The tennis serve is one of the most complex strokes in all sports and it can
therefore be quite challenging to make changes to your service motion. However,
when it comes to the pinpoint stance and the platform stance this is something
that can be quite easily adapted and I therefore encourage you to experiment
with both of these and you will quickly find which one works best for your serve.
So in today's video I'm going to show you some different variations on both of
these stances and let's start off with the platform stance. So the first thing I
want to show you is what I call the regular platform stance. And this stance
is used by Milos Raonic and is one of the most comfortable platform stances to
execute. Basically you're gonna have your feet shoulder-width apart. Now the
front foot is gonna be slightly pointing forward, the back foot is gonna be
slightly turned backwards, or it can be parallel to the baseline. You can
experiment with this and find what works best for you. And now the way you're
gonna line up your feet is have the middle of the back foot line up with the
heel of the front foot. This is gonna be your setup and now what's important to
understand with this platform stance that it doesn't work quite well if you have a
big coil on your serve. So if you have a medium length coil or even if you have a
coil that's quite small this stance is gonna work great for you. So if I try
to coil in the stance it kind of locks my back foot and puts pressure on my
hip and doesn't really work well for this particular serve. So it's more
comfortable to have just a regular length coil with this particular
platform stance.
Now the next platform stance that you can try out is what I call the lateral
platform stance and this is a stance that's used by Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. And
basically there's going to be a separation between the tip of the back
foot and the heel of the front foot. There needs to be space here. So the feet
are a little bit wider apart and this beautifully syncs with a larger coil. So
if you do have a larger coiling motion on your serve ala Sampras or Federer
his type of stance is gonna be preferable for you.
On the other hand if you are uncomfortable with coiling a lot on your
serve and you try to separate your feet in this manner and then you coil very
little this is not going to work well on your serve. You might not be able to come
out of the stance very powerfully. Interestingly on the lateral platform
stance if the back foot is pointing towards the back fence this accommodates
a much easier coil and you can try this out. So basically point the back foot
towards the back fence as you're setting up for your platform stance you will
find that the coil is going to be much easier to execute and now don't worry
this foot will turn once you initiate the racket drop. It will either be
parallel to the baseline or if you're attempting a flat serve will actually
start pointing forward.
The next platform stance is what I call the extreme lateral stance. This is
something that was used by John McEnroe and currently by Pierre Hugues Herbert. And
basically the feet are going to be separated really wide and now
interestingly the back foot is gonna be parallel to the front foot and this
beautifully works with an extreme coil as well. So if you remember how John
McEnroe served he would stand like this with this extreme platform stance and
then as he took his racquet up the back foot would turn backwards to accommodate
a huge coil where basically his chest was pointing towards the back fence. And
this is a serve that's very difficult to recreate and that's why you don't see it
so often. Most players will not be able to get out of a coil this large and I'm
one of those players. I cannot turn this much I'm unable to come around the other
way and now all my serves will have an accidental slice as a result of it.
Another platform stance that's very rare and difficult to execute is the reverse
platform stance where basically the back foot is on the outside of the front foot
this is a stance this was used by Boris Becker and Jana Novotná. Interesting that
these players would be catapulted off the ground and they would land on their
dominant leg. See 99.99% of tennis players will land on their non-dominant
foot. So if you are one of those players that's rare and lands on the dominant
foot inside the court this is a stance that might work for you.
Another platform stance that's quite difficult to execute is the narrow
platform stance where the feet are basically close together and this is
something that Andy Roddick used on his serve. And this stance will not work well
with a large variety of serves. It almost only works with an abbreviated serve. So
if you do happen to have an abbreviated serve ala Andy Roddick this is a
stance that you should give a try.
And the reason why the narrow stance doesn't work with many other service
styles except the abbreviated serve is that the abbreviated serve is very short
in length and therefore the feet have to match that. So there's not a lot of time
to bring the back foot up and there's not a lot of time to separate the
feet and come out of a position like that. Overall without a back swing and an
abbreviated motion we almost have to have the feet closer together in order
to match this type of serve. So on the pinpoint stance there's also some
variations that you can try out but first let's talk about how far the
position of feet apart from each other. And when it comes to the pinpoint stance
you can actually benefit from having feet further apart and you will gain
more for momentum if the back foot travels a further path towards the front foot.
