travlerajm
07-09-2007, 09:59 PM
4.5-5.0 player here - in the days when I used to play every day, I had a huge serve - big pace and monster kick. It was one of the strongest parts of my game.
But as a mostly self-taught player who developed my big serve by serving buckets of balls in high school, my motion is a little complex, and requires good timing to get that kind of power and kick. So when I play once or twice a week, the first thing to go is my serve.
Today during a serve practice session, I decided to see what I could do with a grip adjustment. I usually use a grip slightly on the eastern side of continental. But today, I focused on serving with a full eastern backhand grip.
What a difference it made in the explosiveness! The grip change really let me tap into extra racquet speed, especially when I whipped it down fast in the backswing. Suddenly, my serves were dancing like they did in my heyday. Even with dead balls, I could make the ball bend in the air like I never had before, and the ball was exploding upward off the court at ridiculously steep angles, considering I was using a stiff tweener. The added spin gave me much more margin for error (which I have sorely been needing). And I really liked that slight variations in my angle of attack resulted in wildly different unpredictable bounces.
I think the full eastern backhand serve grip is the ticket for me from now on.
But as a mostly self-taught player who developed my big serve by serving buckets of balls in high school, my motion is a little complex, and requires good timing to get that kind of power and kick. So when I play once or twice a week, the first thing to go is my serve.
Today during a serve practice session, I decided to see what I could do with a grip adjustment. I usually use a grip slightly on the eastern side of continental. But today, I focused on serving with a full eastern backhand grip.
What a difference it made in the explosiveness! The grip change really let me tap into extra racquet speed, especially when I whipped it down fast in the backswing. Suddenly, my serves were dancing like they did in my heyday. Even with dead balls, I could make the ball bend in the air like I never had before, and the ball was exploding upward off the court at ridiculously steep angles, considering I was using a stiff tweener. The added spin gave me much more margin for error (which I have sorely been needing). And I really liked that slight variations in my angle of attack resulted in wildly different unpredictable bounces.
I think the full eastern backhand serve grip is the ticket for me from now on.