The Power Serve:
Part 1
By Bruce Elliott
Sometimes I am asked if the purpose of my research is to show teaching pros how to teach the serve. Absolutely not! Teaching professionals can teach me how to teach the serve.
What my work does do is break the serve down into its mechanical parts. For teachers or players this means they can have a better understanding of the service action and how to modify technique to improve efficiency or to reduce the chance of injury.
Strength Base: The Prerequisite
If you want to serve with power, you must load the body. But here's the catch: two places that you typically load the body are where injuries now are occurring in tennis, particularly on the pro circuit. These are the shoulder and the elbow. So, some of the things I want to explain have to do with how you actually reduce the loading on those areas, while still developing the power serve.
It's very important to understand that, if you want to serve at a high speed, you've got to prepare your body physically. You cannot just learn the power serve without a strength base. So let's see what a strength base entails.
First, you must have core stability. To be good at tennis, you definitely need core stability. Basically, that's stability across the pelvis, or the lower abdominal area.
The other thing you need is shoulder stability. You can't just go out and rotate your arm as quickly as you possibly can, without having a stable shoulder. You need core stability and you need shoulder stability, before you start to introduce high speed serves.
So that's the cautionary tale, but what about the serve itself?
Keys to the Power Serve
First, you need fluency or coordination. You need the body parts to flow together.
Second, you need to use elastic energy. You need to set the system up so that elastic energy is used during the serve to improve the speed of movement.
If I was to tell you, you could get a 20 percent dividend in the stock market, you'd all want me to tell you how.
I'm giving you a tip from a tennis coaching perspective that's better than that. You can be guaranteed a 20 percent bonus on the power of your serve if you use elastic energy, and I'll show you how to set that up.
The third thing is you need to use as many segments of your body in the motion as you possibly can.
You don't just hit the serve with the arm. You need to use multiple segments, like you do in the forehand, like you do in the backhand.
You've got to coordinate those segments together so that you get back to my first point, and have a motion that is fluent.
And the last thing you need to increase the movement of the racquet is the distance that the racquet moves, so that you can build up speed. To use a technical term, you've got to increase displacement. You've got to increase the distance that the racquet can move so it has a greater opportunity to build speed.
Foot Action
There are two types of foot action that you can use in the serve. What I would call the foot up and what I would call the foot back.
The foot back technique places the feet apart. The foot up technique places the back foot up near the front foot. And obviously, you can have the foot anywhere in between, so it's not just one or the other. It can be the whole range in between.
Our research studies show that if you use the foot up technique, you get better height on your drive. You usually impact the ball higher.
If you use the foot back technique, it's better for driving your body forward. So if you want to get into the net very quickly, quite often people will use that foot back technique.
Now does that mean one technique is better than the other? Absolutely not. If the player uses the foot back technique, he is probably very good at moving forward into the court, but he may need to place particular effort to hit up and out to the ball. It's a trade off.
The Leg Drive
The next element as you go up the tree or the bio-mechanical chain is obviously the legs--the knees and the leg drive.
Why do you need a good leg drive? I'll give you three reasons.
If you have a leg drive and you drive up with my legs, it drives your shoulder up, and that drives your racquet down.
You get two bonuses with that. You get elastic energy, so all the muscles across your chest are put on stretch. That's number one.
You also increase distance that the racquet moves down behind my back. The "scratch-the-back" that we all used in coaching does not work with today's modern serve.
Trunk rotation also positions the racquet further away from the back. It should be down near the backside. That will give you an idea as to whether they've got a good leg (and trunk) drive or not.
And the third thing, I can tell you from work that we have done recently, you'll get less loading on the shoulder and elbow - the two areas most susceptible to injury that I mentioned above.
To achieve these three bonuses, you've got to come out of that knee bend or flexion with as much drive as you can possibly muster. Remember, you do not jump off the ground under any circumstances. You drive yourself off the ground.
The Trunk
As you move up the body, the next thing to look at is the trunk. I'll talk for quite awhile about the trunk, because it's so important to the serve. You'll see that if you set the serve up right, you're going to spend more time on the legs and trunk than on the upper limb, which is next in the chain.
So let's look at the trunk in two parts. The first part of trunk movement is backwards. This is the rotation of the hips and rotation of the shoulders backwards away from the net. What should you look for? A number of things.
First, that there is some rotation of the hips. Secondly, there is more rotation of the shoulders. That puts the muscles of the trunk on stretch, so that's going to help us with elastic energy, and we're going to use that elastic energy to help drive the whole system forward.
So we want rotation of the hips, rotation of the shoulders, and we want more rotation of the shoulders than of the hips.
Be careful with the hips. Sometimes the hips don't turn all that much initially, but you still want the trunk to turn on top of the hips.
This is related to the stance. Let's go back now to stage one and the foot up technique. If you are using the foot up technique, make sure that your back foot comes up and behind the front foot. Make sure that your back foot doesn't come around in front of the front foot.
If you bring your back foot up and place it in front, it will cut out the action of your hips. So if you use a foot up technique, make sure that you position the back foot, by tucking it in against the front foot, because then you can rotate your hips.
Where would you want the hips to be? You certainly want them to rotate so that they are at least at in line with the direction of the serve.
If you start with your hips very square to the net, be careful, because you can't rotate your shoulders and put your muscles on stretch.
Starting with the shoulder open can facilitate the stretch between the shoulders and the hips.
It might be a good teaching point to start with, but when players can actually serve, you are better to start more open. They then can rotate backwards, and they can put some stretch between the line of the shoulders and the line of the hips. That is, you can rotate the shoulders beyond the hips.
If that doesn't make sense on a serve, think of a forehand. Think when you're hitting a groundstroke. You always rotate your shoulders further your hips. Doing this, you are actually putting your trunk muscles on stretch. And you want the same in the serve.
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