Fixing My Serve (Plus practice tips) #tennis

hey if you watch my last video you'll have seen that I tried to fix my backand one oh good start well today I'm going to take you on court for a 30 minute serve practice where I try to fix my serve problems you'll get to see how I like to structure a productive serve practice and as a bonus you'll see some of my technical flaws and how I try to fix them let's go so first of all like in any practice session especially when serving it's vital that you warm up and that you warm up the muscles that you're going to be using and for the serve we're actually using a lot of muscles that we don't really use in day-to-day life specifically your rotator cuff I like to use a resistance band you can see this is quite a thin one quite lightweight and I'm just going to go through just a few warm-up exercises that are going to get my shoulder ready for a good serve practice now as I said this serve practice is going to be about 30 minutes long um I actually don't suggest doing any more than that because anytime you go past the 30 minute mark you start to lose form um and you start to tire so um I would recommend anything up to 30 minutes is good if you saw my last video on the backand you'll have noticed that although I was trying to make a technical change when looking back at the footage afterwards I noticed that quite often I was never actually making the change intended so um today I'm going to be using video to give me live feedback rather than waiting until the end of filming to take a look as um as you'll know it's really really important to get instant feedback so that's why a coach can be handy or the camera can be your best friend so I'm just going through a few different moves that are going to help to prepare me for my serve finally I like to do Shadow swings using two rackets so something that I started doing as a junior um and yeah I just like to feel that extra weight in my hand because when I take the second racket away it makes my surve feel nice and flowing and smooth and much easier to swing fast okay so let's hit some balls now as I mentioned I have a couple of technical flaws within my serve and I'm actually not going to talk about those until I finish my warmup so if you can spot a technical floor before the end of my warm War up drop it in the comments I'm sure you're going to spot plenty so when it comes to warming up my serve there's two different ways that I like to do this and they're both Progressive so I'm going to quickly show you through both of them so first I like to do what we call step back serves which is where I start on the service line I hit a couple of serves from here just to get my timing and then after every couple I take a step or two back before continuing here I'm going to do this until I get all the way back to the Baseline fine but the idea is just to kind of get my timing and get my flow going you'll notice that I'm not using my legs too much yet I'm just focusing on timing my ball toss and getting my throwing action going with my hitting arm it's pretty windy today you can probably hear it but um just working my way back to the Baseline and so now I'm back at the Baseline I'm going to start to use my legs a little bit more to get up to the ball another variation of stepback serves is 1 to 10 serves where you start straight from the Baseline and your aim is to hit your serve at a 1 out of 10 speed so a very slow 10% you'll do that for two or three serves again just really focusing on your timing and then after a couple you'll go to 2 out of 10 20% and then a three out of 10 and a four and a five and a six and so on clearly when you get to five and six you'll start to use your legs and your coil a little bit more so you'll start to get your body involved so that's a five let's go for a six now after a few you'll go to a seven eight now I'm going through these a little bit quicker take your time on them because by the time you get to 8 N9 and 10 you want to be timing the ball really really well nine which for me would probably be a a big first serve very rarely do I go for a 10 as I know that when I'm hitting at my maximum speed I lose control so nine here try nine again and then we'll go for a 10 and we'll do a few of these so this is at full speed got some ladies as targets over there nearly got them and again good so feeling fully warm now use one of those two variations whether you want to do step back serves or one to 10 serves I actually think I prefer 1 to 10 serves as by making those small adjustments incrementally on your serve can give you a really good feel for your timing but yeah to put things into context my serve is actually one of my weapons it's for my height quite a big shot I serve between 180 and 190 km per hour um on average on my first serve so I'm actually able to use my serve as a weapon already which is probably why I haven't made any technical adjustments to my serve since starting coaching as I'm not competing that much anymore but for the purpose of this video I'm going to point out the main technical flaw that if I was competing I would probably try to change and then I'm going to show you how I would go about making that change in this session what you may or may not have noticed within my serve is that when I get into my loading phase here my back foot actually turns to point backwards which means that as I drop down into my knee bend my knee is pointing this way now the problem with this is I want to drive all of my body weight upwards and forwards into the court and if my knee is pointing this way it's quite hard to do so I think the reason why this happens is