Start Using Rotation Instead...(drills included)

Why does it feel like the more you start to pull your racket on your serve, it actually doesn't go as fast? You feel tired, super exhausted, but you see players professionally and even college, they hit the serve and boom, the ball just explodes off the strings. The difference is, they know how to use the racket the right way so they're not pulling and the racket head is actually creating a lot of acceleration through it. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. How to get out of the classic pull the racket around to start creating more racket at speed with your racket. Now here's the problem. Most players think that the serve, the pulling action, that I'm pulling the racket down when actually that's what creates the weakness because if you think about it, when I pull the racket down, my racket can only go as fast as my hand and this limits how much power you can get. And this is where so many players are. They pull the racket down to this position not understanding that that's the very thing that's causing them not to have a big serve. We have to get to the source of things. What things make the racket actually create more racket at speed without us pulling our arm? The core idea is this. That the serve isn't a pull but it's actually a rotation. You're probably thinking like, what do you mean by rotation? Rotation between my forearm and my shoulder. Just like this. Just as if I was taking my arm just like this, this is a rotation versus a pull. And so, when we understand that our racket needs to rotate above our head, this now creates a different concept. Look at the difference between my hand moving this way and how fast the racket goes compared to now the racket orbiting my hand. Now my racket moves much faster in a much smaller space. And this is a key idea to start creating more power on your serve because you're focusing on rotating instead of focusing on pulling. Now yes, can you create a lot of serve power pulling? You can but you're still capped compared to having your racket rotate using your forearm and your shoulder. Now that you understand this, let's go through some simple drills you can start using today to really understand how you can start generating maximum pace on your serve. The very first thing is I like to talk about range. What I mean by range is if I hold my racket with a continental grip just here, I can turn my forearm and turn my racket probably about here. Now I can take my shoulder and go a little deeper but we're going to call this, for this drill, the range. Here and then I can take my forearm and my shoulder and turn it here. Now honestly, with my shoulder, I can turn it even more. But right around here is the range we want to be considering here. I want you to start feeling how this feels when you're using your shoulder to initiate the start and then your forearm's going to take it over here. There's something called long axis rotation which is a combination of your shoulder rotating and your forearm rotation that we're working on right now. Do this very first exercise. Have the racket here. We're going to initiate and if you want to, grab your arm by your triceps and pull it over. That's pulling my shoulder which my elbows are coming up. Then from here, there's kind of not that much more you can rotate as my shoulder does this which we don't want. Then we're going to take our forearm. So that combination of turning it over. Practice this. Get a lot of repetitions in just like this. Then what we want to do is start doing some exercise, start building this muscle. A great little kind of popping exercise is holding the racket just like this, toss the ball and go. And so all I'm doing here is working on my racket, feeling the ball and popping it down. And so right actually now, we're making contact here. Doesn't matter. Really just trying to work this action here. Just get used to using these muscles. Now the biggest mistake players start to use is they start moving their arm again. They start moving their arm to do this. So they're going this way instead of just isolating this and going this way. You can see also, if I go even faster, how this can create a lot of pop and we want to do that above our head. The second drill we want to do is just simply combine what we just worked on. Remember the range we just talked about? Having the butt of the racket here and flipping it over, boom. You can even go further than that. Now we want to find a fence or some wall or something and get up against. Now we're going to pretend like we're serving this way and all I want you to do is hold your arm up just like this. Now I'm going to get pretty close to the fence here and I'm going to rest the racket where the butt of the racket is looking this way. Now just like we did that before, that same popping drill with the ball, we're going to do this against the fence and start practicing this. Again, the mistakes we want to make sure we're not making for right now is going this way. See how my arm's moving versus isolating this and really focusing on my shoulder rotating and my forearm. You can start developing a lot of speed here. That's the second drill you want to start doing. This starts to now promote where your arm is above your head. From here, we want to bend our arm a little bit so we can start working on getting our racket up to the ball. What this means is from here, all I'm going to do is basically take my racket and point it where the ball would be. We want the ball slightly above my head right here so my butt of the racket, which you can see from here, is pointing up there. Now we're going to extend and then boom. We're working on you can rest your elbow right here. I'm going to extend, which puts me back in that position here. Now we're segmenting this, so extend here, but then we're going to combine it so it goes here. It feels more like a whip because now I have this momentum or this momentum of my racket going up from the extension and I can use that to help this rotate a little bit more. Now, key thing that starts to happen. Players start to want to do this action a little too much. The more we have a little bit of bend, that's where we can really leverage the racket. As my racket goes straight, it gets a little harder to leverage. Even if I'm doing this, you'll see that the racket's now a little bit