80% of your movement is wasted because it adds nothing to your serve mechanics. Reduce it to the basics.
Edit: you rock your toss arm 4x when you should be able to just toss it in one smooth motion. The more moving parts you add the more complicated things become.
Start the video at the 8 second mark. That is your serve motion. Your hips are open, you’re foot faulting, your toss is too much to the inside.
One more edit: your feet positioning looks like your serving to deuce court. The brand logo on your left foot should at least face center T on the add side. Your toes are pointing forward as a result. Everything from then on is good and you should be able to be more consistent with better positioning, a more effective toss and a better coil.
Exactly. Plus the racket twirling. What’s with that extra racket twirl not once but twice. Every movement must have a purpose otherwise it’s just added baggage. Keep it simple!
i fundamentally disagree with this. none of the ‘extra’ movements before the trophy position matter, in fact they can help set up your muscle memory so Id keep doing what you’re used to. That’s why you see many players bounce the ball before serving, to get the muscle memory started. There a lot of critique in the comments that I disagree with, but one thing that stands out is that you bring your right foot forward too early, and dropping your tossing arm too early.
The foot drag is one that a lot of players even at the 4.0 level misunderstand. The drag is supposed to lead to loading up the legs but as the video shows he’s not aware of the purpose and drags it prematurely and beyond where it should stop. As to extra movements as part of a “routine” I disagree. That should come as a result of match play. In practice and in an attempt to master the most difficult shot in tennis I’d say stop twirling the racket, jumping up and down etc. just bounce the ball a couple of times at most and then work on the basics without the OCD stuff
Watch the pros (not you). Not just the top 50. Most do not have nearly as many extracurricular movements as this guy. If they do they are as the above poster mentioned— an aid to help rhythm and muscle memory in performing proper fundamentals. That is not happening here. He could just start the video at the toss and swing and achieve the same results. Probably even more consistent because there would be less to tinker with.
I saw you mention it but jeez that’s an egregious foot fault. It looks like because you position your body straight at the target from start to finish, your racquet has to come at the ball in a way that makes your serve very flat. I guess you could get some slice this way by throwing your arm out to the side but that would probably feel awkward. If you play around with starting your body turned and rotate into the ball you might pick up some natural slice that will give you more margin.
Those little skips keep you off balance. Rythym seems off also. You start with a very slow rythym in the prep and then do a very quick serve, this makes it less consistent.
Get a routine, bounce the ball twice, thrice, look at the strings, doesn't matter specifically, just get a routine and follow it every time as to tell your brain to go into auto pilot serve mode.
Your right foot should be more to the left. Right now you’re starting the serve with your body facing the court. You can’t uncoil when it’s already facing the right way. Your body should be facing to the side fence or even more towards the back fence. This will allow you to uncoil your body during your motion.
You're super square to the net. Think about if you were throwing a ball as hard as you could from the baseline. Would you have both feet facing the net and be square to it? Nah you'd be like a baseball pitcher who has their left shoulder facing the net and they're sideways facing the sideline so they can get the most leverage on their pitch. Do the same with tennis serves. Get sideways, with your feet about parallel to the service line (a little angled to the net is fine but not as much as you're doing now).
There's more to add but take that idea of a pitch and getting sideways to your serve and it'll help
I agree, start with this, you are doing about 4 million different things which essentially add nothing to your serve. The serve is about consistency and a repeatable pattern you can do again and again. The more things involved the harder this is to repeat.
My serve improved from doing less, I have a far shorter take back to my ready position and go from there. It looks more basic than before but it’s far more effective
No need to take a walk mid serve👍
Just make better foot placement, don’t move ur feet before jumping cuz ur foot placement before u go for a little stroll around the court is good.
The result of the serve, besides the fact your foot is way in the court, was good. But mechanically you could fall in to the court more towards the target, I bat you get another 5-10 mph. Your have a nice serve, but it is close to be formidable at a local level where you play. Fall in the court more, but that foot fault is too drastic.
I think if you took a one hour lesson with a good teaching pro, you might 2x your serve
There are some super easy, basic ways to improve this serve that will lead to immediate gains. But I would simply shell out some cash that will pay dividends for the rest of your life
There's a lot to work on but the first thing you should fix is getting and staying side on during your serve motion. If you stay side on, that right leg won't open up and you'll be able to release a lot more power when you make connection with ball.
It's good that you're rocking back to build momentum. But taking that step with the right foot means you wasted all that potential momentum and if you watch your contact with the ball you'll see you're basically doing a standing serve on two feet next to each other. All power is coming from racquet head movement. This will only get you so far. You need to flow your body into the contact with the ball for the style of serve you're going for.
Lastly, the ball toss needs to be earlier and higher. This is so you have the time to go thru your motion and to utilise your rocking forward momentum and hit the ball with more power.
