| Subject: Tennis Tips |
Author:
bobo
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Date Posted: 15:00:11 04/23/02 Tue
In reply to:
MikeKnight
's message, ""The" Tennis Tournament" on 00:11:29 04/07/02 Sun
Mike requested more speed on his serve today....so here are some tips. I figured I'd post them, since Sara and Melody can take (or try to take) active use of them as well, in order to make things more competitive at the tourney.
1) A consistent toss. Make sure that you are tossing the ball consistently. If your toss doesn't go to the same place everytime, there is no way you can expect your serve to go where you want it to go everytime. Ideally, your toss will be about a foot right of your right shoulder, and as high as your racquet can stretch.
2) The right grip. Most people will use their forehand grip to serve. While this allows for the "muscle" serve, you are limiting yourself to semi-fast, flat serves which are slower and less accurate than they could be. Instead, use the "continental grip", or as I call it, the samurai grip. Hold your racquet like a samurai would his sword, or a master chef his knife. No, I'm not Japanese. If you don't think you could hit a forehand with this grip, that's OK, you are holding it right then. After you hit your serve, you change your grip to your normal forehand grip.
3) The first part of the swing. As your left hand is tossing the ball, draw your racquet back, until your racquet is parallel to the ground, and about shoulder level. Try to make sure that throughout this phase, your palm faces the ground.
4) Just right before the ball reaches its apex, initiate the second phase of the swing. The racquet should have ended the first part of the serve almost parallel to the ground. Now, slowly tilt your palm up so that your racquet could scratch your back if you tried. The ball should have reached its apex now.
5) The forward swing. Don't muscle this, at least not with your arm muscles. Just like when throwing a ball, most of the power will come from upper body rotation, weight transfer, and the sling action of a loose arm. Starting from the backscratch position:
Remember to keep your eye on the now-descending ball, but imagine that you, the master chef, are now going to chop off the head of the gigantic fish. A BIG fish. So it requires that you put your whole body into it. As you start swinging the knife of doom, let your elbow naturally extend away from the body, so that it hits the ball at an almost full extension.
6) That's all I can tell for now about serving... if you learned anymore, you could be better than me, and that would def not be cool until the speech tourney is over.
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