hey guys in today's video I want to explain to you why the cart wheel on the tennis serve
is one of the most important technical elements that you need to possess in fact
it is a fundamental element that should be present on all serves whether you're hitting
a flat slice or a kick serve and what is a cartwheel well if you aren't familiar
with the term a cartwheel is basically a move where you start like this and then you roll
your body over your hands and your feet go up into the air I'm not going to demonstrate one
and this is somewhat similar on a tennis serve and a lot of recreational players
have a mistake in their toss arm positioning that prevents them from executing a proper cartwheel
so here's what happens to a lot of players at the rec level they toss the ball but they don't
continue to go up with the toss arm so that the shoulders are level you can see that if
I don't continue to go up with my toss arm the left shoulder and the right shoulder
are on the same level what should happen is the following you should toss the ball and
then continue to go up with your toss arm arm so that the non-dominant shoulder goes above
the dominant shoulder and you create a tilted position in your trophy phase
so when you achieve that tilt naturally as you go up into the contact you will cartwheel into
the contact this is something that will happen naturally you are unlikely going to continue
to stay up with your left side if you allow the racket to go up towards the ball naturally that
non-dominant side is going to go down let me show you a couple more I'm going to go
up with my toss arm and then naturally as I go up towards the contact I achieve a cartwheel
a common question that I receive from my students is whether we should consciously pull down
the toss arm after we have achieved the Tilted position this is something that you should
definitely shouldn't do because you're going to time your cartwheel the wrong way so if I
consciously drag down my toss arm I'm likely going to do this too fast too early I'm not
going to time it right and it's going to destroy the so important vertical momentum you don't need
to manufacture this movement this will naturally happen as you start to go up towards the ball
so the important thing for you to remember is that you need to create a
tilt and then as you go up naturally that left side is going to go down
now the tennis serve is one of the most unique movements in sports and it is not
really like a cartwheel I'm going to tell you why because when we do a cartwheel our upper
body is straight but we don't want to serve like this because we're not going to be able
to maximize our vertical momentum so what should we do in the trophy phase of our serve
we should bend our knees we should bend our body slightly forward and slightly backward
if your body allows you to do this so this is not how you would set up a cartwheel so what
this means is that the cartwheel is going to be intact as we serve but at the same
time the body is also going to straighten so let me show you what that looks like
as my body is straightening from this bent position several things happen
as a result of it I am leaping off the ground because that vertical momentum
is propelling me upwards but not only that because I'm doing a cartwheel simultaneously
you will see that my back foot is coming off the ground first you take a look at
any high level player you will see that the back foot always comes off the ground first
so in other words as the feet are leaving the ground the front foot will leave the ground last
and this is a direct result of the cartwheel it makes sense as our body is going down on this side
the right side of the body will go up which will naturally pull our back foot off the ground first
now should you pay attention to this absolutely not this will happen naturally there's absolutely
no adjustment that you need to make like I said what you need to do is load the body
correctly and then just simply unload it all these things that I just talked about will
happen naturally so again you're going to have to put your body in the Tilt you're gonna have
to bend your knees get on the toes maybe bend your body forward and backward a little bit and
now here's the thing you're gonna have to drop your Racket and unload your body simultaneously
where a lot of you guys get in trouble is that you are dropping the racket in isolation and you have
a racket drop leak so you go in here first before unloading the body let me try to demonstrate that
mistake again so the racket drop is occurring in isolation and the body gets unloaded much later
so if you have a racket drop leak in other words if you are not unloading the body simultaneously
with dropping the racket you're going to have a big problem your vertical momentum in other words
your cartwheel and the straightening of the body will be affected negatively by you leaking your
racket drop now you ever noticed that the pros land inside the court but there is a direct result
of the players throwing the ball in front of the Baseline if the players were indeed throwing the
ball more behind the Baseline they would land behind the Baseline so naturally when the ball
is in front of the Baseline what will need to happen is that the body has to go forward in order
to adjust to a toss that's more inside of the Baseline where this happens naturally players land
inside out of the court so let me demonstrate that I'm going to throw a ball more behind the Baseline
you'll see here the land with my non-dominant foot
behind the Baseline and this one I'm going to throw in front of the court
you see here that I landed inside the baseline so the thing that you have to
keep in mind is that you have to lean your body slightly forward as that toss is inside of the
Baseline this will naturally allow you to land inside that Baseline and get that's so important
forward momentum so now let me demonstrate to you what happens to the service motion
if I don't have the cartwheel so I'm going to try to execute the forward momentum I'm also
going to bend my knees and bend my body and try to go upwards without having the
cartwheel so let's see what happens to my serve if I do all those things
so let me try that again there might be some muscle memory still there
where I'm unable to do a serve wrong but let me try it again I'm going to
bend my knees I'm going to load my body optimally without having the cartwheel
so even there I try to minimize the cartwheel I think a little bit of it was still there
but you can see how much less athletic this serve looks without the cartwheel
see that and actually I'm feeling a little bit of pain in my shoulder let me try it the
correct way I'm going to tilt my shoulders I'm going to keep my toss arm up a little bit longer
you see the athleticism has increased a lot by me cartwheeling into the serve so
now let me try to do a serve with the correct cartwheel but without
bending my knees and without going forward let's take a look at this one
so you can see that this serve wasn't Perfect by any means but it looked a lot more athletic
than the one without the cartwheel so this proves that the cartwheel on the serve is one
of the most important power sources that you need to utilize there's a tremendous amount
of power stored in the reversal of the shoulder positions when I reverse my shoulder positions
I'm able to accelerate upwards a lot more there's a lot more range of motion compared to a serve
that doesn't have a cartwheel which goes to show you that possessing the cartwheel is one
of the most important fundamental elements that you need to learn on the tennis serve