Improve your racket head spead, pace and spin on serve with one tip!

[RichieTenenbaum]

During your wind-up stretch out your front arm as far as you can. Try to keep your hitting hand and your body relaxed.

A lot of people on here worry about what their "trophy pose" should look like. This tip approaches the same problem, but from a different angle. By reaching up with your tossing arm as far as you can, you will ultimately get a better shoulder turn, you'll get your front hip more into the court and you will be getting more knee bend.

It's an easy cue to use to get a good coiling and uncoiling action on your serve. Remember to keep your hitting arm relaxed and let the racket head lag. You want to get that whippy power through contact, but you're doing it by coiling and uncoiling your large muscle groups.

Trying to focus on consciously pronating faster at contact is a road to disaster. The pros have such violent pronation, because they're storing energy by coiling their big muscle groups and then releasing that energy later in the stroke.

If you're not coiling properly in the early stages of your serve, you can't magically release more energy later in the stroke by consciously trying to pronate violently at contact. Focus on good preparation and fundamentals and the results you're looking for will come.

 

[RichieTenenbaum]

tips works great for overheads too!! Reach up with that tossing arm and stretch it towards toward the sky.

On overheads a common tip is to point towards the ball, which is a good tip.

But try to stretch that front arm out as much as you comfortably can to really get a good coil going. You should feel your chest muscles stretching out as you reach up with that front arm.

 

[Deleted member 120290]

Sounds like a great tip. I sometimes find myself T-Rexing my tossing arm which results in poor balance, toss and premature lowering of the tossing hand which results in serve going into the net.

 

[RetroSpin]

Richie, I criticized you on the other thread but i will say I think you make a great point here. Trying to violently pronate into contact will create a disaster. The hitting arm should be relaxed and be thrown through by motion of the shoulder.

 

[RajS]

@RichieTenebaum: Thanks. I incorporated this tip into my serve, and I can see the improvement already. I now start the toss with the arm stretched, and keep it stretched up as I release the ball. Everything works better. I don't know why, but trying to extend the arm upwards seems to work better than trying to keep the arm up as long as possible.