The first type of pinpoint stance is what I call the regular pinpoint
stance and it's used by players such as Nadal, Zverev or Karolina Pliskova. And
basically the back foot will come up to the front foot.Now once we set the back
with the feet are going to be positioned parallel to each other
The one advantage of having this type of pinpoint stance is you can actually feel
where to stop with the back foot. This can be a quite a challenge for some
players. Because we're looking up towards the ball and we are just going by feel
where the back foot is stopping and many players will stop at different distances
from the front foot and so by bringing the back foot up to the front foot you
can kind of touch the front foot something that Zverev does and therefore
you can always set the back foot at the same distance from the front foot. And
there's a couple of different ways to execute this particular pinpoint stance
one way is to have the feet separated from each other now again just like the
platform stance this can actually help us coil a little bit more initially and
now once we bring the back foot up to the front foot we are likely going to be
remaining in that coil position now if you aren't comfortable with coiling this
much you can bring the back foot up straight in and this works quite well
the Serve that doesn't have a big coil.
Another style of the pinpoint stance is what I call the corkscrew serve.
.Basically the back foot is going to come on the outside of the front foot
And some of the greatest servers of all time have used this particular pinpoint
style and some of them are Ivo Karlovic, Goran Ivanisevic, Venus
Williams, Guy Forget. and also Patrick Rafter. And this can be done in many different ways.
See Ivo Karlovic for example will set the back foot on the outside and now
as he comes in and the back foot is basically traveling straight forward.
Other players such as Rafter and Venus will set the back foot behind the body
like this and then the foot is going to come around the front foot in this manner.
And the big advantage of this particular style is that it loads the body in a
more aggressive way. So if I have a coil and now my back foot is on the outside.
See my body kind of gets twisted like a corkscrew and when I undo this system I
get a little bit more energy transferred into the ball. And there's a couple of
disadvantages to this style as well. So the first disadvantage is that some
players are simply not flexible enough to have their body in this corkscrew
type fashion and for them it would make more sense to have more of a regular
pinpoint stance. Also there is a danger of foot faulting
with this particular style where some players will go too far with the back
foot and end up committing a foot fault in this way.
One thing that I want you to keep in mind on the pinpoint stance is to stop
trying to load that back foot. So regardless of what type of pinpoint
stance you have you will not be able to load the back foot even if you wanted to
because naturally as you are tossing the ball in front you will lean forward and
you will have most of the weight on the front foot. If you watch carefully on
players such as Ivanisevic, Isner, you will see that the back foot is
barely touching the ground as they're going into their loading phase. If you
watch carefully only the tip of the back foot is on the ground so if it shows you
that these players are absolutely not loading that back foot and this is
something that I also encourage you to practice as you doing a pinpoint stance
to only lightly bring that back foot up and where you're not putting too much pressure
and trying to set this foot. This is gonna be something that's difficult to
come out of. So it's enough to just simply have a little bit of pressure
applied to the back foot, only the tip of the back foot dragging along the ground
and then the majority of the weight once you're set it's gonna be on your front foot.
So I encourage you to try all these different stances and you will quickly
know which one works best for you. In my case I have always been more comfortable
with a platform stance. It doesn't mean that I cannot serve with a pin point but
there's just something about the platform stance that suits my serve better.
And it doesn't mean that this will always be the case, I might all of a
sudden start serving better with a pinpoint stance so it's always wise to
experiment with stances. And there's even some examples of big servers on tour
that have changed their stances one-player is Joe-Wilfried Tsonga who had
changed from a pinpoint stance to a platform stance and another player on
the women's tour is Coco Vandeweghe. And finally I'm going to talk about which
one I think is the better stance. I think both stances are perfectly fine because
bio mechanically there's really no difference. See on a pinpoint stance it
might be a little bit more forward momentum applied to the serve but it might come at
the cost of timing. It might not be worth it to do so this is very individual
but overall the vast majority of the best servers of all time does serve
with a pinpoint stance and I think the correlation there is that it does give a
little bit more momentum and power. But again this might come at the cost of
timing and it might actually cause you to lose power and just in my case I
get less power when I do a pinpoint stance because my timing gets all messed
up and I'm unable to apply the same type of power so in my case I serve faster
with a platform stance and you might be the same way. So the best thing to do is
is to experiment all these stances and you will quickly find out which one
works best for your serve.