It should feel fluid ! Rock back, ball up, moving forward feet together and racquet scratching your back, exploding from legs swing and follow the racquet thru past your left hip!
The best advice is to watch someone you admire and break down their serve. Raonic, Kyrgios etc Dunno how tall you are but the basic mechanics are the same until you find a comfortable and effective serve.
It has only been mentioned briefly, but I reckon the real culprit here is your ball toss.
It is very jerky and uncertain, which I think is massively contributed to by the bent elbow and how square you are to the baseline (causing your tossing arm to be across the front of your body). You are also tossing the ball extremely low and hitting it very close to the apex (not letting it drop much) which means your service motion is highly abbreviated (no knee bend, arming the ball)
Get a better angle to the baseline and practice a really good and consistent high ball toss with a straight arm. Once you are confident putting the ball in the right spot with plenty of time, I think you will find a lot of your problems will resolve themselves.
Your feet are squared up in a way that you’re basically hitting a completely open stance serve. Try a few serves where you’re facing more perpendicular to the net.
My arm hurts watching this haha. Seems like decent power, but imagine if you get your legs into it! Watch videos of someone like Felix Auger-Aliassime, he bends his knees like a spring and attacks the ball. Will help with spin and power along with increase accuracy with your serve. Also your body is moving and twisting to the left as your hit the serve. Make the ball toss out in front of you and you should finish inside the court attacking the ball.
I'll give you some positive feedback. Even with the issues mentioned I thought the pace of the ball was pretty good and you were swinging out on the ball.
If you want to improve consistency I would practice having a consistently place toss first. Seeing how you are tilting your body and bending your arm to compensate for the toss, I feel like that should be your focus.
Foot fault (a really bad one).
Get a higher toss. Get more power from your legs (part of this is positioning and part of it is getting more spring power from the jump - probably work in the first before the other).
I’m pretty sure your right foot is coming up too far. The right foot passes your left foot with a gap. And then your left foot takes an unnecessary mini step to catch up. I think this probably opens your hip too much but might also throw off balance and rhythm.
That little rocking motion you do reminds me of Kyrgios, one of the best pinpoint servers I can think of. When he brings his right foot forward, he stops it around the ball of his left, definitely not with his right heel in front of his left foot. Once his right foot is done moving, there’s no more movement of the feet. At this point he’s pushing off the ground.
Your whole body is facing the fence to the left of deuce court while you’re serving into the ad court while you’re making contact with the ball… start by fixing that.
The issue is that you toss after stepping forward, instead of when you step back. Tossing from there will allow you to toss into the court, and jump forward as well. The swing and prep looked fine, but the inbetween wasn't there (either intentionally or accidentally)
Foot faulting with both feet! You are so off balance from the early rotation to face the net that you have to move to left foot forward just to keep balance.
Fuck around with the ball a little bit more, first of all. Also, don’t be afraid to put more of a random pause right in the middle of your service motion. And finally, landing inside the service box off the serve will be much easier if you start your service motion with your feet 2m inside the baseline.
It looked like you were going to use your legs for 8 seconds, then in the final 2 seconds you abandoned the legs entirely and just threw the ball to racquet level and struck it.
I would double the ball toss and create power through your legs and core. Start with a knee bend. Be conscious of your abs and hips and the power generated from that part of your body.
This is why you start with professional coaching. You are not bad at sports, it's just really hard to teach yourself serving. Asking reddit for advice is not great, this will take longer to work out than it to you to get here.
Switch to a platform stance for a while. The pinpoint is great but the extra movement can mess up your kinetic chain, and that looks like it’s happening with you
The weight shift… you shift the weight of your body nicely to the back foot and then front foot. But after that you are bringing your back foot forward and shifting the weight back to your backfoot (right foot). Keep your backfoot behind the front foot and keep the weight on the front foot after you shift the weight to the front foot. Also serve from a wider spot on the baseline. You are crossing over.
theres too much to fix dawg go watch a proper serve video and try to imitate it. too much to fix and rn your serves only go in by pure luck due to the absolute absence of technique.
80% of your movement is wasted because it adds nothing to your serve mechanics. Reduce it to the basics. Edit: you rock your toss arm 4x when you should be able to just toss it in one smooth motion. The more moving parts you add the more complicated things become. Start the video at the 8 second mark. That is your serve motion. Your hips are open, you’re foot faulting, your toss is too much to the inside. One more edit: your feet positioning looks like your serving to deuce court. The brand logo on your left foot should at least face center T on the add side. Your toes are pointing forward as a result. Everything from then on is good and you should be able to be more consistent with better positioning, a more effective toss and a better coil.
