The Push Serve and the Pull Serve

[don_budge]

It's interesting Ben Kibler cites Navratilova as having a good push. don_budge has long promoted Navratilova as being a great model for female serving. Few ever picked up on his comments on her serve over the years but he's getting justified here. Everyone reaches for Serena's serve as the model to emulate, understandably, but maybe Navratilova's is better?

Two things about the Navratilova serve. Number one...she is left handed. Up the ante automatically 25%...in the neighborhood or thereof. Number two...she was following it to the net with perhaps one of the most effective serve and volley attacks from the ranks of women ever.

The teaching model is the platform stance...at least in my paradigm. But every tennis player is going to play around with the stance going to and fro with different pinpoints or semi pinpoints. Moving pinpoints. There have been some great serves from all stances. Jerzy Janowicz has one of the worst "bang for the bucks" ever with his service motion. With his size and talent his motion is poorly designed and his second serve is surprisingly suspect as I have seen him double fault many, many times. His variation is very poor and limited to hard or harder. Very little use of spin or variation of spin. Tactics? Does he even know what that means? His grip is suspect.

Thanks for the acknowledgement...Stotty.

[stotty]

Thanks for the acknowledgement...Stotty.

My pleasure....

Jerzy's stats for double faults is certainly poor, and he ought to serve more aces. His first serve percentage is decent, however; higher than Sampras, for example. But this is where stats are misleading. A serve can be far better or worse than its stats in my view. Another way to look at it is how much underlying damage is a serve doing? McEnroe did more underlying damage than anyone I can think of.

[don_budge]

Jerzy's stats for double faults is certainly poor, and he ought to serve more aces. His first serve percentage is decent, however; higher than Sampras, for example. But this is where stats are misleading. A serve can be far better or worse than its stats in my view. Another way to look at it is how much underlying damage is a serve doing? McEnroe did more underlying damage than anyone I can think of.

Good points. I like the one about "The Great John McEnroe's Serve" in particular. I have always considered Pete Sampras a platform based server as well.

Jerzy sure blasts away at his first...and even his second. He blasts away seemingly thoughtlessly. The only trace of thought is mph. Speed. But McEnroe was the ultimate cerebral server and it certainly didn't hurt being left handed. He automatically ups the ante.

Pin-point serving gives me the impression, rightly or wrongly, as being less stable. More moving parts...making it more difficult to synchronize the toss with the motion. I don't know how many of these stances where the server seems to be tossing the ball out of sight. Slight exaggeration perhaps. But the extra feet shuffling sometimes is a good excuse to throw that thing higher to give the server more time to go through the motion.

Personally I feel that speed may be overrated when it comes to good serving. When watching the Australian Open it became more and more obvious who had the best serve in the world. The big speed servers were on the sidelines and 35 year old Roger Federer mowed down the field. He did it with a lot of cagey serving...while at the same time mixing it up with ample speed and great choice of spin and just as importantly...placement. Another platform server.

Janowicz is the antithesis of Federer when it comes to serving. All of that potential staring him in the face yet he turns a blind eye to it. McEnroe could have taught this kid a thing or two. He may have made a good coach for Jerzy "Joe".

Stats are certainly misleading. It often amazes me how useless they actually are sometimes. The one stat that is the most misleading can be the speed stat. What is power..I ask the student. Control is power...control being the elements of speed, spin and placement. Not necessarily in that order.

[don_budge]

The Living Proof...Roger Federer (and The Great John McEnroe)

Interesting that these two names have been brought into this discussion. Platform or Pinpoint? Push or Pull? Well...the proof is in the pudding. Surely there have been great pinpoint servers.

But I will say this...I was so impressed how Roger Federer was serving out the matches at the 2017 Australian Open. It was a thing of beauty how once he smelled the finish line he was like a surgeon with a deft scalpel. So efficient...not wasting any points at all. Once he was down the stretch run in his matches it was just amazing how he mowed them down. It was like he was striking out the side in the bottom of the ninth.

John McEnroe at his zenith was much the same. For all of his antics and nonsense at times...he was so zeroed in and focused when it came down to the moment of truth in a match. He was like a matador...just waiting to plunge it in for the kill.

Pete Sampras comes to mind as well. Another great server out of the platform mold.

So based on this sort of evidence there really isn't any argument that the platform is the teaching model...even though there have been some great service motions like tennis_chiro's and stotty's that use the pinpoint.

