Stop Muscling Your Serve — Do This Instead

Do you lack power on your serve or tend to muscle that serve and you want to get more juice on the ball? Well, you're missing one thing, flow. I'm gonna show you my favorite drills for working on the kinetic chain and getting flow so you can accelerate like the best pros. Hey, it's Chris Lewitt, top American junior coach and coach to many number one juniors in the United States. Let's get into the flow and power drills right now. Hey, I'm here with my buddy Cleo from, she's been here all summer and we've been killing it on the serve. We've been working on a world-class serve and you're really starting to get it. But a lot of people struggle with their flow and their power. One of my favorite drills is, sometimes I call it like a windmill or acceleration drill. And there's also like a figure eight, but basically figure eight or a windmill looks, now this is a windmill, basically. If you take the racket and you move it around your body like this, you're making kind of a windmill action. And a figure eight would look kind of like this, these different kind of like flow drills. Figure eight looks like this. And these are some of the classic drills for the serve that'll help you build. I don't know how to describe it. Like when you see some people who are just starting out, they are really clunky. Like they go, they look kind of like a robot as they're going through this acceleration phase through here. And so one of the secrets to getting good power on the serve is getting your shoulder range of motion, your scapular range of motion and getting this whole thing nice and smooth and buttery and whippy. Look at this. This is what we want. And most people, including recreational players and kids who are learning, they're more like, you know, they look kind of like that. That's very common. We see Alcaraz with a nice flow into the power position. And then he accelerates through the power loop after that. And Djokovic here is flowing up into the power position. Then he gets a nice start to the acceleration phase from there. Okay. We're just gonna go around and around that windmill. It's not really a leg drill. I mean, you can add a little bit of legs in there, but that's gonna be the next thing we're gonna do. We're gonna try to sneak the legs in there in the next drill. That's gonna be the key to maximizing power. But you've gotta have this flow up top. This is mostly an upper body exercise. Trying to get that thing going and then toss and hit. All right, good luck. It's not easy to get the timing. Yeah, but you gotta do four. Let's do four around the windmill. And then the fifth one, ball. Keep a ball in your hand. One, beautiful. Two, keep moving. Keep it moving. Three, four, and then five. Ready? Nice. One more. See if you can get this flowing. Now, for some people, one variation is you can have a little delay at the top. You can flow through here, slow down, and then speed up. So in other words, the whole thing's not at the same speed. For just pure training, you can just go around and around. But as you get more advanced, let's say, you don't wanna go too fast through here. You'd like to slow down and then speed up. And slow down and then speed up. So there can be like a timing differential here. Know what I'm saying? You can slow down. I think you were kind of doing that intuitively. Right. And a sneak preview or a sneak peek of what we're gonna do next is during that little slow down period, we're gonna add the legs. And the secret is to add the legs at just the right time so that the legs fire as this racket's coming around during that power loop phase. And if you can time it just right, you can maximize the kinetic chain and you can get the maximum velocity on your serve. Yeah, let's do four and then on the fifth one, see if you can rock a great serve. This is a little tricky to get, the timing, if you haven't done a lot of these. I like that little slow down there. But some people do do it like they just blast through it and then it's really hard to sneak the legs in there. Nice, nice. One more. If you guys do this over and over again, day after day, week after week, maybe not every day, don't hurt your shoulder, but you will get a little bit stronger but super coordinated through here and you have a great range of motion in your scapula. The scapula are the shoulder blades. And so when you have that nice range of motion and you're fluid through here and coordinated, you can really start to get the juice on that serve. Okay, one more. Because if you don't have that fluidity there, that coordination, it's always gonna be kind of robotic. It's always gonna be kind of clunky and you're never gonna get the juice. That's great velocity. It doesn't have to go in. That's great velocity. All right, so we gotta get this shoulder joint and the scapular range of motion. It's gotta be real buttery. It's gotta be smooth and coordinated. But then you gotta figure out something for the lower body. How do you get the lower body in there? And if you're doing this too fast, there's just, you can't get, it's very hard to learn. So that's why I don't like to do super low tosses and fast motions with most of my students when they're at the beginning of the journey. But later on, sometimes we do do that. But I prefer a little higher toss that gives you a little time as you're coming around the bend here. And then we have to get the legs down and up. And the legs wanna start firing up right as the racket's entering down. So this is very tricky timing. But if you can do that, it's like magic. One way to work on that is just to put your racket up. So we'll start in half motion. We'll go half. We'll go halfsies. And then what Cleo's gonna do is load the legs, toss it up, and then just work on sequencing the legs and then the loop, the power loop, the drop. So you just have to feel that the toss is up and that you start to do this with your legs. See this? You start to do this at the same time this goes. And if you can get that, and with this power loop, it's super magic. Yeah, start half. But the thing is, you're gonna toss. Get down into your load without moving this. Don't move that. Toss it up. Boom, you get down to there. And then start thinking all of that stuff you learned with the power loop, with the windmill and stuff. Get that going. Try to hit it. Right, so this is the second ultra-critical drill for developing max power and then the timing of the kinetic chain is we have the flow. We're kind of established flow. And then we gotta figure out how we can get the legs to go during that flow at the right moment. And do the last couple here. And then let's try to put it together and do the whole motion and see if we can get the legs firing on time. So you're holding there, half motion. You toss and what most people do is as soon as they toss, they try to do that. They try to activate that. And I'm saying toss and actually just think legs and then let the racket chase the legs. Let the racket drop, chase the legs. Chase the legs going up. As the legs are going up, racket goes down. Don't let the racket go down before the legs start going up. That's what most people do. Excellent, wow. Great serve and that was right in the corner. Beautiful serve. What most people do, most people, they toss, racket comes down right away. Or they toss and they bring this down together. The racket comes down with the legs coming down. So you wanna somehow get the racket in here, put the racket here. As you bring the racket up, keep it here. And then you wanna have the opposite effect. Legs going up, boom. Nice, last one. Super, good job, all right. I hope you got a lot of value from this video and that you're on your way to getting more flow and power on your serve. 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