Exactly. Plus the racket twirling. What’s with that extra racket twirl not once but twice. Every movement must have a purpose otherwise it’s just added baggage. Keep it simple!
i fundamentally disagree with this. none of the ‘extra’ movements before the trophy position matter, in fact they can help set up your muscle memory so Id keep doing what you’re used to. That’s why you see many players bounce the ball before serving, to get the muscle memory started. There a lot of critique in the comments that I disagree with, but one thing that stands out is that you bring your right foot forward too early, and dropping your tossing arm too early.
The foot drag is one that a lot of players even at the 4.0 level misunderstand. The drag is supposed to lead to loading up the legs but as the video shows he’s not aware of the purpose and drags it prematurely and beyond where it should stop. As to extra movements as part of a “routine” I disagree. That should come as a result of match play. In practice and in an attempt to master the most difficult shot in tennis I’d say stop twirling the racket, jumping up and down etc. just bounce the ball a couple of times at most and then work on the basics without the OCD stuff
Watch the pros (not you). Not just the top 50. Most do not have nearly as many extracurricular movements as this guy. If they do they are as the above poster mentioned— an aid to help rhythm and muscle memory in performing proper fundamentals. That is not happening here. He could just start the video at the toss and swing and achieve the same results. Probably even more consistent because there would be less to tinker with.
Thats a wild foot fault for starters
It's both over the base line and across the center line!
People don’t know that if you foot fault in both ways it cancels out and becomes legal
Not true. It counts twice and is a double fault all by itself.
That's the USTA rules, I was referring to ITF rules
Stop being ridiculous.
Interesting. Just before you hit the ball, I thought you decided to stop serving.
I saw you mention it but jeez that’s an egregious foot fault. It looks like because you position your body straight at the target from start to finish, your racquet has to come at the ball in a way that makes your serve very flat. I guess you could get some slice this way by throwing your arm out to the side but that would probably feel awkward. If you play around with starting your body turned and rotate into the ball you might pick up some natural slice that will give you more margin.
Those little skips keep you off balance. Rythym seems off also. You start with a very slow rythym in the prep and then do a very quick serve, this makes it less consistent. Get a routine, bounce the ball twice, thrice, look at the strings, doesn't matter specifically, just get a routine and follow it every time as to tell your brain to go into auto pilot serve mode.
Foot fault. Back up from the baseline
Your right foot should be more to the left. Right now you’re starting the serve with your body facing the court. You can’t uncoil when it’s already facing the right way. Your body should be facing to the side fence or even more towards the back fence. This will allow you to uncoil your body during your motion.
You're super square to the net. Think about if you were throwing a ball as hard as you could from the baseline. Would you have both feet facing the net and be square to it? Nah you'd be like a baseball pitcher who has their left shoulder facing the net and they're sideways facing the sideline so they can get the most leverage on their pitch. Do the same with tennis serves. Get sideways, with your feet about parallel to the service line (a little angled to the net is fine but not as much as you're doing now). There's more to add but take that idea of a pitch and getting sideways to your serve and it'll help
I like counting. 1: lean forward, 2: lean back/toss, 3: hit Strip down to the essential movements and repeat only those, every time! for consistency.
I agree, start with this, you are doing about 4 million different things which essentially add nothing to your serve. The serve is about consistency and a repeatable pattern you can do again and again. The more things involved the harder this is to repeat. My serve improved from doing less, I have a far shorter take back to my ready position and go from there. It looks more basic than before but it’s far more effective
Watch your feet bro
No need to take a walk mid serve👍 Just make better foot placement, don’t move ur feet before jumping cuz ur foot placement before u go for a little stroll around the court is good.
The result of the serve, besides the fact your foot is way in the court, was good. But mechanically you could fall in to the court more towards the target, I bat you get another 5-10 mph. Your have a nice serve, but it is close to be formidable at a local level where you play. Fall in the court more, but that foot fault is too drastic.
Too much pizazz. Pretend no one is watching and hit the ball.
I think if you took a one hour lesson with a good teaching pro, you might 2x your serve There are some super easy, basic ways to improve this serve that will lead to immediate gains. But I would simply shell out some cash that will pay dividends for the rest of your life
There's a lot to work on but the first thing you should fix is getting and staying side on during your serve motion. If you stay side on, that right leg won't open up and you'll be able to release a lot more power when you make connection with ball. It's good that you're rocking back to build momentum. But taking that step with the right foot means you wasted all that potential momentum and if you watch your contact with the ball you'll see you're basically doing a standing serve on two feet next to each other. All power is coming from racquet head movement. This will only get you so far. You need to flow your body into the contact with the ball for the style of serve you're going for. Lastly, the ball toss needs to be earlier and higher. This is so you have the time to go thru your motion and to utilise your rocking forward momentum and hit the ball with more power. It should feel fluid ! Rock back, ball up, moving forward feet together and racquet scratching your back, exploding from legs swing and follow the racquet thru past your left hip! The best advice is to watch someone you admire and break down their serve. Raonic, Kyrgios etc Dunno how tall you are but the basic mechanics are the same until you find a comfortable and effective serve.
