Back Foot Serve

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Most serves are front leg.

A lot are good.

A lot are awful.

If your front leg serve after decades is still mediocre, reader, try neutralizing your front leg and push off of your back one.

When you were a child learning to throw a rock, you drove off of rear foot, right? Same thing when you became a big league pitcher?

Driving off of back foot sure can simplify the timing of one's coil.

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Upper Arm Twist

Look at the huge amount of upper arm rotation employed by Mardy Fish in this second serve:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/phantom/Mardy_Fish_HD_HS/index.html?dir=Serve/2nd_Serve&stroke=MF_2ndS%20Ad%20Front1%20500fps.mp4

His is a front leg serve, but upper arm rotation is my subject right now.

One wants to pre-load upper arm in all serves.

That means setting up a contest between nerves and muscles fighting one way but being overpowered by reflex action caused by gross body which means that, in net, the upper arm twists backward.

In a typical down together, up together serve, some of the available arm twist gets used up in “the up” unless one goes out of one’s way to keep one’s palm faced down.

One is looking for the best length of curved racket head tract to match gross body propulsion, it seems to me, and one could take a number of different measures to detect this perfect length of tract.

One could enclose this tract in a larger tract all of upper arm rotation, like Fish.

One could tailor make a desired length of tract instead.

When I started my feet close together version of rear leg serve, I arrived at down together up together with palm and strings facing the court and arm quite severely bent and everything quite forward with hand ready to be drawn back from floating ball in tandem with coiling body—my best design so far. I really like it.

But the upper arm rotates (twists) backward a little as I raise it while bending it in blended fashion. And any backward twist subtracts from later availability.

So what if I simply create a down together up together where elbow leads hand and everything comes up behind body? Looks good. And I’ve bought some time. Maybe toss can be lower. Might be a quick serve. The drawing back of elbow as if cocking a long bow is incorporated in the down and up rather than being made a sequential step. I can reach the same availability of upper arm twist, but the racket may be rising up just before that twist rather than gliding back.

Any different racket level after down together up together will affect the amount of twisty tract available, which means I’ll be in a good mental place for discovering the best match.