don't see why the same couldn't be true for great or even just good tennis players.

[julian1]

A post for you

please see

http://www.tennisplayer.net/bulletin/showthread.php?t=2204&page=3

post #22

[stotty]

Great post...

Essential hangings range widely from the punishment enacted by some ancient societies on a leader who took them unnecessarily to war to hangings from subway handles before the subway tunnels were flooded to hangings from bus and trolley handles to sleeping sloths.

The goal in all cases is to keep the head still or perhaps to make it still for the first time and is especially effective in swinging or hitting sports.

In golf, in Scotland, there was a brother combination of teaching pro and champion player named Percy Boomer and Aubrey Boomer. Between them they enacted the principle of dynamic action to keep the head still (maybe sometimes just relatively speaking!) for the extra moment of hang time needed during the ideal golf swing.

In tennis, in the United States, two similar brothers worked out the same principle. One could see it in the one handed backhands of Lloyd and Donald Budge both but it extended to all the other long strokes in tennis as well, and eventually Roger Federer from Switzerland became most famous for keeping his head still during contact in his forehand.

In Federer's case, people attributed his stability of core to his turning back of his face at contact.

Similarly, when one hangs from the handle in a lurching bus, one stills one's head whether one is turning it or not, along with one's body.

When one hangs one's body in a hammock mounted on the deck of a small freighter in the Caribbean, one doesn't get seasick, or, perhaps if seasickness was incipient, one can reverse the slow march to unwanted social catastrophe. (I had this experience on a German freighter on which I chipped rust and then painted over the holes from Auckland, New Zealand to Charleston, South Carolina.)

Who expresses this hanging idea best? I would say Percy Boomer in his book ON LEARNING GOLF. He advises some subtle straightening or lengthening of the human head to ball line just as one hits the ball.

http://golfhuman.com/learn/golf-3863.html

http://www.impactzonegolf.com/percy-boomer/

How could that be? Everybody knows that golf is all about not looking up, and not moving the head, or keeping one's chin down and behind the ball as my father used to say.

But doesn't that sound as if keeping the head still is pure determination to do so without help from anybody or anything?

Actually, the anything that helps is the speed of the head of the club, the speed of the racket head, the centrifugal force that tries to break the sputnik loose out into space as the gravity of the earth, i.e., centripetal force tries to pull that artificial satellite back down to the ground.

One starts a swing and then hangs on it. In the Donald Budge backhands one can see him lean backward against the cleanness of his hit. Two sides of an equation are involved. In his case, perhaps keeping the head still as I already tried to suggest was a relative proposition. If anyone other than Donald Budge leaned as much as in the following video perhaps a very critical teaching pro would say, "Don't look up like a duffer!"

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHRear.mov

The faster the racket head moves the more of a tug there is. The body tries to straighten or lean or husk to create racket head speed but stops or slows straightening because of that speed.

Same thing with a tennis serve. Downward force accelerates the racket which increases hang time. Or in Federer's still-headed forehand. Roger Federer is trying to move body left which only increases racket head speed which helps keep the hub of his swing-- i.e., his turning back head-- more still.

The Percy Boomer talk about great golfers in the links above places head displacement at as little as a few fractions of an inch after the opposing forces have done their thing. I don't see why the same couldn't be true for great or even just good tennis players.

Fascinating post and links...

[don_budge]

Hammocks, Hemingway and Percy...and bottle to boot.

Fascinating post and links...

Well it is a literary work isn't it...Stotty? It makes you think. Good old bottle. Swinging and hanging...hanging around. I'd hang with bottle any old time. Somehow bringing hammocks swinging on rolling Caribbean seas just off of the shores of Cuba or in the Florida Keys into the equation...evoking visions of Ernest Hemingway and "The Old Man and the Sea". See "Midnight in Paris" by Woody Allen by the way. It's a movie about a writer...or a writer wannabe. It's a movie about love too, of course...what else? The fleeting and illusory aspect of it. Dreams. You will like it...guaranteed. Paris or bust. I'm coming home Ferdinand.

Then there is Don Budge and his golf alter ego equivalent Sam Snead...Snead liked to use the word "duffer". Snead was very eloquent...in a sort of "hickish" way. I can visualize good old J. Donald saying "don't look up like a duffer" in Snead's southern accent...as he practiced and demonstrated his beautiful serving motion barefoot on the grass courts of Forest Hills...just like "Slammin' Sammy" in a parallel dimension, down on the grassy links of some cow pasture or some Virginia farm.

But the links to Percy are equally fascinating...I have always said that I learned more about teaching tennis from playing and teaching golf than I ever learned from playing tennis. Again I feel validated...twice in one day. And the day is still young. It's going to be a glorious day...if only the sun would shine.

She turned her hand this way, then that...in what amounted to the most ambivalent gesture imaginable. It's the kind of gesture that leaves you there standing all alone...gaping and wondering. Empty inside. What did it mean? She loves me...she loves me not?

[bottle]

Kick Plan If Snow Melts From Court

Wind up differently but with standard threshing heels form quickly re-becoming the basis for all of your (my) serves.