[tupelodanger]

They are pushing with both feet. It's elevating the back hip--but the front foot is what is raising them off the ground. Look at a bunch of leg action serves in the archives.

That's really not happening with (esp.) Sampras's motion.

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/high_speed/High_Speed.html?PeteSampras1stServe.mov

He's still in the trophy position and waiting to explode up into racquet drop when his rear foot has been completely unweighted. At the moment he's generating force, his weight distribution is quite literally 100/0. It couldn't be any other way. The degree to which his hip is thrust into the court means that his weight has to be far over that lead foot, and you can't push up against nothing with an unweighted rear foot and hope to get "a push." The only way it's even possible for the rear foot to "push" in a Sampras motion is rotationally, though Pete doesn't even really do this. You can see his toe drag rotationally around, which it wouldn't had he applied significant vertical push to it a moment before. By the time the first iota of vertical push begins, Pete's rear foot is well on its way already, and is in such a position that pushing with it would be quite impossible.

Pete's certainly pushing, and you want to. But he's doing 100% of the pushing with his left leg, I'm afraid. The crucial value of pushing with the rear foot is being grossly overstated in that vid, I believe, at least w/r/t Pete's service. I think it's a tradeoff he makes in the name of getting his weight moving forward.

Someone like Federer, despite the superficial similarities, is getting significantly more push off the rear leg. You can see differences in both the way the right foot/leg/hip explode upward, and in his much-further-back landing spot into the court. Fed's all about exploding upward into the ball. Pete was about exploding up and forward.

[tennis_chiro]

That's really not happening with (esp.) Sampras's motion.

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/high_speed/High_Speed.html?PeteSampras1stServe.mov

He's still in the trophy position and waiting to explode up into racquet drop when his rear foot has been completely unweighted. At the moment he's generating force, his weight distribution is quite literally 100/0. It couldn't be any other way. The degree to which his hip is thrust into the court means that his weight has to be far over that lead foot, and you can't push up against nothing with an unweighted rear foot and hope to get "a push." The only way it's even possible for the rear foot to "push" in a Sampras motion is rotationally, though Pete doesn't even really do this. You can see his toe drag rotationally around, which it wouldn't had he applied significant vertical push to it a moment before. By the time the first iota of vertical push begins, Pete's rear foot is well on its way already, and is in such a position that pushing with it would be quite impossible.

Pete's certainly pushing, and you want to. But he's doing 100% of the pushing with his left leg, I'm afraid. The crucial value of pushing with the rear foot is being grossly overstated in that vid, I believe, at least w/r/t Pete's service. I think it's a tradeoff he makes in the name of getting his weight moving forward.

Someone like Federer, despite the superficial similarities, is getting significantly more push off the rear leg. You can see differences in both the way the right foot/leg/hip explode upward, and in his much-further-back landing spot into the court. Fed's all about exploding upward into the ball. Pete was about exploding up and forward.

Exactly. More later. And although Federer may be the GOAT in terms of majors and achievements, it is generally accepted that Pete's serve was better and especially that Pete's second serve was much better.
don

[johnyandell]

tupelo,
That's pretty much what I thought too. If the back foot is off the ground how could it be "pushing"--until I started working with Ben on his series. According to his work, it's about what the back foot does to the level of the hips. In the clips you can see the push from the wrinkle in the shoes. I plan to have been clarify this in future articles--but the elevation of the back hip is in his view a marker.

[klacr]

Clearly this video has elicited some great responses and insights. This thread is proof of that. The push/pull idea is old as far as the biomechanics of it but I go about it a different way. I often think of chest up/chest down.

Push: I always try to imagine that my chest is pushing upwards towards the ball and contact height. In order to do this I must use the legs to push up as the thrust from my legs creates what feels like an SSC forcing my upper torso to tilt up and chest towards sky.

Pull: You'll see many players try to yank and lean to far forward, bending at the waist at or immediately following contact. No Bueno.

Maybe I'm overcomplicating it or just giving it a different hat. But thats what I see. Maybe another angle to explain to students also. Think about it.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[cms56]

Preliminarily, a statement: kinesiologically and biomechanically the tennis serve is most essentially a throwing motion with an implement (a racquet) in the hand rather than a ball, and with the force directed both up and forward rather than merely forward. Those differences do demand some slight adjustments that alter body configurations (the backward bend, for instance), but the basis sequence of muscle movements is identical. It is, first and foremost, a kinetic chain that generates angular momentum with heavy and fast pelvic rotation initiated with the legs (clarity on this in a moment), and that communicates itself up the torso and ultimately out the throwing/striking arm through a sequential cascade of muscular contractions enhanced by the stretch-shortening cycle using the very elegant differential relaxation exhibited by skilled athletes.

