Top 3 Serve MYTHS - Tennis Lesson for Power and Kick

Welcome to video two in this brand new series. If you haven't seen the first video, you gotta go do that right now. Because in the first video, I identified the three serve personalities. The Dairy Queen, Jekyll and Hyde, and the Musclehead. It's really important that you identify which one you are because then we can apply the serve mastery formula to make sure that your swing isn't stuck like that for life. Remember, if you don't master all three parts of the serve mastery formula, what's gonna happen is your opponent's either gonna beat you or you're gonna wind up beating yourself. Now it's time to dive deeper into each one of the serve mastery personalities to find out those technical flaws that are causing those evil, ugly alter egos. Now it's really important because the serve is so complicated and it's held back by a lot of old cliches that just won't die. So let's get started and go into the Dairy Queen to find out what are those technical flaws that are holding you back so you don't have them anymore. The first myth that we're gonna bust in today's video is that you should serve the way that you throw a ball or specifically throw a baseball, which is a tip that I've heard over and over and over again. And it will lead you, if you follow it, lead you directly towards that Dairy Queen personality, which was a big, huge first serve attempt followed up by a soft serve. And the reason why throwing like a baseball will lead you to that is because a baseball delivery is very direct and lateral. Here I'm gonna show you some super slow motion footage of Drew Storen, who's a professional baseball pitcher. And you'll see that by the time he drops his shoulder back and really loads up his upper body, his chest and his hips are already facing towards his target, which is obviously home plate. And so the result is a super direct, lateral, straight release of the ball. And that's because there's no net for him to have to throw over. He's throwing directly at home plate. So as long as you follow that advice and you try to hit directly at the box, you will never have any shape or spin or curve, which is what leads players to slow down and just tap their second serve in. So the fix on this is to swing up and out to the side. So the next video I'm gonna show you is a super slow motion clip of Tim Smicek, an American professional tennis player. The first delivery, you'll see a flat serve from the side. Notice how his chest is facing up towards the ball as he starts to unwind. That's the other main difference between a serving motion and a baseball motion. And so you'll see him release his arm and his shoulder through the baseline. But then watch this second clip on a kick serve, how he unwinds and releases out to the right and then across the baseline, not through the baseline towards his target. So remember, if you want a really confident second serve, if you don't wanna have to slow down and tap in your second serve, don't serve like a baseball. You wanna serve like a high quality tennis player. And that means accelerating up and out to the side to make lots of spin, lots of curve, and lots of margin so that you can have lots of confidence. Now we're gonna go into the second myth that we're gonna bust, and that is to hit your serve at the peak or at the top of your toss, okay? This is said very often, but it is flat out wrong. Let's take a few examples here of the pros so we can really see that you're going to hit the toss as it's actually coming down and not at the peak and not on the way up as you hear as well, okay? So first let's look at Roger Federer because he has a great serve and it's a great serve to analyze. As you can see, the ball is coming down dramatically by the time he makes contact. So he is definitely not hitting the ball at the peak of the toss. Now, two other examples of the pros that are really close but still do not hit at the peak of their toss is Dago Polov and also Bob Bryant. So if we look at Bob Bryant first, you can see that although it is very close, the ball is actually coming down before he makes contact. The same thing here with Dago Polov, the same thing, it's coming down. It's not, as some people say, he hits the ball on the way up. It is definitely not on the way up. The ball is actually falling. It's already at the peak and coming down. So if you're having a lot of trouble with your consistency and your rhythm, there are two different spectrums of this. One is where you toss really high and you take really long time to be able to go up and hit the ball. The second is where you have a short toss and it's very quick. It's your job to find that variance somewhere in the middle that works for your rhythm and your timing so that you can get that consistent serve that you really need. Now it's time to talk about the muscle head. One of the biggest issues the muscle head has is they don't have the full range of motion which generates clean, fluid power, meaning that you're tight, you're tense, and you're having to muscle every ball to get it over and you're still not getting the results. Now this is caused by two things. First of all, if you've ever heard that saying about scratching your back, avoid it. Avoid it at all costs because by scratching your back, you never get your arm into this loaded position. And what that means, what it looks like is most players tend to start in this position thinking that this is quality to getting the racket up to the contact position. And what happens really, by having your racket here, your elbows shut down a lot and it creates more stress. You actually have to try harder to get your full motion in. And that takes away the smoothness that you can apply to your serve. Now, the key is making sure that instead of scratching your back, you get into a shoulder loaded position which means that you see the difference from the scratching back position to having your arm away from your shoulder and this now loads it preparing for the second part which is learning to pronate. Now if you really look at Roundage when he's serving, you can really see how there's a clear difference that he's not getting in this scratching back position. When his racket goes up, there's good distance away from his shoulder which allows him now to load and release smoothly. He can use his entire body. And by using his entire body, it creates a nice smooth power. Now the second part is pronation. Pronation is just simply the rotation of the arm instead of having this really tense fighting action which is generally caused by the first part we talked about which is not loading. And then a lot of times since we don't load, we can't pronate and we're really tense here. Now going back to Roundage again, you see as he pulls the racket up from this loaded position here, you can see how he pulls on edge and the racket's allowed to go all the way through showing where the racket face is facing the other side. This is pronation. And when you do pronation correctly, it allows you to smoothly move through the ball. Now you have your entire body working towards creating smooth effortless power. And that's the key not to have your ugly alter ego muscle head showing up. Millions of tennis players worldwide subscribe to at least one or two of the myths that we busted today. So what I wanna know is which one was the most helpful or surprising to you. So also in the comments below, let me know if we missed any myths and we will send you a quick reply with your updated version of the Serve Personality Checklist in the new version of this, we're gonna be showing you the technical elements that you need to know to fix your ugly alter ego serve forever. Today's video showed the what, the next video in this series is going to show the how. It's the exact same progression step-by-step that we use with our VIP and remote coaching students to help them get huge serve transformations. So thank you so much for watching and great work with your tennis.