Ideal Tennis Serve Position At Contact

The serve is the most complex stroke in the game of tennis. To master it, we need to break it down into smaller chunks.

But, in this complex process of analyzing each little segment of the service motion, we can lose sight of one of the essentials of a tennis stroke.

In my opinion, one of the most important moments in the stroke execution is the body (legs, arms, wrist, etc.) alignment at contact.

At contact, we actually transfer energy from the complex movements beforehand into the ball, and it is this moment and body alignment that determine how efficiently we do it.

Incorrect vs. Correct Body Alignment At Contact

An easy way to check how the player imagines the contact on a tennis serve is to simulate the serve into a back fence.

Slowly initiate your service motion from the beginning, and gently hit the fence and stop the racket there.

Now check 4 key body positions/alignments:

• forearm/wrist angle
• angle of your head
• position of the non-hitting arm
• angle of your body (where it’s facing/oriented)

In my experience, the most common mistakes in how tennis players imagine a contact point on the serve are:

• no angle between the forearm and the wrist (meaning the player likely doesn’t feel pronation)
• head position too vertical
• non-hitting arm swings to the side or back
• body is facing the fence (court or target when actually serving)

All these “mistakes” happen because players intuitively position themselves in a way that makes sense at first glance.

They want to reach as high as possible in order to have a better angle, and they want to keep their head and body turned towards the target area as that gives them a better orientation in space and a better aim.

But, it turns out that what is intuitive does not really work well on a tennis serve.

Observe now Roger Federer’s serve at contact and try to position in a similar way.

Then compare the power/force/strength that you feel at contact between the position where you’re facing the net and reaching as high as possible and the position Federer is in and that I demonstrate.

You will feel more power and stability in the second position.

4 Key Checkpoints Of A Tennis Serve At Contact

As I have explained in one of my previous articles, a tennis serve is a really difficult stroke to master.

Some parts of the service motion don’t really make sense until you are at such a proficiency level that you actually feel the benefit of that certain movement or position.

If you are seriously motivated to get to the bottom of an advanced tennis serve technique, then let’s dive deeper into each of these 4 checkpoints.

1. Forearm/wrist angle

It makes sense to try and reach as high as possible to get a better angle on the serve, but if you reach up too high, you will lose wrist stability/strength and the ability to pronate.

Players who have no real angle between the wrist and the forearm at contact don’t really feel or use the pronation.

So, in order to correct this part of a tennis serve, I recommend you engage in pronation drills rather than simply trying to correct this mechanically as you see in Federer’s example because it won’t really make sense to you.

It will make sense to you only when you feel the benefit of the forearm/wrist angle – and you will feel the benefit only after you practice pronation drills for a while.

2. Head angle

It is very natural to us to keep our head vertical/upright because that’s how we best orient in space and maintain balance.

The balance organ is inside our inner ear, and as soon as we tilt our head, that organ signals to us a possible loss of balance.

The second reason why players keep their head too upright is that they still want to orient towards the service box in some way, even during the serve.

But, the problem with such an upright head position and serving a tennis ball above our head is that, when the head tilts back in order to look up, our neck quickly prevents further movement.

We can’t move our head back any more. As the player tries to do that, they cause a lot of tension in the neck, and that tension affects the whole shoulder region.

And with that stiffness in the neck and shoulder region, we definitely cannot serve with effortless power.

The head needs to tilt sideways just like the body and allow the player to look up from a more sideways position. This doesn’t cause any stiffness in the neck and shoulder region.

I sometimes have my players lie on the bench or the ground and ask them to hit a few gentle serves to exaggerate this point and get them used to such an unusual head position.

Check my shoulder over shoulder article for more details.

3. Body orientation

Players mistakenly orient their body towards the target rather than the ball for the same reasons they make mistakes in their head orientation.

Another likely reason is that players believe they will get more power on the serve if they rotate/turn their body forward as they serve.

While forward rotation makes sense at first glance, the serve doesn’t really work that way.

The serve works more on the basis of a transfer of momentum.

That means that the body must initiate the movement, the arm lags behind and then, at a certain moment, the body decelerates and basically stops moving. That’s when the arm will take the momentum from the body.

Since the arm is much lighter than the body, it has to travel faster in order to maintain the same momentum.

This all sounds very complicated, but most people do this quite naturally when they throw something.

That’s why I recommend so many times to use throwing and swinging exercises so that you get in touch with that feeling of accelerating your arm through body deceleration.

You may not even be aware that you decelerate and stop your body for a split second – and, really, you don’t have to be aware.

You just need to be aware of the feeling and the ability of throwing or swinging really fast without must effort.

Coming back to the sideways body orientation at contact, it now makes more sense – at least in theory. The body is sideways because it has stopped moving for that brief moment so that the arm can accelerate.

A split second after contact, the body will continue moving as the arm pulls it forward and the player unwinds from the whole service motion.

My advice on how to make this happen is the same as always – don’t try to correct this mechanically, but use throwing and swinging exercises to feel what transfer of momentum actually means.

Once you get some sensation of effortless acceleration of the arm, then try to apply it to your serve.

(I also recommend you check the Why Is The Serve So Difficult article that explains more reasons why we don’t face forward at contact.)

4. Non-hitting arm position

The non-hitting arm swinging sideways or back instead of swinging towards the body (belly area) is simply the consequence of incorrect body and head alignments.

If you correct those first, you’ll be able to correct your non-hitting arm position quite easily.

In summary, the goal of this video article is to bring your attention to the correct body position at contact with the ball, as this is what determines how well you’ll transfer power from your body and speed of your racket into the ball.

Even if you execute all the service motion chunks before the contact correctly (stance, grip, backswing, coiling, trophy, drop, swinging up, etc.) your serve will not work well if you are not aligned correctly at contact.

Check your current serve position at contact on the back fence and see how it compares to the Roger Federer model that I also demonstrate.

If it’s not similar, then spend some time correcting it with the suggested drills as you think about it and visualize it before working on other parts of the service motion.