How To Hit A SLICE Serve With PRONATION In 8 Steps

Hello guys, Vincent Simone here, semi-professional tennis player and professional tennis coach, and today I'm going to show you how to hit a slice serve with pronation and take your opponent off the court. Let's get right into it. So first of all, we're going to get our feet sideways on a skateboard. Get up on your toes and don't let your heels touch the ground. You want to be nice and loose and relaxed and let your shoulders hang over your front foot. We're going to have to use our body a lot more than you think on this because slicing the ball does not produce a lot of power, so we're going to make up for it by doing the next few things that I'm going to show you. So firstly, we're going to get into our letter y position. A lot of people, they don't know how to toss the ball properly. They turn, then toss, then raise the arm. They have kind of a three-part setup, but we want to get into a one-two rhythm. What you have to do is load your legs and it's what we call the coil, and we turn our whole body, our shoulders, and we toss the ball at the exact same time. Let me show you an example. We're going to do everything together. As you can see, I've set my body in a letter y position, loaded the legs, turned the hips, and tossed the ball at the same time. The toss for this serve goes in the same spot that I would recommend you hit any serve. Take the ball, put it straight out in front of you, and make a 45 degree angle. Pull the ball in your fingertips, toss straight up and down, about two feet above your head. This is going to be your universal toss for every single serve. Now, when we're in the letter y position, a few things are going to need to happen. Firstly, we're going to need to, from here, get our shoulders in a position which I call shoulder over shoulder, meaning the front shoulder is higher than the back shoulder. In order to generate racket head speed, we're going to have to flip the shoulders and pull ourselves up towards the ball. What you want to do is get your shoulder over your shoulder and the tip of your racket should be pointing at the ball. Now, from here, we implement the shoulder flip and what I call the racket drop. As this happens, we're not forcing the racket behind our head. I call it combing the hair and then scratching the back, but what you're actually doing is you're starting to go up with your legs and the racket just kind of falls loose behind you because we're going to create lag on the serve. So you've got it here and then the racket's going to free fall behind us as we go up with our legs and start throwing our elbow and our shoulder up to the contact point. Right now, a lot of people make the mistake of opening up too early, but you want to stay with the ball and use your body to propel your momentum upwards to really get through it. If you go like this, you're going to end up dragging your upper body down into the court and you're going to miss in the net. So stay sideways, especially on the slice serve. So we get the racket drop and the shoulder flip. We go up with the legs, staying sideways, contact point. Now, here's where it's going to be a little bit different from a traditional serve because we need to get slice. So firstly, I'm going to show you the grip that you should be using for this shot. So for a right-handed player, you're going to start with the knuckle of your index finger, which is your indicator on the continental grip, or what I call bevel one. And you're just going to twist it over a little bit to the left until it's on the crease here between the next bevel. I just call it bevel two. So you want to have your index finger spread out like this and you want the knuckle, which is your indicator, on the crease right here. So now that you've got the right grip, you're going to contact the ball on an angle like this. And if you're in the right grip, your racket's going to automatically have this position. You won't have to force your hand anywhere. And what you want to do is feel like you swing and hit half of the ball, but it's got to be the outside of the ball. So for a right-handed player, you're going to hit this side of the ball, the right, and you need to slice through it. If you hit too much of the ball, it's going to end up being a pop sound and it's probably going to go in the net. So what you want to do is be super loose and relaxed, but feel like you can accelerate and boom, boom. Just feel like you hit half of the ball. And with this grip, it should be pretty easy. And once you feel the ball leave your racket, you need to pronate to keep your momentum going because you've generated a bunch of racket head speed. But if we stop the swing and then don't really know how to turn it over to get it to finish, getting from point A to B as quickly as possible, it's going to make for a really weak shot. So we want to keep our momentum going by pronating. And what I call this step is checking the time. And it's really that simple. So at contact point, you skim past the ball with speed. Don't slow down the racket on this shot. And you're going to twist out and check the time on your watch. I'll show you again. You hit half the ball, twist out, and check the time on your watch. It can be an imaginary Rolex, a G-Shock, it doesn't really matter. And once you've checked the time, you've essentially created pronation. And it's going to allow you to easily just let the racket fall down into a natural position. And you can finish like this in a letter X. So you can just, boom, just let it, you know, kind of fall to the side. Now, another thing that needs to happen when you hit this shot, we've got to engage the legs and the lower body a lot. What you got to do is throw yourself up, boom, and land on your left foot for a right-handed player. And you actually need to do this on every type of serve, because it's really the only way to get your body through the shot. And you'll find maybe that you'll get a 25% increase in power if you can simply load the legs and everything together like I showed you, and boom, get into the court with your left foot. Because that tells you that you've essentially gotten your body through the shot, and you're not just aimlessly using your shoulder and, you know, creating a stroke that's gonna give you injury down the road. So I basically covered everything you need to know about the slice serve. I hope you enjoyed this video, I hope you found it helpful, and please like and subscribe for more educational tennis videos. Thanks. 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