Need a little help on my serve(vids)

[courtratlwc]

The past few weeks I've been serving really well, but I've been experiencing a sharp pain in my upper bicep after a few games serving. I'm thinking there might be something wrong with my motion that's causing it, could you guys help me out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ikzvF9bN-8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN7AX459Ias

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-cOEVpGTTo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGi6swj-WcU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VubaH1rV6ys

also, if someone could tell me how to rotate the video once I put it on my computer, that would be awesome.

[FedererUberAlles]

What's your grip?

Your timing is off too-- you are framing a lot of balls in your videos. I don't think you're using your legs, either, they seem to be dragged along. I wouldn't worry about them, though, until you figure out your toss and your grip.

If you watch the videos you'll see that when you're going into the trophy position your racquet is not inline with your body. Maybe I'm just seeing incorrectly, but this will cause you to have problems in pronation. Obviously, your grip should be continental. Sometimes when I hold the racquet it is continental but my wrist isn't oriented on it to serve, this might be it also.

For the toss, I think I'm wrong actually. You may just need to wait a second more when you're in the trophy position. Give that a try.

just my input, I could be pretty badly wrong

[LeeD]

I suspect you actually have an arm injury.
You can close off your stance more. You can twist your torso into the serves, to eleviate the strain on your arms.
You can widen your platform stance. You use your legs nicely thos.
You motion doesn't seem wrong. Are you trying to arm your serves to get the ballspeed?

[Ajtat411]

I think your form looks good. I have the same bicep pain you're talking about and I think it is from gripping the racket to tightly during serving and like LeeD said, "arming" the stroke. I have the same tendency to arm the serve because the timing of my kinetic chain is not quite there yet and trying to squeeze the last bit of power out of your serve can cause issues. I'm trying to focus on my knee bend/hip twist/shoulder dip/chest muscles instead of my arm for getting more power in serves.

The pain started when I was practicing my kick/twist serves. Tossing the ball over the left side of my head and stroking up and out from 7 oclock to 2 oclock. It causes my muscles to be very sore and I think I tweaked something doing these serves because I was getting less velocity on these serves and I wanted to compensate by arming the serves to try to get better velocity. Bad Idea.

[courtratlwc]

Yeah, I think you guys are right. Anytime I want to hit a big serve, I focus on my arm, not the rest of my body, and I end up arming it. Thanks guys.