What I just did there was fake pronation and it might have looked okay but in
reality didn't benefit my serve at all. The topic of pronation is very important
to me and this is a question I get frequently asked from my students and the
reason why it's so important is that I want you to serve better and you will
not be serving better if you're consciously trying to pronate.
Fake pronation takes place every time you consciously try to pronate. You will not
be able to get the timing right and you will do it too late. I made a video
illustrating the time span between the pronation into the contact and the
continuing pronation. I'm going to put it in the description below you can check
it out if you like. And this video is great because it shows you how short
this time span is. It's literally milliseconds a blink of an eye, a snap of
a finger you literally cannot see it with the naked eye. So what you have to
realize if you try to make a conscious mechanical adjustment to the angle of
your racket in this time zone, this is humanly impossible to do. There are two
things that will happen if you consciously try to work on pronation:
Number one you will have to slow down your serve severely in order to feel
pronation and this is not what you want on the serve you want to accelerate your
serve to the max. Number two if you accelerate to the max use your normal
serve speed and then try to consciously continue to pronate you will do it too
late well after contact with the ball and
this will have absolutely no effect on your serve and this is what I see from a
lot of players and this is what I call fake pronation. Fake pronation is only
associated with players trying to consciously pronate after contact but
when we watch the best servers of all time you can see they do not always
continue to pronate. There's some serves they will hit where the racket will not
continue a pronate this will take place on almost all players. There's a few
players like Roger Federer, John Isner, Milos Raonic that will pronate on almost
all their serves, but the vast majority of WTA players and a lot of ATP players
will not always continue to pronate on their serves. So do not concern
yourself with continuing pronation. This is not as important as pronation into
the contact. Pronation into the contact refers to the racket being on edge when
the tip of the racket is pointing right towards the back fence and then
the pronation into the contact occurs and this is what every high-level player
has in common, so this is a very important piece of the serve. So you're
probably asking yourself how do i pronate into the contact? Well it's not
something you're gonna do with a tip or a trick and get it done in one day. This
is something that might take a lifetime to develop. You will need all the proper
serve fundamentals you will have to apply all the power sources, because
pronation into the contact is a direct result of the correct fundamentals and
serve acceleration. So no matter how hard you try to do this and you can try to
hit balls with the edge of your racket. None of that will help once you start
doing your regular service motion it will go back to you opening the racket
face too early. So you'll have to be patient, don't try to get this done in a
month give yourself a couple of years. What I recommend to my players is to try
to serve 500 serves a week. If that's too much try to do 250 serves a week and if
you multiply that by a month, we're looking at 2,000 serves. If you're doing
500 a week and then multiply that by one year, two years, three years. Now you're
getting a lot of serves in there. This is how you build muscle memory. Remember
Andy Murray was quoted as saying that only in practice he hits about 55,000
serves a year. And that is your only chance to be able to pronate into the
contact, you will not be conscious that it's taking place so do not concern
yourself with that. Concern yourself with learning the right serve fundamentals.
There's many of them. What you'll have to learn is proper stance, you will have
to have a proper toss, a take-back, you have to sync your toss arm with your
hitting arm, you have to have the correct rhythm on your serve, the correct
timing and also you have to apply all the multitude of power sources. Once you
have all that done, once all that syncs in beautifully you might have a chance
to pronate into the contact and you will never know that it's taking place.
I'm going to tell you a story that might convince you that this is not something
you should worry about when you're practicing your serve. So I am a high
level tennis player. I played Bundesliga in Germany for you guys that live in
Europe you know what that means, it's a high level of tennis. I was also one of
the best Division 1 college players in the United States. My best shot is my
serve. I had one of the best serves in college. Now think about this, when I
started teaching, this is when I started finding out about all the technical
elements of the service motion and started studying the serve. So think about it this way.
I spent my entire career not knowing what takes place in this area of
the serve where we are pronating into the contact and continuing the pronate. I did
not even know what these terms meant. So what that means is, I had all the correct
fundamentals and all the things that had taken place in this part of the serve
where things are happening so fast I was not conscious of and it was never in my
mind. So think of it this way if I was able to achieve a high-level serve
without even knowing what pronation means, that means that you should do the
same thing you should try to learn the fundamentals and you have to most
importantly get a lot of repetitions in. If you do that then you will have a
chance to be just like me and not be conscious of what is taking
place when the racket accelerates to the max