Hey guys, in today's video we're gonna talk about the racket drop leak and this
is a problem on the serve that's even present on the professional tour. Before
I explain what the racket drop leak is first let me show you how a serve can be
struck in the most optimal way. So the serve should be accelerated when
the racket reaches the trophy phase. So independent what type of serve style you
have, what type of backswing, whether you have a platform stance or a pinpoint
stance the body should be loaded and ready to accelerate into the ball when
the racket has reached this position. And let me show you on my serve. So I'm going
to accelerate my serve at the moment when the racket reaches the trophy phase.
take a look.
And when the serve is accelerated in the most optimal way the
racket drop occurs so fast it is not visible to the naked eye. Let me hit
another serve you try to look if you can see my racket drop.
So there you probably couldn't see how exactly my racket is dropping and that's
a good sign. Now it's a bad sign when you see a player and you can actually see
the racket leaking into the racket drop before it's accelerated. So basically
what the racket drop leak is is a slowly dropping racket into the racket drop and
then the actual real acceleration starts from a lower point and that is a
disadvantage to an optimally struck serve where the acceleration starts from
the trophy phase. So we have a lot more range of motion. There's more room to
accelerate when we do it from here versus doing it from a lower place. So let me
show you a serve with a racket drop leak. So basically I'm going to start slowly
dropping the racket and then accelerate from a lower place.
And the difference between my serve and the serve with the racket drop leak is not huge. It's not 20
miles an hour difference. Maybe it's 2 to 5 miles an hour.
So this is not a huge problem and it's exactly why you see even some
professional players with this problem. One example is Kiki Bertens. She has a
racket drop leak so if you ever watch her serve you will see that the racket
slowly drops in here with an open face and then she accelerates it from
somewhere around here. So she's not striking her serve optimally. She could
hit it a little bit better but still she's one of the best serves in the WTA
so this is not that big of a problem. But when it comes to tennis there's always
room for improvement and this is true for some of the best players in the
world including Federer. You can always get a little bit better. So if you do
happen to have a racket drop leak where the racket is slowly dropping into the
racket drop and you're accelerating from a lower place there's no reason why
you shouldn't change this. You should always try to improve your strokes to
the most optimal way. And here is how you can correct the racket drop leak. So most
likely it's stemming from a pause in the trophy phase. Often serves with an
abbreviated style where the racket has to pause here or an up together type serve
where the toss arm and the hitting arm go up together
and now while the ball is still in the air the racket is pausing here and a lot
of players will in this pause slowly start to leak the racket into the racket
drop. And a great corrective technique is serving with a lag. See what happens on a
lag serve is we're gonna toss the ball and lag the racket behind. And now once
that ball is in the air my racket is gonna start going up and now that ball is
gonna start to drop and now I don't have any more time to slow down or even stop
I'm gonna have to gradually accelerate my racket to catch up with the ball. So
let me show you a lag serve. So I'm going to toss the ball first
lag the racket behind you will see that the racket will gradually have to
accelerate and there will be no time to stop.
So I strongly encourage you to try the lag serve. It is the most commonly used
serve on the professional tour and it might even help you with your racket
drop leak. Now another possible cause of the racket leak is an isolated
movement of the wrist in the racket drop phase. So some players will go up in the
trophy phase and now they will do an isolated movement of the wrist and if
you look at my racket this is a racket drop leak. You see my racket is
dropping. Now this doesn't mean that this is gonna turn into a waiter serve
necessarily because if we you can still achieve a full racket drop even though
the wrist is bending backwards. Now one technique that might help you get rid of
the isolated movement of the wrist in the racket drop is the bending of the
wrist in the preparation stage. And a lot of professional players use this method
and one that's famous for it is Milos Raonic who severely flexes or bends
his wrist in the preparation stage. Now if you do this in the beginning phase of
the serve and now you go into your serve
style you will see that the racket is gonna be more on the hitting side if the
risk remains bent and now once you are in this position you are less likely to
now bend the wrist backwards. I can show you from this angle. So if I bend it
in the preparation stage and I'll go up you see the wrist is still bent and I
once I accelerate I'm less likely to make an isolated movement on the wrist
and extend it this way. So let me try one of these serves where I bend my wrist in
a beginning stage of the serve. So I'm gonna try it like Raonic. I'm gonna
severely bend it now take a look how my racket is traveling up into the trophy phase.
You can see there I started with a more bent wrist in the preparation stage and
as my racket was going up the wrist remained on the hitting side of the body
and this actually felt really comfortable as I was executing my serve
and I once I accelerated my serve my wrist was safe from going all the way
back into an extremely extended position or in other words making that isolated
movement of the wrist with nothing else happening in the body. And the most
important thing when it comes to the racket drop leak is the timing of your
serve. And this can get quite complex and I'll try to simplify it for you as much
as you can. To put it simply you don't want any long pauses in the most
important stage of your serve which is the acceleration stage. Now when does the
serve start to accelerate the fastest? It is in the trophy phase position. So if you
find yourself waiting in this area there's gonna be problems. And there's a
couple of problems that can occur if you have long pauses in the trophy phase of
your serve. Let's say you don't have a racket drop leak and you are pausing and
keeping the racket on the hitting side of the body. Now this is not optimal
either because you lost all your momentum from setting up your take back
and now you have to accelerate from zero to a hundred. Or even worse what happens
to a lot of players is they pause in this position and they start slowly
leaking the racket into the racket drop and they're losing a little bit of
acceleration because of that. So what you have to do in order to defeat this
problem you have to structure your serve in a way where once you have reached
this position your body should be fully loaded and ready to accelerate. So let me
show you how that works on my serve. So by the time I'm ready to accelerate
everything is going to be loaded and there's actually not going to be any
time for me to go into a racket drop leak. So take a look here I'm going to
set up my serve in a way where once I have reached that trophy phase there's
not going to be any more time to stop or slow down.
Now one exception where leaking the racket slowly into the racket drop might
be okay is if you happen to have a waiter serve. You can use this as a
corrective technique. You can check out my video titled fix your waiter serve
where explain in detail why this is the case. However if you don't have a waiter
serve leaking the racket into the racket drop is completely unnecessary and you
should use the methods provided in this video to get rid of it. And you should
always strive to hit your serve in the most optimal way.