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I think you are spot on 10splayer. I would guess this on probation position that Brian/Rick are promoting is pretty much based on this outside to contact importance.
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I like this type of clip. Quick and straight to the point. I was having a discussion with John on whether an outside backswing is more pronounced with lateral pinpoint players. The archive says yes. tennis_chiro has done some really interesting work with a student in this kind of area. It would be interesting to see what he thinks of markb's serve.Originally posted by 10splayer View PostStottyComment
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It very well may be stroke..Another residual effect of this progression (brian/macci) is that it tends to get the arm in a good, early, trophy position which makes it easier to sync the arm progressions with the leg drive...Something that's very, very important.Originally posted by stroke View Post
I'm not sure Brian thinks that "momentum" into the downward trek (which occurs with staggered and or fuller backswings) is all that terribly important.
I like the shape of this backswing (video) as it is something i try to promote with students..Comment
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So you found that the pinpoint tends to lead to more of this outside postion, huh? Nice find..that's interesting..I need to think about that and why. Any clue? I'm always interested in you and tennis chiro's thoughts....Originally posted by licensedcoach View PostComment
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It seems so from the archive (lateral pinpoint). I think the starting stances of the oldies who all use lateral pinpoint tend to be more one foot behind the other rather than the back foot toe lining up more with the heel of the front foot, as is more prevalent today.Originally posted by 10splayer View Post
It's probably just the less extreme stances of the older players that makes the swing go more to the outside. It's probably stance driven. Who knows? I have no answers.
That said I am watching Jack Sock right now as I type and his swing goes very much to the outside. But there are certainly more inside looking swings today compared to the oldies...but I'd need to see a lot more oldies to be sure of that.
Laver is very much to the outside...Newcombe less so. I like Newcombe's serve much more than Laver's.
Last edited by stotty; 03-17-2015, 02:16 PM.StottyComment
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Perhaps a more interesting/relevant point is how much and how early a swing goes to the outside. I see Jack Sock doesn't get his right shoulder pulled back as much Bautista Agut (watching their match right now). Agut goes to the outside much later than Sock.StottyComment
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Man you guys are amazing at responding. I never thought that I would get so much feedback from you guys. I will try to put a new video out by this Saturday and will try to incorporate what you guys all have said. Right now, I'm letting my Brachii muscle recover to see if the changes help or not.
Thanks again.Comment
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MarkB videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkbN-Od00MA Side view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P4lCcwkWUo Rear view
Macci video on serve from trophy (check 21:50):
McCraw Serve Video demonstrating difference between inside and outside backswing (not swing)
Laver vs Newcombe:
Gonzales Serve:
Poor video, better viewing angle
Better video, poorer viewing angle
This is a great thread/discussion. It's nice to be invited to comment. Sometimes I feel like this is the only place anyone is interested in my opinion. And I guess I do have one here. Unfortunately, I don't think I can clear anything up without being a bit long winded. So please forgive me if you've heard me run these progressions before. I imagine a lot of the participants in the Forum have no idea what I am talking about.
For starters, remember MarkB has a pretty nice start on a serve. The fact he can serve 115mph at 5' 7" is indicative of something. It appears that the motion is too shallow and he's not getting a deep enough power drop or using enough shoulder and body rotation in the motion which could explain why he is putting too much strain on his arm and creating his persistent muscle soreness. He's obviously strong enough to accelerate the racket head in an abbreviated path to the necessary speed to hit it 115, but his shoulder and arm are complaining about the stress... understandably. I agree with others here that Roddick is not a good model. He had been serving for many years when he just decided to adopt that quick abbreviated motion, but remember that his shoulder had built up strength for many years of serving before he started to do that; furthermore, if you look at his motion carefully in slow motion, you will see that it is not really that short
Andy actually double pumps his backswing and then goes up to a classic trophy position before dropping into a very deep power drop position before he swings up to the ball. Also notice the right foot leaves the ground earlier than the right as the primary drive comes from the left leg although the right is certainly helping.