higher, but I still have that angle that allows me to get that leverage. I'm going to do the exact same thing, but you notice how my racket's hitting higher where it was here. Now it's going above that because we have a little momentum that we're sending up. This is the second drill that's super, super important to getting this done. All we did now is if we step away from the fence, we're doing this action. Let's talk about contact first. Contact. We talked about the range, but we want to make contact for right now roughly somewhere in the middle and then this will be the end. Earlier, we made contact here just to work on using the muscles. If I'm standing here, and you can see it from this angle, and I make contact here, where's the ball going to go? It's going to go that way. We're going to make contact here and then have it continue to go through the court. Now we're going to go into the court and I'll show you exactly how you can do this progression work your way all the way back to the baseline. This is going to be our next progression. We're going to pretty much do the exact same thing where I have my elbow bent and the butt of the racket looking up at my target, which is the ball. All I'm going to do is practice the same action in the air. What I want to do is make sure when I toss the ball, I'm making contact so the contact looks where I want the ball to go. I'm going to be on the deuce side here and we want the ball to basically go to the deuce box. When I go up, I'm going to hit it and stop. I'm extending and stopping here. It's not exactly what I want, but I want to make sure that you can understand where the racket base needs to be. This is super important if you want to be able to place this. Now what we want to do now, if I bend my arm back a little bit more, as I start pulling my racket up, it's going to go on edge, being here on the range scale. So if I pull it on edge, I'm going to use my rotation to line and time it. So now the racket's looking where I want the ball to go and I'm going to continue through. That's what's going to give it the power. Now we're not really going for a lot of power here. If you want to, actually you can grip up too since we want to have a little bit more control. So I'll start here and I'm going to go here. Now really important this, if you're having trouble with this, really understand what's going on with the racket face. When I take the racket face up on edge, look how the strings are vertical. You can see it from here. It's vertical. And basically as I rotate, it stays vertical through the shot. Sometimes it might open up if you're hitting really soft or if you're coming up on the ball, it might close a little bit, but we're going to focus on it being vertical, meaning that basically if I did the same motion right here, if the racket face is vertical, the ball's going to go straight. It's not going to go really up. So if I start here again, I'm keeping the racket face vertical. And notice we're doing that same action, but now we're having to time it where we make contact here and keep going through. Now the big key is we don't go back into pulling. Most players when they go here, this is what they start trying to do. Look how this came all the way down here. Through contact, we want to keep the space between my forearm and my chest as wide as possible. It can move forward, but we don't want to start collapsing it in where it gets really close. And so we want this action. I recommend when you're starting to do this in the beginning, hold the racket up. I'm not trying to hit the ball hard. I'm just trying to get the motion. Hold the racket up. After you get really good at this, every time you make a serve, scoot back until you scoot all the way back to the baseline. Once we're back at the baseline, continue just this, not trying to really hit it tooth per heart. All I'm going to do is making sure I can get the placement to go where I want. A couple great checkpoints is that notice how my strings are still close to being vertical. Now that you're back here, I want to make one thing really clear. You can create quite a bit of place just turning your shoulder up, but we don't want to overwork it. And so what we want to start incorporating is our hips and our torso to send the energy up. And even our legs can be used to generate more power. I'm not going to talk about that in this video. And if you want to go learn more about that, check out the video at the end of this video that'll help you. But from here, now that we have this understanding of how we can start really generating a lot of pace, you might want to be thinking, well, how do I get my motion in effect? There's so many different motions. The key is this. Once we get the racket here, we're going to put our racket in this position where the butt of the racket is going to look up. And guess what? Boom. So you see players here, they'll start here and at some point the butt of the racket will look up. Boom. That allows them to do it. Or they'll take the racket up here. At some point, the butt of the racket is going to look up. Boom. If you just think about how can I get the butt of the racket looking up, you can take that and do the same motion here. But this is the core thing. This now accelerates the racket. And then when you start to learn how to use your legs to accelerate, it takes your serve to a whole nother level. So if you want to learn how to start using your legs because you got this part, make sure you go watch this video because it'll really help you understand how you can use your legs to accelerate this even more without stressing out your shoulder too much. Finish. How do you finish? You watch the pros and they go up. They make contact here. Boom. And then the arm starts coming down after contact. And what they're doing, because they're staying sideways to do this, they're bringing the racket around into this position. This is what the illusion or the myth we think we see. So it's really important that we understand it because now when you understand it, the serve does this action first and then it comes down compared to bringing and pulling the racket down just like this, noticing the difference in power. Now there's so much more to the serve, but this is one of the core elements that if you understand that and start adding your legs, you'll see a dramatic increase of power on your serve.