serve technique

[robheath]

Dear John
I recently joined your site, It's great. It seems all the tennis books do not teach the serve the way the top players are hitting it. It seems to me that the serve is really not like throwing a baseball when you look at the shoulder action. Anyway, I was reading an article by Bruce Elliott and I hope you can clarify something for me .

To maximize the serve potential wouldn't it be wise to coach the player to rotate the shoulders first, load legs and the '"Tilt shoulders" ? (so he can serve "over the top" as Dr Elliott calls it. ) After reading the article I think that this was what he was saying but I wanted to be sure.

Also, to help a player "feel" body rotation(torque) on the serve, what do you think of a playing experimenting with the McEnroe serve?

thanks
Robby Edwards

[johnyandell]

The Serve

Robby,

Welcome aboard! I think that one of the problems in teaching the serve has been the lack of video and other "objective" info like Bruce has developed. You are quite right--the internal arm rotation of the serve may be somewhat similar to the baseball throw but not the body! Did you check myth of the pitch article in Advanced Tennis?

I think you have got the start of the sequence correct. The body will usually rotate to the line of the stance--see the Sampras Serve article on body rotation in Tour Strokes. This is combined with the knee bend. These two factors are big in power. BUT as far as the shoulder tilt goes be careful! Bruce is a zillion percent correct in identifying the 3 dimensions of shoulder action. No doubt the good servers do it--the question is how?

My opinion is that this action happens naturally if you get the body and leg position right and then focus on taking the hand to the ball. Again look at Pete or anyone in the Archive. At the max knee bend the body inclines naturally and the shoulder tilt just happens--I've filmed some pretty good players who hurt their motions by trying to exaggerate this by leaning backwards at the waist!

So far as Mac goes--he's the absolute extreme (on the serve and everything else.) I wouldn't recommend trying that extreme version of rotation at first--or probably ever. Instead I'd try to copy the starting stance of Federer very precisely--his motion is in some ways just a less extreme version of Pete's.
Cheers,
John Yandell
Tennisplayer.net