JY could be on to something significant in that the arm trouble may not be from the serve at all but from the grip change, I think it was on the forehand. But Markb's motion definitely is putting a lot of strain on his shoulder and arm. I'm really surprised he is not having more trouble with his shoulder.
The reference to Rick Macci's video (above) is interesting because the points are definitely related, but I have a lot of problems with Rick's presentation. I don't like the whole emphasis on jumping and driving with the right leg out of the platform stance. Leg drive is definitely important, but I think it is more important in the way the leg power is translated to racket speed through the rotation of the trunk and the pelvis from sideways to facing forward. That's why I think my "feet together forward, figure 8" drill is so important. At one point in this 26 minute tape, Rick makes the point that if he asked anyone in the crowd to throw the ball, they would use the right sequence of movement and lead the motion with the leg drive. I'd say the same thing in a different way. I tell people that they are fine when they throw and the body knows what to do (turn the shoulders forward from the hips), but when the body gets a racket in its hand, it decides to let the racket do more of the work and it goes on vacation and doesn't make the turn.
So I have them stand in a regular stance and do a figure 8 as if they are standing in a narrow alley made by 2 20' high thin glass walls 2' apart with that alley extending to the middle of the service box. They have to be able to do their "fig 8's" in that alley without hitting those glass walls. They struggle, but they can do it. Then I have them keep their upper body in the initial starting position and turn the left foot so it is pointing in the direction of that alley (at the middle of the service box almost perpendicular to the baseline). That's pretty easy, but then, while maintaining their upper body position (angle of shoulders and racket position), I have them put the right foot next to the left, also pointing at the middle of the service box. Now the body is twisted and it really wants to twist forward. The student now repeats the same motion with the racket while trying to stay within the glass alley (don't want all that glass to come crashing down on them). Now, when the racket reaches the trophy position, the body will want to turn forward and lead the motion. It's this turning that enables the racket to swing over from the left of the body to the right and onto the line through the impact towards the target. If the racket path doesn't get to that line, you can only hit the ball with a glancing blow. And if you only get to that line very late in the motion (you have a shallow power drop like MarkB), then you have very little time for the muscles in your arm to apply the force necessary to accelerate the racket head up to the necessary speed and so they have to strain and are accordingly overworked. Most great servers don't appear to be straining; rather they are just releasing on the shot. The racket head is accelerated over a greater length. Most cars can go 100 mph, just not from a standing start in 3 to 5 seconds.
So the student goes through this drill dry without hitting a ball making one figure 8 after another and then they start to actually toss the ball and hit the serve. I like them to do practice swing, hit, practice swing, hit with 4 consecutive figure 8's without any pause. Obviously, no jumping here.
You can see a good example of me going through this drill with a student on Ed Weiss's court 3 years ago in one of the sample videos on my website, Tennischiro.com
See the first video, "A Serve Lesson". These videos were really shot for the student, but they serve the purpose. Website is still very much "under construction", but I think you can get some benefit from that video.
No audio, but you can see it on my youtube channel here:
I make a big point of this drill because I feel that is the key to real power on the serve. Over the years, I've had a lot of success getting people to feel the correct sequencing coming out of the trophy position. I think Stotty is referring to the success I had with one student since last summer when I started with him. I just got permission to put the video up as an example, but he is really an example of a different problem from MarkB. Macci makes a lot of reference to an incorrect backswing that goes to the wrong trophy position and actually establishes a bit of a backscratch. That is the problem my student, Greg, had last summer. And it's very tough to change in a 17 year-old competitive player. Fortunately, Greg actually did the drills I asked him to do; usually players that developed don't have the patience to do them, but Greg did. I asked him to use my "hiccup" drill and I think that was instrumental in getting him to make the change you can see clearly in these comparison videos.
