How The Tossing Arm Gives You More Serve Power | Tennis Technique

To get more power on your serve, there are three things your tossing arm must do. Do you know what they are? Well, in this video, you're about to find out. Now, before we get started, this video is courtesy of NewYCPhoto on YouTube. Three things your tossing arm must do. The first is you want your tossing arm to stay up until you get into the trophy position. See, a lot of times players bring the tossing arm down too soon. But what is the definition of too soon? Because what I see a lot right now in rec tennis is players are keeping their tossing arm up for too long. And you think I'm crazy, but wouldn't it be possible that the tossing arm stays up too long? Of course. And that's what I'm seeing because everyone's worried about dropping it too early. You want the tossing arm to stay up until the racket begins to drop. Watch how this player from Stanford, Samir, drops his tossing arm with the racket. Go out and film yourself. Make sure that your tossing arm stays up until the racket begins to drop and then it drops with the racket. Now, the second thing that I want you to pay attention to with your serve is I want you to pay attention to his palm. Right now his palm is facing back toward the back fence. But watch his arm rotate. Watch how his hand turns right there and now it's like he's showing his palm to the other side of the court and he does that for a forceful drop. See, when you drop your tossing arm, you don't want it to go down passively. You want it to go down actively. What you're trying to do is get this shoulder over shoulder movement where here for a right-hander, his left shoulder is higher and then as he goes to contact the ball, his right shoulder is higher. And the faster you can make that move, the faster you're going to serve. Well, what can you do with your tossing arm in order to facilitate a really quick shoulder over shoulder movement? Rotate your palm so that before it ever drops, you show your palm to the other side of the court and then you actually want to push down with your palm. You push down with your palm which helps propel your body up and it also helps the shoulder over shoulder. I see a lot of rack players who send me videos of their serve and by the way, if you want me to analyze your serve, send me an email ryan at twominutennis.net and I'll give you the details. I see a lot of players who I analyze on a daily basis all around the world and their arm drops passively. It just collapses as it falls. That's not what you want. You want to rotate the palm, turn the palm to the opponent, then push down and you'll make that move, that pushing down as the racket is going down. You'll also notice by the way, this is a great example of the ball, I'm sorry, I should say the body and racket go in opposite directions. So watch how his racket's going up as the body's going down. So his racket's about to go up as his body is about to go down. Watch. Now his racket's up and the body's down. Now watch. Now the body goes up and the racket's down. See on the serve, the arm and the racket or the body and the racket should go in opposite directions. Body and racket go in opposite directions. Here's the last thing that you've got to make sure of when you are hitting big time serves with huge power. I want you to notice at contact, we can see his tossing hand visible on his hitting side. Many of you are throwing this tossing arm behind you like you see with Nick Kyrgios or even Ash Barty a couple years back. You see that tossing arm go way back. That's not going to help you hit your biggest serves. It'll look flashy and it'll look cool, right? And people will be like, man, your serve is so cool. But it doesn't actually help you hit faster serves. You don't want to be rotating as you're serving because your racket just won't be able to go its fastest. What we want to do is have a very still body. You want to stop your body rotation or slow the body rotation down in order to accelerate your racket. And an easy way to do that is after you drop your tossing arm, I should say push down with the palm of your tossing arm out in front of you, then pull that arm back in against your body. His arm right now, let me draw this. His arm is like this and he has his tossing hand as if he's waving to us, you know, with the camera, right? He's waving to us, viewing him from the back view. You've got to make sure you just film yourself, go out and film yourself at contact. Make sure that your tossing hand is visible on the hitting side of your body. And I would actually recommend that you just keep it here and just allow your hitting arm to come down. And it's actually called a power X because your arms cross. I'll tell you, one of the best examples of this is actually Ralph Nadal. Here's Nadal at Indian Wells serving against Alcaraz. And yes, this is Nadal. I just reversed the video to make him right-handed so that it correlated with Samir at Stanford. But look where the tossing hand is visible on the hitting side of the body. And then what I really like about Nadal is watch how he crosses his arms. And this is called a power X, Vic Braden power X, where you actually draw an X in front of your body. It's all about making sure that your body is still as you're hitting the ball so you can really snap the forearm and accelerate the racket. Want to get analyzed? Send me an email, ryan at twominutennis.net. Could be your technique, your footwork, your match play strategy, anything. Work on the three things your tossing arm should do when serving, and there's no doubt you're going to gain confidence, win more matches, and play much better tennis. This is Ryan Reidy from twominutennis.net. You got this.