Torso rotation to facilitate racket drop of kick serve?

[socallefty]

I am not saying it is not different for different spins, but I would qualify by saying serve direction affects it along with spin. Less spin, the more you open up and have more forward momentum after initial shoulder turn. The more spin you want, the more your stay sideways to facilitate the right swing path. For instance, I hit slow slice with more sideways spin as a 2nd serve sometimes and faster slice with less spin as a 1st serve sometimes - the degree of body uncoil varies and then if it is T-slice or wide slice, it varies too.

My main point is that many coaches (certainly the many who have taught me on two continents separated by forty years) don’t teach about degree of sideways rotation during the forward swing when they teach different spin serves. After teaching the fundamentals, they focus on differences in toss location and swing path mostly. At the same time, I understand there may be many variations in how the serve is taught.

 

[Curious]

I am not saying it is not different for different spins, but I would qualify by saying serve direction affects it along with spin. Less spin, the more you open up and have more forward momentum after initial shoulder turn. The more spin you want, the more your stay sideways to facilitate the right swing path. For instance, I hit slow slice with more sideways spin as a 2nd serve sometimes and faster slice with less spin as a 1st serve sometimes - the degree of body uncoil varies and then if it is T-slice or wide slice, it varies too.

My main point is that many coaches (certainly the many who have taught me on two continents separated by forty years) don’t teach about degree of sideways rotation during the forward swing when they teach different spin serves. After teaching the fundamentals, they focus on differences in toss location and swing path mostly. At the same time, I understand there may be many variations in how the serve is taught.

Well, agreed but if someone asked me to show them how to hit a kick serve I would still show them the correct swing path and instead of waiting sadistically for them to figure out the stance , I’d add straightaway ‘mate, if you stay sideways longer it’ll be much easier!’

 

[socallefty]

Well, agreed but if someone asked me to show them how to hit a kick serve I would still show them the correct swing path and instead of waiting sadistically for them to figure out the stance , I’d add straightaway ‘mate, if you stay sideways longer it’ll be much easier!’

My coaches taught me to hit kick and slice serves at different speeds with varying degree of side spin. I suspect that if they had focused a lot on staying sideways only while learning the kick, the only kick serve I would hit would be a very slow, looping kick. Once I learned the kick toss location and swing path, they let me riff a bit and learn how to hit it with different speeds and different levels of kick spin.

Maybe if you are teaching someone their first hour or two of learning a kick serve in their entire life, you have to say certain things. But if you are teaching someone to improve their kick, you might say other things. A lot would also depend on how good their basic serve fundamentals are already even if they don’t know the kick serve. I feel that those are some of the nuances that seem to be missing in many of the online coaching videos posted on here as they all seem to be geared towards the first hour or two of learning a shot by a very basic beginner.

 

[leodevlin]

Upper torso rotation will normally have the shoulders moving wrt to each other. This is not what is meant by shoulder rotation. Shoulder rotation, internal rotation (ISR) & external rotation (ESR), are articulations of the shoulder. Torso rotation does not refer to an articulation of the shoulder(s).

ESR & ISR:

ESR occurs during the racket drop on the serve. ISR occurs later, during the upward swing to contact.

ESR:

People often confuse ISR with pronation. Both can occur on the upward swing. With forearm pronation, the hand is rotated by the forearm. The the upper arm and elbow do not rotate as a result of forearm pronation.

The whole arm can be rotated as a result of ISR or ESR. With the elbow bent, ISR (and ESR) will look the movements shown in the top 3 images above. However, with the elbow straight, ISR will turn (rotate) the hand much like pronation does. This is where ppl will mistakenly refer to ISR as pronation. As I indicated, pronation does not turn the whole arm, whereas ISR does

Thank you , that makes it more clear.

 

[leodevlin]

Ooooh you're getting warm!

J

Yup, I know how ignorant I am.

 

[J011yroger]

Yup, I know how ignorant I am.

Man you grabbed the corner of the idea. Keep pulling at it.

J

 

[tennis3]

I don't know man, even Rick Macci says you should use torso rotation :

That’s a really good explanation.

 

[jz000]

I added a slight rotation in my prep, and it helped generating easy power on that kick serve.
Also, I finish the stroke much 'higher' than my flat serve, like what Pete Sampras does.
In slow motion, you can see Federer's finish is also abbreviated on kick.

And a million other things. Happy serving journey.

 

[ballmachineguy]

That’s a really good explanation.

Uhhh, his feet are on the ground. How do you turn the hip in the air as most servers are off of the ground at that point.

 

[leodevlin]

racket flex just published a new video on the subject:

Maybe I don't understand all the nuances between a torso vs should vs hip rotation, but something seems for sure needs to be rotating it seems .