In fact, you can see just the changes Stotty is trying to investigate in wide outside backswings represented by Newcombe and Roche. I was concerned Greg was getting a little too far to the outside and the backswing breaks down when the racket makes a break with the rearward motion and gets lifted straight up to the right. Greg decided to straighten it out a little bit and I thought the version he ended up with a week later (which has held so far) was much better. I'm really pleased with the motion and I think if he hits about 20,000 practice serves in the next 6 months (1000/week), he could have a really good serve that will move him up one or two levels on the strength of the improvement in his serve alone (here in the US, college recruits are rated 1 star to 5 star to blue chip - that's what I mean by a level). The serve won't be great until he gets it tested under the fire of real competition in a couple of years of matches, but I think it could actually be great. I didn't think that was the case when I first started to work with him last summer because, for me, the change he has made is massive. He still needs a lot more internal shoulder rotation leading to pronation right after impact, but the real obstacles to potential progress have been removed.
Here's the change in that motion a week later, from the deuce side and then from the rear, regular speed and slow motion(deuce only):
continued in next postComment
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But getting back to MarkB, I don't think MarkB's trophy position is that bad at all. I think the McCraw video makes a good argument for the change that MarkB needs to make. I would disagree with McCraw's description of the correct swing as an outside/in swing; I would call it the correct BACKswing. And this is the point Stotty is getting at about the outside backswing for pinpoint servers. Laver and Newcombe (and Gonzales) definitely take the racket a little to the outside on the initial backswing to drop the racket into the correct power slot. Macci talks about the racket head coming down in the plane right through the middle of his head and definitely not in the "waiter's tray" position; and that is exactly where MarkB takes the racket head from the trophy position.
But wait a minute. Here's someone else with a pretty good serve who does just exactly that:
You could set a nice mug of beer on that racket face just before he drops into the "power drop" position. But Pete gets a lot lower than MarkB. (Also notice that he is still driving up with his left leg, but his right leg is off the ground way before the left finishes, but the legs are definitely driving up, as Macci suggests, before the racket reaches its lowpoint). Notice the rotation of the hips. They have rotated maybe 60 degrees forward of their total 100 to 120 degree total rotation toward and past the target before the racket tip started to rise at all. There is definitely hip over hip and shoulder over shoulder rotation (Gordon likes to use the image of the rolling barrels), but the action that swings the racket head over to the appropriate line to enable all of this is the rotation of the hips and then the shoulders; the rotation that we do quite naturally when we don't have a stick in our hands and are just throwing the ball.
So what would I recommend for MarkB? He's got to learn to feel the drop of the racket head to his right behind his back before it goes up to the ball, what we sometimes call the "loop" we feel in the service motion as the racket head kicks from right to left and then back over to the right before it gets on the expressway direct to impact and lined up on the target. When Laver and Newcombe took their backswings out to the side (but not too far) they gave the racket head some lateral momentum to swing it back to the opposite side before they came up at the ball, but there were an awful lot of guys in those days who swung the racket straight back as well.
don_budge would probably like this guy:
KLACR would tell you this guy of a more recent vintage is a pretty good model too:
Here's someone else who had a pretty good serve, but took the racket straight back and even into Macci's "forbidden area" beyond the middle of his head. If you look carefully, you'll see that he compensates with a double clutch, backs up a little and then goes into a bit of a tray position before dropping into a great, deep power drop position where he did indeed develop a lot of power:
I think MarkB has to address the problem don_budge brought up right away. He has no rhythm to what he is doing. He'd be much better starting his hands just a little higher and trying to adopt a motion like Gonzales with a clear rhythmic rock back and forth synchronized with his hands going up and down: hands down/weight back, hands up/weight forward. This is not the predominant motion anymore, but it definitely works and MarkB needs something to hold everything he is doing together. I would strongly suggest he address that problem of rhythm before he worries about anything else. At the same time, I would get him doing various versions of my figure 8 to see if he can find and appreciate the advantage of a deeper power drop in his backswing. If that doesn't do the trick, then we have to get "medieval on his ass" and have him do some "hiccups". Yes that is a drastic measure, but look at what it did for this guy's serve when he did something like that. He doesn't want to admit it worked, but he increased the speed of his first serve about 15 mph for a few months and won the US Open... but he doesn't want to admit it helped him and so he went back to his old serve:
(That is Christophe Delavaut's youtube channel; he's narrating. He used to make contributions in this Forum and I like a lot of his stuff.)
Hmm. That old Rafa backswing looks a lot like MarkB: elbow above the shoulder line, ...