I get quite a big coil in my loading phase here you'll see that my chest actually points towards you which for me actually helps me to get a lot of power on my serve as having that big turn here allows me to really rotate up and into the ball however if I'm able to keep my back foot more sideways on so that my knees are bending in this direction I can still get that coiling here but now my hips and my shoulders are at a slightly different angle we call that angular separation which creates that torque that we want and that elastic energy to make most of that coiling and so what I'm going to do on my next few serves I'm going to move you over to the side so you can have a better view of my current serve and then I'm going to talk you through some progressions and how I'm going to fix it so what I'm going to do first of all is I've actually got another tripod out here so that I can film my serve and get instant feedback for myself as when I made my video on the backand of fixing my backand it wasn't until after I filmed in the edit that I saw that actually my strings were still open and so by filming on this camera here I can give myself some instant feedback so um yeah I'm going to hit three serves without thinking about technique so these will be kind of my current serves I'm going to take a look at the footage here you can obviously see what's going on behind me as well and then we're going to talk about how I'm going to go about fixing it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay one more okay so let's take a look so that's the position I'm talking about so here you can see my back foot is pointing backwards and that back knit is in some funky position let's see if it happens on the second one even more so there so even if you don't know much about the serve you can tell that's pretty funky but as you can see I get a pretty good upper body coiling my chest is almost pointing The Back Fence um one another little problem i' I felt in the past is that hitting elbow gets a little bit low but what it does do is it aids that shoulder tilt which allows me to get decent power pretty good extension up to the ball but yeah let's see this last one yeah funky back leg so let's talk about how I'm going to fix it so as you saw I actually have a small slide up with my back leg and so to try to get this back knee more in this direction I'm going to actually start with my feet slightly more narrow and the reason for this is I feel that if I can keep my feet static it will give me a bit more control over where that back knee bends and where that back toe is pointing when I'm all the way back here I feel that that drag actually encourages that back knee to bend out so let's start a bit more narrow and I'm going to go slightly slower with my swing to really focus on this back knee position okay to me that felt good I'm going to film myself again in a minute so I can give myself some instant feedback one more so slightly more narrow base I want my knees driving in the same direction so that I can spring up and into the court okay let's film it it does feel slightly odd to be honest but equally it doesn't feel like my serve is going any slower than it was before so if I'm able to hit my serve as big with an instant change in technique then over time who knows it could get even bigger okay I'm going to film these three so exactly the same thing another three serves with that narrow setup here we go bummer the UK wind you guys don't normally see the the pain of uh filming in the UK but we're doing this live let's try again okay take two so narrow base we want the knees pointing in the same direction here here we go okay that one felt funky that was good that one felt good one more okay so just like before the serve didn't feel any slower than my normal one but let's see if I was actually doing it this time so as you can see my knees are looking better there I'm still getting that upper body coiling which is what I I want but my knees are definitely in a much much better position boom so safe to say that when I was consciously thinking about it and starting with my feet more narrow it's a definite Improvement and so if you get to this point with your serve if you're working on something Technical and you feel like you can do it whilst you're thinking about it then you've got to keep going with repetitions now I would actually do this for another 10 15 minutes straight trying to maybe trying to put the camera on every 5 minutes or so so that you can get some instant feedback and to make sure that you're not getting into bad habits but once you feel like you're doing this consistently it's time to then add an external focus and that's what we're going to do next so when I talk about an external Focus I'm talking about something else to think about outside of the technique that you're working on and so in this instance we're going to add a Target at the other end now as soon as there's an external focus it becomes more difficult to focus on the technique that you're working on which is why you need to try to include an external Focus as soon as you can as when you're playing in a tennis match there are tons of external factors to take into account and so we want to be able to perform that technique in those situations now if you're not working on something technical within your serve I would suggest after you've warmed up fully and done the 1 to 10 serves you get straight into a drill like this as you want to make your serving practice as realistic as possible and having a Target at the other end is great this target is even better as if I hit it it's going to bounce back to me