Hi guys, I’m Clay Ballard with Top Speed Tennis, and today we’re going to talk about
how you can get more pronation in your serve to help bump your speed and do it with very
little effort.
This is one video out of our entire Power Serve Series.
I’m going to break down pronation into three simple moves that you can incorporate into
your wn game.
Let’s go ahead and get started.
OK, so the first thing we need to understand is when we’re talking about pronation, how
does this add speed to our serve?
When I see many a beginner tennis players, when they were very first starting to play
tennis, a lot of times what they want to do when they’re hitting their serve is keep
the strings facing the opposing side of the court.
So imagine you’re my opponent, I’m hitting a serve towards you, and I’m trying to keep
my strings facing you the entire time.
When in reality, we want these strings to snap as we’re coming through to help increase
that speed, and that’s what pronation is.
As we’re hitting this serve, we want the racket to be turned sideways and then snap
through.
This will add speed, you can imagine as I did in the intro, you can imagine sticking
your arm straight out, having your palm toward the sky and as you rotate your hand forward
with pronation, that’s going to give you an extra maybe 20 miles an hour of racket
speed with very little effort.
Now let’s go ahead and break down this motion into three simple pieces so that you can start
to incorporate this and practice this in your own serve.
Now as I mentioned, we’re going to break this down into the three simple motions.
I’m going to walk you through this at first, not really going up toward the ball as we’re
hitting a service, but imagine this level with the ground.
Then in the second piece of this video, we’ll go ahead and take it up like we’re actually
going to be hitting a serve with this.
The first piece of this, I want to you to imagine is that we’re going to grab our
racket just like we’re going to use this as a hammer.
The edge of our racket we’re going to be hammering down toward the ground.
Now I want you to imagine as you’re doing this, let’s imagine instead of a hammer
this is a hatchet.
I’m going to throw this directly towards you, like you’ll see those people throwing
a hatchet toward a piece of wood and gets it to stick in the wood.
I’m going to imagine the camera is that piece of wood, and I’m going to be throwing
my racket directly towards you.
This is exactly what we’re doing when we’re hitting a serve, as we’re going up in our
serve and getting into the trophy position, just after that, we’re going to be having
our arm extend upwards.
We’re going to see there’s an angle between my upper arm and my forearm.
There’s also an angle between my forearm and my wrist, and I’m creating levers here.
As I’m extending up to hit the ball, now I’m getting rid of those levers and I’m
taking advantage of that lever to really increase my speed.
So that’s the first move.
I’m going to be pretending that I’m going to be throwing the edge of this racket directly
toward the camera, and this is move number one.
So if we look at this from the side, as I’m coming toward the other side of the court,
this is move number one.
’ve created these levers here, with the edge of the racket going directly towards
you.
Now move number two is where we’re actually going to start this pronation.
This is where we’re going to extend our arm, get rid of those levers, and now instead
of my racket edge facing towards you, now the racket strings are going to face toward
the ground.
If I had a thumbs up here, and the first one the thumbs up is pointing back toward me,
and the second move the thumbs up are going to be pointing to my left.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at this again.
This is towards you, now I’m going to extend, my arm is extended.
My thumb is now pointed to the side, and these racket strings are pointed at about a 45 coming
down from my arm.
So move number one, move number two I’ve extended this and I’ve started to pronate
that racket to help to add speed.
So if we’re looking at this from face on, again, this is going to be level with the
ground at first.
Here’s move number one, move number two I’m extending that racket.
It’s at a 45, and then my thumb is to the left.
Now, you’re going to see this in all great tennis players.
So if you look on the ATP tour, this is exactly where you’re going to be seeing them make
contact with the ball.
As they come up, their arm is vertical, and the racket is at about a 45 as they’re pronating
that around.
The third piece to this is we’re going to come all the way around, and now we’re going
to get our thumb pointing down to our side, so just outside of our left hip here, our
thumb is going to be coming down.
Move number one, move number two which would be contact, and move umber three, now my thumb
is going to be facing down toward the ground and my racket comes all the way on around.
So if we do these, all three of these together, we’re going to hear a lot of snap in this
racket as I’m coming on through.
You can hear that racket really whipping as I’m coming through the contact.
That’s exactly what we’re going to be doing in this next part of the video, we’re
going to take that up to the ball, and you’re going to have the full service motion.
Now that we’re familiar with all three motions at ground level, the only thing that’s going
to change is as we toss the ball up into the air, instead of having these motions directed
at the camera, now we’re going to have these motions directed at the ball.
So let’s go through these three motions again.
I’m going to give you all three views from around my body.
I’m going to pause in each three, and then you can practice those on your own.
So from face on here, as we start to toss the ball up, move number one is going to be
when my arm is extending upward, I have the edge of my racket facing the ball.
Move number two, I’m going to be extending, my racket is going to be at a 45, and move
number three and my thumb is going to come all the way around, pointing back to the ground
into my finish position, and I’m moving into the court.
Let’s take a look from behind now.
So from behind the same thing, be tossing the ball up in the air.
Move number one is as I’m starting my upward motion.
Now my edge of my racket is going up toward the ball.
Move number two, I’m fully extended, my arm is at a 45 and now my racket strings are
facing the service box.
Then move number three is my thumb goes ahead and rotates down, and I’m going to be finishing
moving into the opposing side of the court.
Now finally we’ll take a look from behind.
Finally from the final angle here, we’re coming up, move number one, my arm is extending
upward, the edge of my racket toward the ball.
Again, number two, this is where I’d be making contact, obviously I’d be in the
air at this point.
Racket is facing at a 45, and then number three, I’m coming all the way around.
As I put all three of these together, I’m getting that snapping motion of my wrist,
that’s really going to help me to accelerate and get a lot more speed.
A
ll right, I hope you guys really enjoyed this video.
If you did like this video, be sure to click the like button below, +1 this video in Google,
that really helps us out, and post any of your comments or questions below, I’ll be
sure to answer those individually.
And as I mentioned, this is only one video out of an entire series of videos on how to
really boost up your serve speed.
And one of the motioned that I mentioned early in this video is creating leverage and getting
rid of this leverage in the service motion.
We have a great video for that.
I’m going to attach a preview from this video.
If you want to watch the full video, go ahead and click the link that pops up on your screen
or down below in the description.
You’ll be able to watch that full video plus the entire series free of charge.
I really look forward to working with you guys much more in the future, and I’ll see
you all soon.
Hi, I’m Clay Ballard with Top Speed Tennis.
Today we’re going to talk about how you can use a throwing motion to increase your
serve speed.
OK, so in this video we’re going to talk about using arm speed to increase your serve
speed.
So when we’re making a serve, really what we’re doing with the racket is we’re doing
a throwing motion up toward the ball.
So in this video, there we go, hit one out of the air.
OK, so practice that, go ahead and get…