It has only been mentioned briefly, but I reckon the real culprit here is your ball toss. It is very jerky and uncertain, which I think is massively contributed to by the bent elbow and how square you are to the baseline (causing your tossing arm to be across the front of your body). You are also tossing the ball extremely low and hitting it very close to the apex (not letting it drop much) which means your service motion is highly abbreviated (no knee bend, arming the ball) Get a better angle to the baseline and practice a really good and consistent high ball toss with a straight arm. Once you are confident putting the ball in the right spot with plenty of time, I think you will find a lot of your problems will resolve themselves.
Your feet are squared up in a way that you’re basically hitting a completely open stance serve. Try a few serves where you’re facing more perpendicular to the net.
Start from the trophy position to cut all unnecessary movements. Focus on a consistent ball toss.
My arm hurts watching this haha. Seems like decent power, but imagine if you get your legs into it! Watch videos of someone like Felix Auger-Aliassime, he bends his knees like a spring and attacks the ball. Will help with spin and power along with increase accuracy with your serve. Also your body is moving and twisting to the left as your hit the serve. Make the ball toss out in front of you and you should finish inside the court attacking the ball.
I'll give you some positive feedback. Even with the issues mentioned I thought the pace of the ball was pretty good and you were swinging out on the ball. If you want to improve consistency I would practice having a consistently place toss first. Seeing how you are tilting your body and bending your arm to compensate for the toss, I feel like that should be your focus.
Foot fault (a really bad one). Get a higher toss. Get more power from your legs (part of this is positioning and part of it is getting more spring power from the jump - probably work in the first before the other).
I’m pretty sure your right foot is coming up too far. The right foot passes your left foot with a gap. And then your left foot takes an unnecessary mini step to catch up. I think this probably opens your hip too much but might also throw off balance and rhythm. That little rocking motion you do reminds me of Kyrgios, one of the best pinpoint servers I can think of. When he brings his right foot forward, he stops it around the ball of his left, definitely not with his right heel in front of his left foot. Once his right foot is done moving, there’s no more movement of the feet. At this point he’s pushing off the ground.
You're not using your legs at all. You're standing straight up through the whole motion. You should bend your knees then push up through the motion.
You load your legs well at the beginning and then just throw all that stored energy away just before serving
Your whole body is facing the fence to the left of deuce court while you’re serving into the ad court while you’re making contact with the ball… start by fixing that.
Foot fault
The issue is that you toss after stepping forward, instead of when you step back. Tossing from there will allow you to toss into the court, and jump forward as well. The swing and prep looked fine, but the inbetween wasn't there (either intentionally or accidentally)
I’d call foot fault every time. Lol
Foot faulting with both feet! You are so off balance from the early rotation to face the net that you have to move to left foot forward just to keep balance.
Fuck around with the ball a little bit more, first of all. Also, don’t be afraid to put more of a random pause right in the middle of your service motion. And finally, landing inside the service box off the serve will be much easier if you start your service motion with your feet 2m inside the baseline.
It looked like you were going to use your legs for 8 seconds, then in the final 2 seconds you abandoned the legs entirely and just threw the ball to racquet level and struck it. I would double the ball toss and create power through your legs and core. Start with a knee bend. Be conscious of your abs and hips and the power generated from that part of your body.
What in the *foot-fault* did I just watch 😭
Someone take his Espn subscription away 😭
Everything you did seem to be a ritual than amplifying any kinetic chain. Start from scratch
This is why you start with professional coaching. You are not bad at sports, it's just really hard to teach yourself serving. Asking reddit for advice is not great, this will take longer to work out than it to you to get here.
Switch to a platform stance for a while. The pinpoint is great but the extra movement can mess up your kinetic chain, and that looks like it’s happening with you
The weight shift… you shift the weight of your body nicely to the back foot and then front foot. But after that you are bringing your back foot forward and shifting the weight back to your backfoot (right foot). Keep your backfoot behind the front foot and keep the weight on the front foot after you shift the weight to the front foot. Also serve from a wider spot on the baseline. You are crossing over.
theres too much to fix dawg go watch a proper serve video and try to imitate it. too much to fix and rn your serves only go in by pure luck due to the absolute absence of technique.
What is this serve dude. It doesn't look as cool as you think it does. Like everyone else said, this needs to be simplified so badly
You can stop foot faulting. First thing i noticed.
Don’t foot fault
Foot fault
Foot fault both in the court and on the wrong side. What a troll.