Well, I hope that will give some additional life to this interesting thread. And my guess is that if MarkB can serve 115 with that motion, he's got another 10 mph in him in a motion that doesn't cause him to have a sore arm (if indeed that is the root cause) if he can develop better sequencing and a deeper power drop that incorporates the use of his legs, core and shoulders in a more gradual and complete wave of power so his arm doesn't have to work so hard.
donLast edited by tennis_chiro; 03-18-2015, 11:00 AM.Comment
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His shoulders don't angle straight up and down, but stay pretty much horizontal. Throwing away a lot of power.Comment
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I can't tell whether you are referring to MarkB or my student Greg, but in either case, you would be correct that they do not get nearly as much tilt as Sampras did (which was really ridiculous when you look at some of the pics that you posted), but they are both actually getting more tilt than Roger Federer:Originally posted by GeoffWilliams View Post
It's true that Greg reduced his tilt in the new motion, but he's already getting some of that back and eventually he will be able to get it up near 70 or 75 degrees. But I don't want him to worry about more than what he is already doing (about 50 to 60 degrees in the last rear picture from 3/7); instead I want him to focus on getting comfortable with what he is doing with the overall motion and rhythm and try to get some additional internal shoulder rotation and release that would be demonstrated by a more Sampras-like racket face motion just after the contact, pointing the head and shaft down at the ground with the arm and wrist still up and with the racket face that hit the ball facing the deuce side fence to Greg's right.
I think I can probably say the same about MarkB's serve with respect to the shoulder tilt as well. He gets a reasonable tilt at about 50 to 60 degrees in the side view we already have (go 9 seconds in to the clip).
donLast edited by tennis_chiro; 03-18-2015, 11:20 AM.Comment
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Rhythm...
Wawrinka, Murray, Tomic all have horizontal shoulder lines but they can all hit big serves. I used to think shoulder tilt was a big deal, now less so. My shoulder tilt is close to perfect (my elbow, shoulder, shoulder is a perfect straight line) but I never had a big serve. It didn't buy me any real power.Originally posted by tennis_chiro View PostI can't tell whether you are referring to MarkB or my student Greg, but in either case, you would be correct that they do not get nearly as much tilt as Sampras did (which was really ridiculous when you look at some of the pics that you posted), but they are both actually getting more tilt than Roger Federer:
It's true that Greg reduced his tilt in the new motion, but he's already getting some of that back and eventually he will be able to get it up near 70 or 75 degrees. But I don't want him to worry about more than what he is already doing (about 50 to 60 degrees in the last rear picture from 3/7); instead I want him to focus on getting comfortable with what he is doing with the overall motion and rhythm and try to get some additional internal shoulder rotation and release that would be demonstrated by a more Sampras-like racket face motion just after the contact, pointing the head and shaft down at the ground with the arm and wrist still up and with the racket face that hit the ball facing the deuce side fence to Greg's right.
I think I can probably say the same about MarkB's serve with respect to the shoulder tilt as well. He gets a reasonable tilt at about 50 to 60 degrees in the side view we already have (go 9 seconds in to the clip).
don
I think different serves have different power sources and it's tough to generalise which components contribute the most power. I think one type of serve may rely more on certain components for power while another serve might lean towards other components for power. I think this is why serves can be complex to figure out sometimes...at least for me.
I still hold the view that rhythmic serves that seem to spread the load evenly along the kinetic chain work the best. Gonzales, Stich, Krajcek all had effortless motions. They served bullets yet barely expended much effort. Stich's second serve was amazing...
I like markb's serve from what I have seen so far. He's nearly there for me. don_budge is right about the rhythm thing, and I also take the common view that a less abbreviated motion might be better for markb.
When Roddick first came on the scene I was quite taken by the idea of amputating problem swings in my students by drastically abbreviating them. We now know of course that a Roddick type serve is just too hard to pull off for most people. The Tenniplayer article that breaks down Roddick's serve is superb:
I really like what tennis_chiro has done with Greg's serve. In my view it was quite a brave thing to do to make such radical changes from Greg's original serve. Greg now has a fundamentally better serve to build on; you can see it getting better further down the line and with practice.StottyComment
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Slick Rick says…"we put you on probation".
