that's pretty fast
I'm getting good speed
guys you see this I'm getting possibly 80 or maybe even 90 percent of my power from the arm
action alone now it's not truly the arm action alone naturally when we serve there's going to
be torso rotation involved so the Torso even when I'm sitting down is helping the arm to
accelerate more but the fact is that the arm action is responsible for the vast majority
of power on the tennis serve so guys that first camera angle was a little bit deceiving because
you couldn't see whether the serve was going in or not so let's put this Theory to the test
I'm going to hit a few serves and you'll be the judge I'm gonna hit them from the
chair and I'm going to stand up to my normal serve and you can see the speed difference
so the first problem is the net clearance because I'm sitting on a chair the trajectory is much
lower but the speed itself is pretty quick I have to say so let me try to go a little bit faster
there you go that's not bad
I try to make contact as high as I possibly can and let me try four more
come on Nick get over the net there you go and one more all right not too bad all right so now
I'm gonna stand up and we're gonna test the speed on my regular serve I'm gonna see the difference
okay I'm gonna try a few more
okay that one probably felt the best out of all of them so far let me try
one more it's going to be my last one okay that one felt pretty good so is there a difference
yes there is of course but just looking at the speed of the serve the one from the chair
was slower but how much slower I would guess it somewhere between 10 and 20 miles an hour
which means that most of the power comes from the arm action but I don't want you
to get confused with the message that I'm bringing to you in today's video
you are not supposed to do what I did from the chair you are not supposed to
just get up to the Baseline and arm the serve and go like this
why don't you want to do this well I'm going to tell you why because if you do this over a long
period of time there's a high risk of injury why is that because the arm is not supported by the
body the body's number one job is to support the arm of course the body does add power not as much
as some people think to believe I would guess it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of additional
power from the body but the context is even more important than the actual additional power that
you get from the body you are accommodating your arm by using your body and therefore protecting it
not only will this protect you from potentially getting injured but also it's going to feel a
hundred times better to use the entire body that's supporting the arm movement than just
to stand there and use the arm and isolation see this serve just feels awful I actually
feel something in my shoulder as opposed to a serve like this where I'm using my entire body
please see that second serve felt super effortless it felt as if I wasn't even using the arm at all
and that is the key you have to utilize the power sources on the serve to support the arm
and the serve should feel as if you're not using the arm at all so what are the power sources I
made several videos on this subject and my favorite one is where I use the ruler which
is a good illustration of how the body should be loaded on the serve basically have one end of the
ruler here and the other end of the ruler there and where the body is loaded somewhere in the
middle just like a ruler is so let me break down the four power sources on the serve the two power
sources that I was able to utilize on the chair was swing momentum and angular momentum what I
call rotational momentum so basically by swinging the arm you do get some swing momentum of course
this will depend on your style of serves there are some serve styles that will give you more
momentum than other serves for example serve with the lag has a continuous motion and you will be
able to generate more so when momentum from that particular style in addition to that naturally on
the serve there's going to be torso rotation which gives you additional power now if you are able to
coil your body and get the elbow on the outside you are going to increase this torso rotation and
potentially get even more power now be conscious of the fact that coiling a lot is not something
that everybody can do some players are not able to get out of a coil that's too large the minimum
amount of coil that you need on the serve is your elbow being in line with your torso if you can get
away with going further back by all means continue doing so so swing momentum and rotational momentum
are two important power source sources that will give you a tremendous amount of heat on the serve
so what are the two other ones well the next one I'm going to show you is probably my favorite one
which I call forward momentum take a look at any high level server you will see that they
land inside the court on the vast majority of their flat and their slice serve now this Landing
inside the court is correlated to a toss that's inside the Baseline and also to the body leaning
forward into the ball so in other words the entire body weight is going into the contact now some
people are of the belief that there is no forward momentum on a kick serve but I'm here to tell you
that there is when you observe high level players or Elite level players you'll see that they land
inside the court even when they're hitting kick serve so even though you are going to throw the
ball further behind than you would on a flat or a slice serve there's no doubt about that you still want
to lean in and get your body into the court ideally making contact right above your head so if you do
this leaning movement you will be getting four momentum even on your kick serve which will help
you in those tense moments in a match where your arm is tight to get the ball over the net and last
but not least the fourth power source on the serve is what I call vertical momentum and there are
several actions of the body that make the player go upwards first of all players achieve a tilt in
their loading phase in their trophy position and that tilt is reversed so this reversal action of
the Tilt accompanied with the rotation of the Torso is an upward force and propels the player
violently upwards but that's not all players will also get on their toes they will bend their knees
and now we're going to get into some stylistic elements where some players will Arc their body
backwards in what I call a reverse C formation and some players will do a forward reverse C the
greatest servers of all time will do a combination of all that for example Pete sampras where he has
a forward C and A backward C and an extremely large coil and an extremely large tilt so when
the body is loaded in this particular way the explore explosive movement upwards is so violent
that the player gets propelled off the ground by a lot now listen some of these things are stylistic
so you can't necessarily serve like Sampras if it doesn't suit your body type but here's the
thing that you got to do the tilting it doesn't really require any athletic abilities so anybody
can achieve a tilt and anybody can reverse a tilt how much you load your body is going to depend on
your physical limitations but everybody can get on their toes and bend their knees that is what you
can do you're going to have a coil and how much backwards and forwards you can bend you gotta
test this out so let me try a serve with all four power sources present and let's see what happens
oh there it is Big serve for an old man so guys understand the message of this video yes a lot
of the power comes out of the arm action but most importantly this applies to players of
all levels the arm action needs to be supported by the body to prevent you from injuries and to
make the serve motion more effortless and on top of that you do get additionally up to 20
more power by using the body's power sources one caveat is that if you're doing progressions if
you're learning a serve wait on the power sources then there's no problem to serve stationary and
as you get comfortable with the swing path of the racket with a looping action of the
racket you can slowly start incorporating more power sources so that eventually one
day you can support your arm perfectly by utilizing all four power sources on your serve