What Is A Fast Racket Speed On Serve?

[TennsDog]

I just did some basic calculations, including some rounding and estimating, and I came up with a sheer racket head speed of around 54.5 mph on my serve. I know I have a fast serve, probably between 90 and 100 mph. In case you are wondering, I had someone take a 12 second video clip of my serve, and then counted the frames the clip had. It had 120 --> each frame is .1 sec. I then rounded my height to roughly 6', and measured off a length of one foot on a piece of paper. I then marked on the paper my racket's starting position one frame before contact, then one more mark one frame after contact. I made a general circular line from one dot to the other, and marked off hashes of the same length as my pre-measured one-foot line. My racket head went about 8 ft in .1 sec. This is a whopping 288,000 ft/hr (aka 54.5 mph). This seems incredibly low for what my serve speed is. Is my method so screwed up as to produce such error, is it all the generalizing and roudning, or am I missing something that adds so much power besides racket head speed? For anyone else who has accurately measured their racket head speed on serve, what did you get?

 

[Rickson]

Your serve is pretty fast, don't worry.

 

[TennsDog]

I'm not worried about my serve, I was just interested in the actual calculation I came up with and any others may have come up with.

 

[Koaske]

I think your racquet speed is pretty good. I think I have 90 - 100 mph serve too. I base this estimate to the "angle of my arm" when serving ( http://www.somaxsports.com/RoddickServe.htm <-- see this and you know what I mean ) To get faster racquet speed, I think more greater angle needs to be achieved.

 

[Tennis Ball Hitter]

The instance where speed matters is the part just before you hit the ball. The whole swing is to get your racquet head up to speed for this instance. So it is very likely that a very large part of the full swing will be very much below the speed at impact. This could be the error.

Also my geuss is that racquet head speed should be greater than service speed.

 

[TennsDog]

I suppose thinking about it now, there are two other factors that would lower my results. One is that the frames are rather large compared to a high speed camera, so my racket head is still accelerating quite a lot from the first frame to contact, and then decelerating between contact and second frame. Also, the impact with the ball would slow down the racket head by a rather large proportion instantaneously. Oh well, so much for a good idea...

 

[SageOfDeath]

I think your racquet speed is pretty good. I think I have 90 - 100 mph serve too. I base this estimate to the "angle of my arm" when serving ( http://www.somaxsports.com/RoddickServe.htm <-- see this and you know what I mean ) To get faster racquet speed, I think more greater angle needs to be achieved.

The website you posted is an advertisemetn. Its not mean for an accurate reading on how fast your serve is or how do you get your serve fast, although its meant to make you believe that its all because of angles (which they exagerated) although it does make a difference their calculations if any is not true.

this is what I copy and pasted to prove that the website is an advertisement.

"We have found, when working with runners and tennis players, that for every degree you increase your stride angle, you increase your stride length (the amount of ground you cover with each stride) by two percent. This means that just a 25-degree increase in stride angle (which is easily achieved with Microfiber Reduction) would enable Roddick to cover 50% more ground with each stride on court. The photo below shows Michael Chang, a tennis player famous for his ability to cover the court."

Microfiber Reduction is what they are selling, they also had a similar website to why roger federer beat roddick. Flexibility is very important but they had fake angles and try to make it all make sense but federer beat roddick because he played a better game. Not because MR helped him sooooo much.

 

[kevhen]

Yeah it would be the speed at contact and you would be accelerating up until that last instant. Easier to just measure with a speed gun than do visual calculations.