Hey I just had an idea. You know how sometimes we really don't get along on
the court - well like you don't like it when I give you instructions you would
rather just rally with me which is completely understandable. I mean what
wife would want to listen to her husband dish out instructions.
attack go come on go go go and be aggressive attack come on good on the
run go good try backhand come on all yours I
want you to swing faster Trish come on yes on the run go go. So I was thinking
what if I recorded our little practice and posted it online that way you can
you know review it and it can actually help you to finally fix that serve. What
do you think? Yes or no? Yes. All right let's do it.
Okay take a few serves. Let me just see the serve. Refresh my memory. Take a few
warm-up ones. Okay, you haven't played in a while right?
How long six months?
Okay here's the problem on your serve. So when you when you get to this point
right here there's a slowing down of your serve and then you actually pause
in this position right here and then you basically do a pancake serve. So you're
not getting a lot of power. So what I'm going to do is change your rhythm a little bit
so that the racket once it hits this area here it's actually going to speed
up and not slow down. So your racket as it's going up it slows down and comes to
a complete stop. I want it to go slow here on the bottom
and then gradually accelerate so that you start picking up real speed once you
get into the racket drop and then into the contact. And the way we're going to
fix this is by working on your rhythm. So what you do is you take your racket back
to early into this position and then you also take it up a little too quick. So
take a ball and I want to teach you the one-two-three rhythm. So go ahead and and
put the ball and the racket inside the court and put your weight on your front
foot like this go on your front foot put the ball next to the racket. Now you can
bounce the ball inside the court but the weight has to be on your front foot you
have to kind of lean into the court. Okay now pause it right there perfect
and now you're gonna keep the racket here now shift the weight onto your
back foot and you can lift the tip of your front foot up and into the air. That
is position number two. Now as you transfer the weight back to your front
foot go ahead position you you're going to
take the racket into a lag and toss the ball. Okay. So what that's gonna do is
once the ball is in the air you're then going to do two things you're going to
pull the back foot up and you're going to take your racket into the trophy phase
and then the ball is already going to be dropping it's gonna be absolutely no
more time to stop. So naturally by doing this rhythm you
you will get rid of that pause and you will accelerate a lot more because you
have to. So let's do it all over again. Number one is going to be on the front
foot. Let's do it together. Front foot number two is gonna be on the
back foot keep the racket inside. It's very important that you keep the racket
inside and now you're going to do three things simultaneously
you're going to toss the ball lag the racket and shift the weight onto the
front foot and see how my racket does not stop from
that position. So do the whole thing over again do one two three.
One
Two
And now three
Now you can pull it you can pull the
back foot up okay. You don't have to do this stationary serve what's called
platform stance. So as the as the weight is shifting onto the front foot you're
going to toss and then lag the racket and then once the racket starts going up
then you pull the back foot up. Now you do need a little bit higher toss for
that. Start over.
Number one
Two
And three
Okay, you gotta throw the ball in front and throw it higher. Comon.
One
Two
It's better, a lot better
but you have to throw the ball in front otherwise if that toss continues to go
behind you like that doesn't matter what technique you have it's not gonna work.
One don't rush, don't rush. Okay that was a little better but don't rush it okay
There we go I need you to count. One, two and then three. You see this again one
two three. Okay. At three you're doing three things simultaneously.
One
Better
Okay I'm not sure how low the racket dropped but you definitely didn't pause.
So it wasn't like where you're going here and I'm pausing awaiting for the
ball. It was definitely already more
continuous and you did this with your rhythm you're not really you know
mechanically consciously trying to do things in your racket drop. This is
happening completely because of your new rhythm.
Better
And do one more
Beautiful serve. What do you think? Feeling better?
Alright there's your new serve. Nice.
Hey guys I want to show you in more detail how making one adjustment can
sometimes help solve multiple problems. So here's the before footage on my
wife's serve. Her big problem was the pausing of the racket in the trophy phase.
So let's take a look at why this is taking place. We can see here that she
takes the racket back and she initiates the toss pretty quick. Now if you take a
look at her feet they are set in place at this particular moment. It's very
important that we take a look at the feet because what's going to happen now
is that once she's in the trophy phase the back foot is going to slide up. So
just pay attention to the back foot in relation to the trophy position. So the
back foot is sliding forward while the racket is basically pausing in the
trophy phase and this is leading to a lack of acceleration. She basically has
to pick up the speed from zero and she's not developing any swing momentum
because of that. And one additional problem with this type of rhythm is that
she's initiating the toss off her back foot and this is not good because often
this will lead to a toss that goes behind the baseline. You can see here
that she threw most of the tosses on the before footage behind the baseline
and resulting in a contact that's way too far back and consequently landing
behind the baseline. And after she implemented the one-two-three rhythm
there are multiple things that have been proved on her serve without her even
knowing it. I want to show you here exactly what that is. So number one
because she's transferring the weight forward and initiating the toss she has
a much easier time getting that ball inside the baseline. If you take a look
here she's going to move forward and toss the
ball and this makes it a lot easier to get that ball inside the baseline.
Now I also instructed her to do three things simultaneously which is toss the
ball, move the weight forward and lag the racket behind. Now interestingly she's
doing a semi abbreviated lag which is okay. It's not a full lag and you can see
here that her hitting hand is underneath the toss hand and that is a lag. So
what's gonna happen as a result of this lag. She's already moved her weight
forward. She has tossed the ball and now the racket will continuously move
without stopping and this is a big advantage when it comes to swing momentum. So we
take a look here the racket does not stop and she actually starts moving her
foot up to the front foot while the racket is still moving which is a big
improvement from the before footage where she was simply pausing with the
racket already back and because the ball is in front she's gonna get beautiful
forward momentum and the whole serve is synced better. You can see here she has
better extension and she will also land inside the court with full torso
rotation. So this is a big improvement with multiple technical elements that
have gotten better just by making one simple adjustment. Take a look at the
side-by-side footage you will see how much more awkward and uncomfortable her
body looks before she made the adjustment to her rhythm. So pay attention to he
before serve and you will see that because she's pausing and the trophy phase,
because she's tossing the ball behind she is gonna be completely uncomfortable
at contact. You see the curvature in her body and she's also barely leaving the
ground on this serve. So there's not a lot of vertical momentum going on.
There's not a lot of rotation. The hitting arm is actually slightly bent
and I'm sure this serve did not feel good to her. Now after she made the
adjustment she made several improvements to her serve. So number one the racket is
more continuously moving in and out of the trophy phase and she's also pulling
the back foot up towards the front foot in a much better timing so because of
that now as she accelerates upwards towards the ball she's also going to be
able to rotate much better. She's gonna be able to fully extend her arm and we
can see here how much more comfortable she overall looks. There's less bending
in the torso. The arm is actually completely extended and she is also
getting airborne. You can see that both feet lifted off the ground and she's
also going to land well inside the baseline. Now there of course some other
problems on her serve and one of the problems that she's had to deal with for
a long time is a very shallow racquet drop. So the racket normally should drop at
least to her lower back. On the professional players it's even lower
than that and you can see here that her racket does not drop. It kind of stays
level with her shoulder and this is something that's
very difficult to correct and it's a result of muscle memory. She's been
playing tennis for twenty years and she's always served like that and this was
never addressed. And another problem is that she simply does not practice enough.
This is the first time she's played in six months. So what I'm gonna do is make
this kind of a long-term project. Make it a case study. I'm going to try to fix her
racquet drop and I'm going to be recording periodically and then maybe
six months from now or a year from now we'll put together a video and see if I
can get her to drop her racquet a little better.