Without acceleration, you are left with a weak and ineffective serve. This is true
for the flat, the slice, and the kick serve. In fact, the serves are the fastest
strokes in tennis easily reaching over a hundred miles an hour and if we compare
that to a ground stroke it is very difficult to reach that same speed.
The acceleration on the serve should be gradual. Now there are some servers who
have more of an abrupt faster rhythm and that works for some players but the
majority of the best servers of all time have a gradual acceleration that goes
from slow to fast. And what I mean by gradual acceleration is that it simply
takes a while for the serve to accelerate. So most players will
bounce the ball inside the court and then they will initiate some kind of a
rocking motion, this is different from player to player, and then we will start
syncing the toss arm with the hitting arm. We're going to toss the ball and we're
also going to take the racket back. And now as the racket goes up into the
trophy position we will also get our body in the proper position so we
can execute all the multitude of power sources and get the maximum acceleration
once we initiate the racket drop.
Once the racket drop is initiated the amount of time it takes to get from the
racket drop into the contact is so short and the acceleration is so fast that
this is impossible to see with the naked eye.
And certain technical elements that are occurring in this area from the racket
drop into the contact, such as the pronation into the contact are being
performed as such a speed that it's impossible for us to be conscious of
these actions.
And the timespan that continuing pronation occurs in shortly after
contact is even shorter which makes it absolutely humanly impossible to
this action consciously.
So what this means for you as a recreational player that you must learn the
fundamentals of the serve and you will be able to accelerate the serve to
tremendous speeds. You will then be able to accelerate the serve so fast that this
area from the racket drop into the contact and shortly after contact is
gonna be over so fast in a blink of the eye you will not even know what happened.
And if your serve was accelerated correctly all the technical elements
inside this area are going to be there. So, for example, the pronation into the
contact will be there without you being conscious of it and the same goes for
continuing pronation. If you try to practice continuing pronation
mechanically at a conscious level you will either have to hit your serve
extremely slow and you don't want to do that you want to accelerate your serve
as fast as possible, or if you do accelerate your serve and then try to
mechanically and consciously make continued pronation happen you will
end up with something what I call fake pronation. And fake pronation happens to
anyone who tries to consciously continue to pronate. So even if I hit a serve if
I consciously try to continue to pronate I will do it too late and this is
impossible the time correctly. You saw the time span in which from the contact
to the continuing pronation you can't even see it it's happening so fast so if
you try to do this consciously mechanically you will never be able to
get the timing right and you will do it way too late after contact and it brings
absolutely nothing to your serve. So instead of working on pronation into the
contact and continuing pronation work on the real fundamentals of the serve and
there are many trust me. And then once you develop all these fundamentals you
eventually will be able to accelerate the serve properly and you will have
pronation into the contact and continuing pronation without ever being
conscious of it.