Whipping action on the serve...

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Developing a Back Foot Serve while other Leg Recovers from Arthroscopy

Back foot serve can use same hips mechanism as a Sharapova two-handed backhand or a Federfore.

This mechanistic sequence was identified by innovative teaching pro-neuroscientist Ray Brown in connection with Sharapova: The hips go easy then hard up and around. Put another way the hips go easy with outside leg bent, and then that leg fires hard (extends) just about at contact.

In a Federfore (the Roger Federer genre of forehand) the same thing happens; but, best results come when the player takes a loose view of the thing.

Instead of being extremely literal about hips moving slowly to here, and fast from here to there, the player pretends he is the one-cannon battleship Monitor at Norfolk Roads in the Civil War-- especially helpful if he or she was already a Yankee.

The turret revolves into last instant aiming position but the revolution can be hips and shoulders both.

Similarly, the firing can include hips and shoulders both.

It was Ivan Lendl, in his collaborative book with Eugene Scott, who rejected traditional, Ted Williams type hips-shoulders hitting sequence. Lendl even suggested that the hips in his forehand seem almost to FOLLOW the shoulders.

All this works well enough for a simple, temporary, back-foot or maybe surprise serve any time. One can also invoke the two plastic basket exercise of Rick Macci instantly to increase power-- where the player stands in open stance at the baseline with a foot in either basket and serves into the opposite fence. Or Vic Braden in his early, filmed versions of a shick injector razor serve-- shick-shick and serve-- with feet along baseline just take shoulders back then change direction keeping palm down to form a natural loop.

"Nice hundred mile per hour serve," Braden would say.

After decades of fooling around with this I only believe in one variation:
the palm is up instead of down. The arms descend together, the back one going faster since it has further to travel, with shallow plane of its descent determined by natural direction in which the elbow straightens.

I then use Scott Murphy's way of passively lifting elbow with forward body
movement with the difference here being that the forward explosive movement is more exclusively angular than in a front foot serve. On a Federfore or this kind of back foot serve there is body rotation to burn-- enough available, in other words, to expend it in both soft and hard forward motion.

Left foot can start heel up to release more angular movement which protects left knee. Heel can remain up until the natural motion gently repositions left foot same as in an open forehand.

Hands can go up together, down together as weight shifts forward then back. Tossing hand can bend up with elbow trailing under as right arm continues back and down (all this sentence with weight neutral).

The rising of hitting forearm to skunktail the low racket vertical can be muscular and deliberate as body slowly rotates forward. The right leg kicking in provides plenty of force to passively lift elbow on the fly into a strong throwing position and accomplish everything else.

The elbow can then throw a short distance pro-actively up and forward before you stop it.

I'm now thinking that one shouldn't be literal-minded about keeping elbow in plane of shoulders, either. I like to start two inches behind this line and end two inches in front of it.

This is no patsy serve.

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Sequence from Last Post

Then, if the physical therapist says that your left leg is doing unbelievably well due to your being an active person, you may take off from a closed stance, adding left leg to the thrust mix.

Technically, this is opposite to usual ideas of developing a platform serve. We most of us are used to putting weight on the front foot in a linear fashion.
By making this same transfer angular (circular) and developing a back foot serve first we may come up with a complete platform serve that fully utilizes both legs for the first time.

Of course I am a server who keeps front foot flat to get off the court sooner thus preventing more leg injury.

Whether this particularizes my discussion to similarly flat-footed servers I don't know. Maybe not. In any case, using Federfore leg thrust in a service motion is an interesting (and for me) productive idea.

Reversing information flow so it goes from serve to forehand this time, one may notice that when one keeps left foot flat as one winds back, the body flexes more from transverse stomach muscles.

Result: added power.

However, left heel up loosens body and seems better for ground stroke movement. Perhaps the answer for that method (which we too many of us learned the first day of our tennis instruction) is to consciously slow the hips going back so as to make sure that the shoulders turn more.

So, left heel up same as always for classical foreands AND a Federfore. For the same purpose in serving, however, I prefer to keep both feet flat with knees slightly bent. There's still hips turn as one sinks down but it's limited.

The Hand

Once spiraling double-legged body thrust in this system has lifted the elbow
naturally while aiding the arm and forearm to twist racket downward and slightly to right, the hand can fly hard left extruded between simultaneous,
conflicting forces of A. forcible respositioning of elbow to left and B. firing of shoulder rotors (also in a leftward direction because of tilt in the upper arm).

"Hard left," I say, but how far to left? Not very much. Most of the motion is upward. We are talking navigation here.

The cue that a voluble soliloquizing server sometimes utters to "swing at the right fence" has never seemed more untrue.

But is it? Can not the wrist snap back to the right off of such an action?
The form of this would be more around toward the net than over the top and the thumb could then turn under, stubbing the ball with left edge of the racket due to forearm pronation and any residual shoulder rotors twist.

Out the window in this thinking are both notions of muscular straightening
of triceps and passive straightening of arm through acceleration-deceleration
having stopped the bent elbow hard. The arm starts straightening sooner
as elbow throws hard left and rotors fire. This may be the biggest departure.
Of course you may delay the whole of it just as much as you want.

Another big issue in such a rotational serve is whether one can achieve
thirty degrees backward lean in the bent knees phase and thirty degrees sideways lean in the extended knees phase. I think one can.