How High Can You Go? Serve toss:

[Error]

Error -

2 questions.
1) What is the position of the elbow, wrist and racquet head at contact? Are they perfectly straight or a bend?

To an extent those things are dictated by the toss and the serve your hitting. A flat serve is going to be very straight and vertical for everything. The racket head, the arm wrist etc. but lets suppose you are hitting a flat serve but your toss goes slightly more to the left than you planned, those things are going to change slightly. but generally speaking on a flat serve everything is going to be straight with little or no bend. You can google ATP and WTA players and see that sometimes they extend perfectly straight and others there might be a slight bend. This is because humans aren't robots and we make misjudgments, get tired, let the ball drop a little lower than we should etc.

2) Does the contact height vary with type of serve? Slice, topspin or flat?

You always want to make contact as high as you can within the parameters of the serve your hitting. Again generally speaking you're going to make contact a little lower on a kick serve because the racket is going to be at more of a 45 degree angle at contact.
I'm a huge proponent of BIG fundamentals. What I mean is focusing on the handful of big things that matter and not thinking about the million little things that serve ( pun intended) to confuse and complicate things. I think what happens is many people that frequent tennis forums are looking for a way around the fundamental practice. It takes years of fundamental practice to get good at tennis or anything else. Its a lot easier to argue about pronation or wrist lag on a tennis forum then to practice 200 serves or forehands a day.

[arturohernandez]

Well Rodger is 5th all time for first service games won.. but Nadal is 14th. I don't know if I would call him a master of using his serve to "set up" his opponents.

You're kidding?

Notice I said that their serve speeds are not elite by pro standards. What I meant is that there are servers who serve consistently faster than Federer and Nadal. That means people like Raonic, Isner, Kyrgios. They are elite in terms of speed.

Federer hits his spots extremely well but rarely gets to 130. Nadal's speed is not great by pro standards.

By human standards all pros are elite servers.

[arturohernandez]

To an extent those things are dictated by the toss and the serve your hitting. A flat serve is going to be very straight and vertical for everything. The racket head, the arm wrist etc. but lets suppose you are hitting a flat serve but your toss goes slightly more to the left than you planned, those things are going to change slightly. but generally speaking on a flat serve everything is going to be straight with little or no bend. You can google ATP and WTA players and see that sometimes they extend perfectly straight and others there might be a slight bend. This is because humans aren't robots and we make misjudgments, get tired, let the ball drop a little lower than we should etc.


You always want to make contact as high as you can within the parameters of the serve your hitting. Again generally speaking you're going to make contact a little lower on a kick serve because the racket is going to be at more of a 45 degree angle at contact.
I'm a huge proponent of BIG fundamentals. What I mean is focusing on the handful of big things that matter and not thinking about the million little things that serve ( pun intended) to confuse and complicate things. I think what happens is many people that frequent tennis forums are looking for a way around the fundamental practice. It takes years of fundamental practice to get good at tennis or anything else. Its a lot easier to argue about pronation or wrist lag on a tennis forum then to practice 200 serves or forehands a day.

Agreed! The adjustments are a lot easier to make with exercises than with explicit instruction. Visualization can also help but ultimately the idea is that people should not think about it.

That requires a lot of repetition.

[J011yroger]

I disagree with Error on the flat serve. Making contact at maximum height with arm and racquet straight up subtracts from the speed gained by ISR. There is an angle from racquet to forearm on all elite serves more on spin than flat, but it is still there.

Striving for maximum contact height leads to a variety of problems in my experience.

J

[seano]

J011yroger -

You are correct, an angle exists between racquet and forearm and it has a very direct effect on ISR. I asked the question to Error cause I thought he was implying there was no angle between racquet and forearm. John has some great articles on the subject here on tennisplayer..

SeanO

[Error]

By definition a flat serve will have zero angle or it wouldn't be flat so if there is angle then the server isn't hitting flat. Any angle at contact is going to produce spin. If your goal is to hit a flat serve your going to want the racket to be as vertical as possible.

[seano]

Every serve, be it flat, slice or kick has some degree of spin (specifically some degree of slice). There is no serve that is devoid of spin.

[Error]

Every serve, be it flat, slice or kick has some degree of spin (specifically some degree of slice). There is no serve that is void of spin.

I didn't say flat serves are completely devoid of spin. I said if your racket is at an angle at contact you're going to get spin.I don't know the point your making other than trying to find something to disagree over. The spin on a flat serve,if you hit it correctly, is negligible and is not going to be enough to effect anything. If the spin does effect the ball than you're not hitting flat. That's the distinction between flat and spin. If you want to intentionally angle your racket on a flat serve, more power to you.

[johnyandell]

So called "flat' serves in pro tennis are still spinning at well over 1000rpm

[Error]

So called "flat' serves in pro tennis are still spinning at well over 1000rpm

John,
A "flat" serve with spin is a spin serve not a flat serve. I never discussed spin serves, I simply said that you want to come up on a flat serve with a vertical racket. The only way you can hit a flat serve is to hit it flat not with an angled racket.

If your argument is that ALL "flat" serves on the pro tour have spin then you're saying flat serves don't actually exist but pro players hit real flat serves all the time.

[johnyandell]

Even a vertical racket will produce sidespin because the racket face is moving left to right. If you look at the high speed archives you won't find any serves without spin. Women sidespin at minimum. Men all a combo sidespin and topspin. So correct completely flat serves don't exist.

[glacierguy]

If someone could work out how to produce no spin on serve, it might produce a knuckleball effect, which I'd like to see. (In most cases, players contact as ball descending from toss, which also produces spin.)

[Error]

Even a vertical racket will produce sidespin because the racket face is moving left to right. If you look at the high speed archives you won't find any serves without spin. Women sidespin at minimum. Men all a combo sidespin and topspin. So correct completely flat serves don't exist.

John,
I can serve a tennis ball pretty well and I know when I'm putting spin on a ball and when I'm hitting flat. And I can see the results of spin I put on the ball. To hit a serve with zero spin is probably impossible but to hit a flat serve with so little spin that it doesn't have any real effect on the ball is easy. When I teach spin serve I'll sometimes use a multicolored ball so the student can easily see spin, and when I demonstrate a flat serve, you can easily see the lack of spin.

At any rate, the point of my original response was about the racket at contact for a flat serve. A flat serve is hit for one reason and that is power and you accomplish this with a racket that is vertical at contact or near vertical. If the racket isn't near vertical than you're hitting slice or kick.

[Error]

Take a look at this serve. You can see the ball leaving the racket with hardly no spin. This is 142mph flat serve. At least according to the title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHV1YbeznCo

[johnyandell]

The clip of that serve at 6000 frames/sec is 4/1000 of a second total duration. It takes about 10 times longer for a typical pro serve to make just 1 revolution. So we can't tell what the spin is on that 142mph serve--if it is a pro serve. Looks like it might of spun a 10th of a turn or so however.

Here is a Roger first serve spinning at over 2000 rpm. The racket face isn't vertical but about as close to that as male pro players get--yet it's still 2000rpm.

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...50fps.mp4&new=

I will take your word for it you can hit the ball flatter than that. What I am saying is that's not the basis for a high level serve.