Hi Gerry,

There are a lot moving parts to the serve. You could experiment with a serve in which you start coiled and then release into the serve. It sounds a little odd but this might allow you to try different amounts of coiling to see which one works best for you. It might be that less coiling helps you in some way. When I look at pros serve I see them turn away from the court but when I try it myself it destroys my timing. So I have started to serve from a more coiled position at the very beginning rather than turning away from the court as I toss. Maybe that would help some.

Best,

Arturo

Hi Simon,

Yes, it’s a tricky thing to bring this free swing into the match.

The key is to observe how well the serve goes when you swing freely and how many land in. Then also observe how few serves go in and how slow they are when you apply control in the match.

Then you need to simply lose trust in control because it doesn’t work. Letting go actually produces more serves in (which are also effective) than serving with control.

Tomaz brings up an important point with regard to rotation. The issue of rotation is a complicated one. On the one hand it has the potential to add more power to a serve. On the other hand it complicates timing. Besides being gifted, Federer and especially Sampras are extremely flexible. Sampras shoulder allows him to get into the drop in a way that even Federer cannot. I also suspect that he is able to turn away from the court with his upper body without rotating his feet. I also had the same problem. In trying to get turned away from the court I would rotate my feet because I don’t have the same upper body flexiblity to it the way Sampras does.

I agree with reducing the rotation on the serve and working on the most minimal serve. I followed Tomaz’s advice and hit many serves very slow. What I found was that my windup began to diminish and as that happened I was able to then add acceleration at different times. Sometimes my timing would go completely off and I would miss the serve or hit it on the same side of the court. Over time it began to correct on its own.

I don’t want to sound too repetitive but I really think that hitting more up rather than around the ball will help.

Tomaz’s course will also be a huge help!

I’d just like to add that if you look at Sampras serve of Federer serve, you will see a lot of rotation away from the court, similar to what Gerry is doing.

But a lot of rotation away from the court makes it very difficult to time the stroke and hit the ball clean and also to be accurate with the shot.

Federer and Sampras can do that because they are extremely gifted, but I don’t recommend this for recreational tennis players because it makes the serve just more difficult.

Arturo. Thanks for your advice. Agree 100% with your comments about image change leading to biomechanical change. In the early stages of applying Tomas’s recommendations. Long way to go. Now, as the ball toss is about to peak, I visualize throwing my hand straight up to sky as loosely as possible, ignoring my left arm. Also, to release tension, I start the serve motion with racquet hand dangling down and gently rocking. Seems to help release tension. Gerry

In your analysis of Gerry’s serve, you say “A little bit too much rotation away from the court compared to Feliciano Lopez’ serve.” To my eyes, the problem is specifically too much rotation in Gerry’s lower body. Gerry’s hips/legs are rotated farther around than his shoulders. We can see his kneecaps pointing back towards us, and we can see most of the front of his tennis shorts, even more than the front of his shirt. Compare to Lopez: his knees stay pointed sideways along the baseline and we can only see the side of his shorts, but his shoulders rotate so that we can see most of the front of his shirt (the white line on his chest.) So ideally Gerry would rotate his hips much less while keeping a good shoulder rotation – not more than what the rhythm of his overall motion can handle, but upper body rotation should ideally be more than the hip rotation. This would give Gerry a more powerful coil/uncoil sequence to smoothly transfer more stored energy through his body from his legs through his trunk and into his arm.

Andrew

Interesting post! I’ll start off with acknowledging that I agree wholeheartedly with Tomaz’s diagnosis. I also think that all the things that he suggests will help you. I do differ a bit with him on the way forward because I myself suffered from a very disjointed serve (see the link where I chronicle the change). I followed many of Tomaz’s suggestions and they all worked. With regard to Gerry’s serve I see the disjointed part coming out. It seems that the body rotates around the serve rather than up and through the serve. One exercise that Tomaz suggested that really helped me was to serve from the drop. I did this a lot and at times even did it in tournaments. But my sense is that you see all the rotation in the serve and that you don’t conceive of the serve as up and out. Rather than the rotation being a result of your motion you make it the creator of the motion. I had the same problem. In fact, you can see this in later parts of your serve as you try to stay sideways in order to compensate. Serving from the drop should give you some hint about this because it will reduce the rotation. Another thing that worked for me was to imagine that my arm was going from the drop directly to the side fence (not the court). You could imagine that you are trying to throw your racket sideways rather than forward.

The best suggestion I can give you independently of what particular drill you want to use is to take away parts of your serve. Tomaz suggested that I serve very slow for a while in practice. I have found that if I tried to simply change some part of my serve I would end up messing up some other part of my serve. So rather than fixing my serve I began to try different things in practice. I would serve very slow and then observe which serve felt better and gave me the result I wanted. Over time I realized that certain cues helped.

So my take is that you need to have a two pronged approach. Part of it is retraining your motor system to produce another serve. The other is to create concepts that will help you to serve better. I use images a lot more now and some of my images I know are incorrect. But they work for me because they get my body to do things better.

Then film yourself every so often to see if it is getting better. If it is still not there exaggerate the image.

For example, I no longer imagine myself turning or taking my racket back. In my mind, it goes straight up. I have tried all types of images and serves and none of them work. This one works for me and so I use it.

My best description is that you have to uncover or find your serve. This will require testing different things and seeing what works and what does not. Then filming yourself over and over again.

But I’ll two things about Tomaz. His feel based approach is right on the money. The problem is that he is blessed to be a natural server. So I think us less natural servers need some clear cues to the serve in order to help us out. Nothing wrong with it but the cues are necessary in order to communicate with our sensorimotor system in a way that it understands.

Hope that helps!