Bend elbow early. Needle the damn thing. Get everything cocked during the big thresh.

As front heel rises from court for the second time, sling the arm up and forward straight from behind head, using at least these two muscular sources: 1) upper arm twist, 2) triceptic extension.

This is a lusty blood-filled throw, however, so it has to be loose. Otherwise, oppositional muscles oppose (O,OMO).

Since I have a gimpy front leg to go along with my gimpy back leg, I want the racket head to take the front heel up this second time. A mighty throw will extend front leg and take the heel up, in other words, a comic book throw, utterly melodramatic.

Now the arm is straight and the wrist feels like it's cracking down, although it's probably still taking the racket tip up. "Hit up, snap down," Peter Burwash used to say.

Anyway, here's where I hang on my swing since my body weight has started to plummet increasing speed of the snap.

Of what does the "snap" consist? A combination of wrist extension and ulnar ululation, but no pronation and no "internal upper arm rotation" unless you are a rotorded internist determined never to master his kick serve.

You (I) already did the upper arm twist gig, which was part of the arm throw as body went slightly up.

The wrist snaps in its two delightful ways as the body goes slightly down.

"Fired up. Ready to go."

Note: In reiterating this daydream while taking a shower, I think, that, to let arm throw actually lead the body extension I may need to start it (the short to long arm throw) while front heel is still threshing down.

[bottle]

Mmmmm. More internal rotation perhaps. A unified throw with the internal rotation perhaps more spread out. Was cold out and have been pushing my tennis a bit so today it shall have remained conceptual.

[bottle]

Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop

Any detail in tennis instruction could prove more crucial than the others-- depending on the individual receiving it, I suppose. I'm thinking of one rear view shot in the most recent video of Don Brosseau teaching one of his students the serve. (It appears in a tennis_chiro post in the thread called "Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop.")

The subject of this video is serving rhythm. Within that context the internal arm rotation that Don demonstrates goes slightly from the outside to slightly to the inside-- important because of the scapular additive this enables. Scapular adduction, I think, will work best when it takes racket inward toward the body median.

And yet, in the Stosur first serve we see the action proceeding at 45 degrees to the baseline. And at 30 degrees to the baseline for her second serve.

So the action in each of these two serves is well to the outside-- one of the many paradoxes in the game.

An inside path seems the ticket when speaking of orientation to the body. An outside path occurs in the same serves if one takes one's orientation from the baseline.

This distinction may have relevance only to me or to others as well-- I don't know.

[tennis_chiro]

Making me think again, Bottle!!

Any detail in tennis instruction could prove more crucial than the others-- depending on the individual receiving it, I suppose. I'm thinking of one rear view shot in the most recent video of Don Brosseau teaching one of his students the serve. (It appears in a tennis_chiro post in the thread called "Tennis Serves and The Racket Drop.")

The subject of this video is serving rhythm. Within that context the internal arm rotation that Don demonstrates goes slightly from the outside to slightly to the inside-- important because of the scapular additive this enables. Scapular adduction, I think, will work best when it takes racket inward toward the body median.

And yet, in the Stosur first serve we see the action proceeding at 45 degrees to the baseline. And at 30 degrees to the baseline for her second serve.

So the action in each of these two serves is well to the outside-- one of the many paradoxes in the game.

An inside path seems the ticket when speaking of orientation to the body. An outside path occurs in the same serves if one takes one's orientation from the baseline.

This distinction may have relevance only to me or to others as well-- I don't know.

I see the paradox that the motion creates, but before I run to my library for anatomical descriptions in detail of scapular adduction, let's take a really close look at the video of Stosur I mentioned in that post, the third one up from the end of the article

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/tour_strokes/tom_downs/sam_stosur_serve/index.html

where Tom Downs is drawing a clear distinction between the path of the racket in the 1st and 2nd serves, the 30 and 45 degree angle you referred to above. Please note the movement of the head of the racket head as it comes up from its lowest point in the drop. It seems to come almost out of Sam's right deltoid. At that point you can see the head of the racket has moved that far back to the right (outside?) before coming back up to the ball; then in the action after the hit the racket head moves off further to the right and much further for the 2nd serve. Please note the degree to which she achieves full internal rotation.

But is this what you were referring to?

don

[bottle]

Yes, well, I'm fishing per usual for the kick serve I want. In both serves Sam Stosur "stays closed" to use baseball pitching lingo. The body looks identical. So the difference in swing path can't be there. Nor do I believe the arm is going out in a different direction relative to the body. Could be wrong, of course, but that's what I think right now.

But the amount of forward travel of her head (of her human head) does seem to vary. My evidence is that second serve finish brings left shoulder across the "S" of the word "Southern" to the beginning of the "o." And in the first serve finish the Sam shoulder covers the "o." I'm simply trying to account for the difference between the 45 degrees of first serve and 30 degrees of second serve in a way that I can understand well enough to then take out to the court and try.

As far as "scapular adduction" is concerned, it's just a term I picked up along with "scapular retraction" from Wikipedia. But I thought it an improvement on the tennis instructor's slippery term "adduction" without an adjective. Adduction of what, and in what direction?