Because it is a throwing motion, it is best demonstrated by envisioning a pitcher and how he/she would look throwing a ball (rather than swinging a racquet) up at the tennis ball thrown into the air for a serve (up and slightly forward). It would involve a smaller step than the huge stride seen in pitching, but it would involve a conspicuous weight transfer off the right foot onto the left to initiate the throw.

Now, a thought experiment: try to imagine any major league pitcher winding up, planting his left foot, bringing the right foot up close to the left, and then initiating upper arm throwing motion. With apologies for being clearly sexist, when I was a boy, this was known as throwing like a girl. And put bluntly, this is how I've always seen players who use anything like the pinpoint serve. It just looks plain wrong -- as if the motion were effectively starting off the front foot. Dr. Kibler has clarified that by noting that effective push serves can be accomplished with the pinpoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRPtVfEz4es = take that motion and direct the throw into the air. Would it involve getting into a pinpoint stance? Of course not. So why do tennis serves so often involve just that maneuver?

I'm not suggesting that players cannot get good results from the pinpoint, but why do it when there is a better approach?

So, what is that better approach? Simple: serve like you throw.

Using a right-hander as an example, it is to use a pure throwing motion, with rotation beginning off the right hip as the first axis in the pelvic turn and then transferring to the left hip to continue the rotation. The transfer happens naturally as you shift weight and/or slide the pelvis forward, just as you do when pitching baseballs or swinging golf clubs or swinging baseball bats or doing anything that constitutes throwing/striking motions -- there aren't a lot of really efficient options for this kind of thing. Certainly there is, at some point, a place where the right foot is no longer pushing -- just as there is a point in the stride of a pitcher or the forward foot plant of a batter or golfer -- where the rear leg/hip is no longer principally involved in the rotation, and that's because the duty has been moved forward in the sequence.

I think the real problem with the "pull" serve is that it nearly eliminates the rear foot as the effective start of the serve. In short, it's a bad throwing motion.

I challenge anyone to provide a film clip of pitching that involves a motion comparable to the pinpoint serve (rear foot pulled up close) and then persuade me and others it doesn't look simply ridiculous.

[stroke]

Preliminarily, a statement: kinesiologically and biomechanically the tennis serve is most essentially a throwing motion with an implement (a racquet) in the hand rather than a ball, and with the force directed both up and forward rather than merely forward. Those differences do demand some slight adjustments that alter body configurations (the backward bend, for instance), but the basis sequence of muscle movements is identical. It is, first and foremost, a kinetic chain that generates angular momentum with heavy and fast pelvic rotation initiated with the legs (clarity on this in a moment), and that communicates itself up the torso and ultimately out the throwing/striking arm through a sequential cascade of muscular contractions enhanced by the stretch-shortening cycle using the very elegant differential relaxation exhibited by skilled athletes.

Because it is a throwing motion, it is best demonstrated by envisioning a pitcher and how he/she would look throwing a ball (rather than swinging a racquet) up at the tennis ball thrown into the air for a serve (up and slightly forward). It would involve a smaller step than the huge stride seen in pitching, but it would involve a conspicuous weight transfer off the right foot onto the left to initiate the throw.

Now, a thought experiment: try to imagine any major league pitcher winding up, planting his left foot, bringing the right foot up close to the left, and then initiating upper arm throwing motion. With apologies for being clearly sexist, when I was a boy, this was known as throwing like a girl. And put bluntly, this is how I've always seen players who use anything like the pinpoint serve. It just looks plain wrong -- as if the motion were effectively starting off the front foot. Dr. Kibler has clarified that by noting that effective push serves can be accomplished with the pinpoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRPtVfEz4es = take that motion and direct the throw into the air. Would it involve getting into a pinpoint stance? Of course not. So why do tennis serves so often involve just that maneuver?

I'm not suggesting that players cannot get good results from the pinpoint, but why do it when there is a better approach?

So, what is that better approach? Simple: serve like you throw.

