Hello! Gregg Le Sueur for Online Tennis Instruction.
Here's a tip on the serve
and how to swing up leading with the edge of the racket.
So you often hear
teaching pros say "you want to lead with the edge of the racket and then last
second go to pronate out".
Now this is specific to players who are
possibly thinking of changing grips or you just changed your grip.
If you were on a full hand grip and now you want to move over to a continental (grip 2)....
What happens is you're so used to the strings facing your target, but when you make that
grip change the strings actually face the left. So now what happens is you
lead with the edge of the racquet and right before contact turn the racket out.
Also some players just find the concept difficult where they
just pronate early and they end up leading with the strings facing straight
up instead of delaying the pronation until right before the contact point.
So let's take a look at the two examples. We'll look at in slow motion and
show you what I mean by leading with the edge of the racket and pronating, and
then just pronating too early leading with the string and the strings and the
palm of facing upwards.
Alright if you look at the two examples. On the left
hand side you can see how the strings are starting to face upwards.
On the right
hand side you can see I'm leading with the edge of the racket. So the edge of
the racket comes through and then the pronation happens right before the impact
point and the racket continues to turn out. Let's take a look at that a second time.
And again you can see how the strings start to open up and
face upwards. So as a result on the left hand side i end up hitting more underspin on the ball.
Then the right hand side I'm able to hit different kinds of spin slice in this instance.
Okay now that we've shown you what we mean by leading with the edge of
the racket and then pronating.
Let's go through a
a sequence of drills to help you if you are struggling with this concept.
So i like to call this the half pipe drill.
So it's just like a skateboard halfpipe. I want you to
vision your racket going down the half pipe and then turning out at the bottom.
So what we're going to do is we're going to start by just about bouncing the ball.
So I'm gonna drop the ball and we go down the half pipe and turn it out.
Let's be careful, often when students start to do this they turn the racket this way
and just hit down you want to try to avoid doing that so go down the half
pipe and you'll see when I go up to contact the very similar movements.
So this is the same move as I'm doing it down here.
Nice thing about this
I can see this. So you do this drill and when you feel comfortable with
it you can go on to the next step where we do the same drill but you keep going
further back with your strings of facing backwards.
So now you're getting
that good pronation going and you keep doing that.
Once you feel good with that
then you go into what we call the racket drop position and that's way the butt
cap is facing the sky and your racket is in this position right here where the
tip of the racket is pointing all the way down.
Now I like to have players start with
what we call 'One, Two, Three' so you're going to do this....1 down the half pipe.... 2
and 3. Then you set up in this position the racket drop toss the ball
and try to make that same movement up at the top.
Let's do that again.
1....2....3, into the racket drop
Then once you feel comfortable that and I recommend using your phone or tablet
to film yourself to make sure you are in fact leading up with the edge, then you
can start in what we call a half serve position and all you want to do then is
bend from the elbow and go right to left this way.
So again you can start with '1 2 3'. 1....2....3 go down the half pipe, I start in the
half position, have the racket pointing towards the side fence.
You see how the palm of hand is facing down. We toss the ball I try to make that same movement up
at the top and I check the check point... see how the strings are facing my knee
and the butt caps facing the sky. That's a good indication that you have pronated.
Let's try it again! We're going to go 1...2...3 start with a
half serve. I'm going to bend right to left, I toss the ball right to left and I
swing up to contact.
Then once you've checked yourself on your tablet
or your phone or you're comfortable with it, you can go into the full serve but I
still recommend you go 1...2...3 so you're going down that half pipe. Then go into the
full serve and try to make that happen and then check your check points and
you'll notice how I'm standing here on the service line because I'm not too
worried about the outcome I'm just working on the mechanics of the
serve and the pronation.
So try these drills at home and let us know how you do!