so that I can practice my next ball now if you don't have one of these rebound targets it's really good if you can get a hitting partner to hit with you as having a human being down at the other end adds another external Factor but yeah what I'm going to try and do now is I'm going to hit some more serves still really prioritizing my knee position making sure that I start with that slightly more narrow stance and I'm going to try and hit the target down at the other end and if it comes back to me I'm going to play the next ball into the Open Court let's go so narrow [Music] feet okay a pretty good start we go again not going to lie the serve actually feels slightly bigger than it did when I had my funky knee oh that's too good ah made it focusing so much on my knees there that I was a bit lazy afterwards I was admiring the serve I think got to be ready to pounce return's coming back pretty quick got to be ready the net cord did me dirty there let that ball drop too low we go again yeah as I mentioned earlier if you can get a camera to the side of the court and just check in on your serve every now and again it's really going to help you to make sure that you're getting that technique right [Music] I can actually feel that my knee is in a good position as it feels a little bit weird as I said in the last video if it feels normal straight away it's probably cuz you're not changing [Music] anything that's [Music] good you can see how much more realistic this is by adding the rebound Target in can get into bad habits if you're practicing without the ball coming back as earlier when I was really focusing on this I was landing and stopping and we know you can't do that in a tennis match so this is far more realistic okay we'll do two more ah got to remind myself about that narrow base I nearly went back into the the wide stance which I think led to this and I don't feel like I'm losing anything from making my base more narrow if anything I think I'm more able to get up to the ball than I was when I was a bit wider okay that felt pretty good as I said I would definitely encourage you to get the camera out and maybe every 20 serves or so just check in on a couple to make sure you're still achieving what you want to achieve as it's very very easy to let it slip if you're just relying on your feel as what we feel and what we're actually doing are often two very very different things and as I say I'll repeat it again if you're trying to change something technical within your game and you have a go at it and it feels normal and good straight away it probably means you're actually not making that change it should feel a bit odd it should feel weird as you're changing a habit and so for me being on the tennis court every day of the week I'm quite in tune with how things feel and what things are changing and for me there it felt like I was definitely more narrow my knees were bending in the direction I wanted them to bend although it felt weird I actually got some pretty good results from it so there's no reason why I should go back to my old technique but I know that I will if I don't think about it because I've done so many of those serves over so many years so in that session after a good physical warmup and going through those Progressive serves either step back serves or 1 to 10 serves I then got into hitting lots of repetitions trying to work through that adjusted technique if you're not trying to change something technical on your serve and you just want a good serve practice you can skip that bit and add the external Focus straight away if you don't have a rebound Target just a normal Target is good but if you've got a hitting partner at the other end that's definitely going to help you the next step which I can't do right now as I'm on here on my own is to put it into practice in a competitive situation which again adds another layer to that external Focus because now you want to win and as soon as you focus on winning everything else goes out of the window so it's really really important that you focus on the process and trying to do the thing that you want to achieve rather than focusing on the win and if you're missing serves as a result of changing your Technique remember these are good mistakes because in the long run they're going to make your serves better and so what you need to try to weigh up is what is more important to you right now is it winning the match or improving your Technique and if it's winning the match that's fine you can forget the technique and try everything you can to win but if you really want to improve your game then it's important that you get tons of practice matches in so that you can focus on the thing that you're trying to achieve one thing I will say is when it comes to technical changes please take advice from your coach as the serve technique is so complicated and is very personal to you although my technical change looked pretty simple it's because I've been aware about it for years and I've toyed around with making this technical adjustment in the past before it's also important to understand that I'm actually not going to fix it within this 30 minute session it's going to take me tons more time to get this to become automatic so if you really want to make a technical adjustment within your serve be patient it's going to take time so I hope you found that video useful thanks as always for watching all the way to the end if you enjoyed it hit that thumbs up button and if you haven't done so yet I'd love it if you consider subscribing so that you can see my future videos thanks again I look forward to seeing you in the next one take care