Using a right-hander as an example, it is to use a pure throwing motion, with rotation beginning off the right hip as the first axis in the pelvic turn and then transferring to the left hip to continue the rotation. The transfer happens naturally as you shift weight and/or slide the pelvis forward, just as you do when pitching baseballs or swinging golf clubs or swinging baseball bats or doing anything that constitutes throwing/striking motions -- there aren't a lot of really efficient options for this kind of thing. Certainly there is, at some point, a place where the right foot is no longer pushing -- just as there is a point in the stride of a pitcher or the forward foot plant of a batter or golfer -- where the rear leg/hip is no longer principally involved in the rotation, and that's because the duty has been moved forward in the sequence.

I think the real problem with the "pull" serve is that it nearly eliminates the rear foot as the effective start of the serve. In short, it's a bad throwing motion.

I challenge anyone to provide a film clip of pitching that involves a motion comparable to the pinpoint serve (rear foot pulled up close) and then persuade me and others it doesn't look simply ridiculous.

I like your thoughts here. Good stuff.

[pfrischmann]

I feel a little outclassed with the distinguished names on this site but I did notice something re: Pinpoint vs Platform. I think you can have a good serve with either if everything else is sound. I had a pinpoint and moved to a platform. I found pro's and con's with each. It is interesting that of the top 10 fastest serves on the ATP, only three (Raonic, Roddick and Ryan Harrison) use the platform stance. I may be using the wrong terms but I always felt that bringing the back leg forward gave me more linear momentum whereas the platform stance was more about the shoulder turn and angular momentum. Similar to the differences between an open stance forehand and a neutral stance forehand. I felt my flat serve was better with the pinpoint and my top-spin serve was much heavier with the platform.

I just looked up lifetime 2nd serve percentages and the top 10 were all at 54% or above. It was 60/40 in favor of the platform stance. (Pete Sampras was #18 btw) pretty close.

I'm not sure platform vs pinpoint matters. I think it's more a matter of what the individual player can execute better.
Push vs pull..I'm pretty much blown away by the concept. I can't wait to see the next installment.


Paul.

[johnyandell]

It's coming!

[stotty]

I feel a little outclassed with the distinguished names on this site but I did notice something re: Pinpoint vs Platform. I think you can have a good serve with either if everything else is sound. I had a pinpoint and moved to a platform. I found pro's and con's with each. It is interesting that of the top 10 fastest serves on the ATP, only three (Raonic, Roddick and Ryan Harrison) use the platform stance. I may be using the wrong terms but I always felt that bringing the back leg forward gave me more linear momentum whereas the platform stance was more about the shoulder turn and angular momentum. Similar to the differences between an open stance forehand and a neutral stance forehand. I felt my flat serve was better with the pinpoint and my top-spin serve was much heavier with the platform.

I just looked up lifetime 2nd serve percentages and the top 10 were all at 54% or above. It was 60/40 in favor of the platform stance. (Pete Sampras was #18 btw) pretty close.

I'm not sure platform vs pinpoint matters. I think it's more a matter of what the individual player can execute better.
Push vs pull..I'm pretty much blown away by the concept. I can't wait to see the next installment.


Paul.

It's coming!

It's been a good thread; the best in a while. I like the article because it deals with something I hadn't considered all the much, or at least not the ramifications of spreading the load better along the kinetic chain.

The bottom line is that you can go on court and experiment with the method. After practicing around a hundred or so serves using a platform stance and pushing off the rear foot, I really got the feel for 'pushing' and what it can bring to a serve. I definitely found it superior to my lateral pinpoint stance.

All I would say to the sceptics is to open-minded and get out there and give it a go. You might be favourably impressed.

[arturohernandez]

A little late to the party but one of my favorite drills to do with kids is to have them alternate throwing and serving from the service line. It really makes them loosen up and just naturally get the right motion. Sometimes they want to start pitching when they throw. But I make sure to have them stand in a platform stance.

On a side note, anyone else notice how Fed moves his front foot when he is warming up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6dNCMhhhDU

It's an interesting little thing that he might have developed to get that feel...

[nickw]

It is interesting that of the top 10 fastest serves on the ATP, only three (Raonic, Roddick and Ryan Harrison) use the platform stance.

What's also interesting is that these three players keep that back foot down, and visibly push up strongly with it at the start of the hitting phase. Could keeping the back foot down be the key to making more power with a platform stance?