Originally posted by stroke View Post
At 9.22 Rick queries...
“Perfect example, tell me which one is a perfect stroke. Player A (Rick initiates leg drive after racquet has fallen behind him)...or Player B (initiates leg drive as his racquet is falling). A lot of people like the Player A because cosmetically it was smoother, it was relaxed. It looked good. My racquet was down my back all the way when my legs started driving. On the second one I built in a hesitation."
"It was interesting...when you have a hesitation...I’m getting into the correction now. You can’t just say, “Hey Mac, you’re into your back too soon. Good luck buddy...it ain’t gonna work.” How do we correct it? Here’s what we do...we put you on probation. Ok...I know some of guys have been there too. We put you on probation. We start you from this position. From this position. Why? I want you to get your house in order...alright, you gotta get your act together. I can’t just tell you, “slow the racquet down”...”you are in too soon...good luck”. It’s not going to work."
"Start your kids from here. Ninety degrees. I little tilt. Like a little (inaudible) of the racquet.like this. We are going to toss, bend and tilt. All that I want them to do is to drive the legs first."
Interesting comment indeed. Being on probation in this position might sort of mean where the backswing ends and where the forward motion with the leg drive begins. I sometimes refer to the point where the backswing ends and the forward motion begins as being “betwixt and between”. Sort of like twilight. On probation. Interesting fellow Rick Macci. He turns it into a performance...which is, of course, what it is. The difference between him and an actual snake oil salesman...he actually knows what he is talking about.Originally posted by stroke View Post
While I don't think that Rick Macci is necessarily promoting markb's type of service motion…he is making a case for practicing synchronizing the leg drive initiating the forward motion from markb's similar position.
Good find stroke. I had sort of focused on the "elbow, shoulder, shoulder" but this is just as monumental.
Next…no maybes. Another excellent video suited to our purpose here with markb's motion.
Originally posted by 10splayer View Post
And this may be the next progression..The abbreviated motion help keep the racquet "outside" and this would promote the same, with a little fuller backswing...
Last edited by don_budge; 03-19-2015, 12:12 AM.Comment
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Thank you markb...
Special thanks to you...markb. You have really sparked the creative voices here on the forum with your unique service motion issues. There have been some really interesting contributions and comments from everyone. It seems we are all learning something from your thread. This thread has had some really interesting food for thought and it still has a lot of potential going forwards.Originally posted by markb View Post
It is an exercise like this one that really gives the forum participants something to sink their teeth into. Thanks for being such a good sport and we look forwards to your next video.
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I was really hoping there would be a few more comments, especially in response to post 23-26. I was looking a little further at that idea of how critical the shoulder tilt is. We all know how terrific Sampras's shoulder over shoulder rotation was; but I'm convinced my student's serve has really improved and he has a much better action to his motion even though the shoulder tilt is much reduced.
So that got me to looking at the archive for degrees of shoulder tilt. But in a different way. Not just how much raw tilt was established at some point in the swing, but how much tilt was still left at the point in the swing when the tip of the racket head actually started to rise and accelerate towards impact. I only looked at a couple, but it is amazing to see how little shoulder tilt Rafa has left at the point where the racket head is rising, especially in comparison to some of the other servers. (Remember Rafa is a very strong 6' 1" man, yet rarely hits a serve in accordance with that strength and his innate athleticism.
Take a look and see what you think. By the time Rafa is going up to the ball in this clip, his shoulders are not even horizontal (the point in the clip where the racket head is just moving off the bottom of the video frame):
Compare Roddick's shoulder rotation from the same point in his motion. I think he gets more than a full 90 degrees from there out of his shoulders up to contact, but Rafa only gets about 75 degrees at most. I just wonder if that isn't significant. Rafa's position a little earlier in the swing looks great - nice shoulder tilt, but he's lost it by the time he starts to really accelerate up to contact.
donLast edited by tennis_chiro; 03-20-2015, 12:14 AM.Comment
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