發球進階課程_摘自FYB

henrylin424

The Various Serve Stance
: d( ?7 f7 D3 W- p) D0 c$ OIn the serve fundamentals section of the website we suggested using the party stance. There are, however, several other stances you can use when serving.
6 o6 d* R" ?4 lIn the serve fundamentals section of FuzzyYellowBalls, we suggested you use the party stance when you were first learning the serve because it’s a very simple stance and lets you execute all of the fundamentals of the serve. Not only is it simple, but it is also effective. Many pros, including Roger Federer, use the party stance. To quickly review, the party stance is where your feet are about shoulder width apart, and your front foot is angled into the court at about a 45 degree angle. Your back foot is located about a foot behind your front foot and is angled parallel with the baseline.
8 K/ A) y9 D5 ], H0 t5 z* ]The party stance is part of a larger group of stances called platform stances.” A platform stance is where you have your feet about shoulder width apart, and the angles of your feet are variable. During the service motion, your feet stay the same width apart. They do not “move” until you jump up off the ground.
A second type of stance is called the pinpoint stance. Pinpoint stances are where your feet are only a few inches apart or are basically almost touching. The pinpoint stance has been popularized lately by guys like Andy Roddick and Gael Monfils. There are some variations to the pinpoint stance. The main pinpoint variation, called a hybrid pinpoint, involves starting in a platform stance with your feet wider apart, and then on the way to your trophy pose during your motion your back foot comes up next to your front foot into a pinpoint stance.
( F; @) c: H9 X, b5 g+ bThere are several advantages and disadvantages that coaches typically associate with these various stances. With the party stance, which again is a platform stance, the weight transfer forward during your motion is supposed to be pretty easy. The wider your feet are apart, the easier it is to get all of your weight onto your back foot, and then move it all to your front foot as you hit your racket drop position. With a pinpoint stance, where your feet are closer together, now it’s easier to explode up and into the tennis ball. You’ll get a little bit higher, and thus you’ll get a little bit more power because your feet are closer together and that makes it easier to use both legs to push off at the same time. With the hybrid pinpoint stance, again where you start in a party stance but achieve the trophy pose in a pinpoint stance, some coaches think you can get the best of both worlds. The difficulty with this stance is that there are more moving parts, it is harder to time, and it is more difficult to control your toss and balance throughout the motion. With all this said, in my opinion the so-called advantages and disadvantages of these stances are more in a coach’s mind than they are actually in reality. I’ve never seen any study done which proved that one stance was better than another, and the most important thing is that you choose a stance that you are comfortable with and that lets you execute all of the fundamental mechanics correctly.
The final point we want to make about stances is that you will need to tweak your stance slightly depending on whether you are serving to the ad court or to the deuce court. You will still use the same stance, but the angle at which you position your entire body will need to change. If you are in the party stance and serving to the deuce court, your feet will be angled a certain way. If you then take that exact same body position and angle and try to serve to the ad court, your ball will likely go wildly out. You need to alter your body position slightly so that you are facing the proper direction to serve to each side of the court. Lets take a look at some pros’ stances starting at 3:50 in the video above. First up is Tim Henman, and just like we had said in the fundamentals section, Tim uses the party stance. He’s got his feet maybe shoulder width apart or slightly wider, and one of the reasons he might use this stance is because Henman serves-and-volleys frequently. Because this stance makes transferring his weight into the court (and not up) easier, it allows him to get his weight moving towards the net before he even strikes the tennis ball. We can compare Henman’s serve stance with Andy Roddick’s (at 4:17), and we can see that Roddick is using a pinpoint stance. His feet are only a few inches apart. Roddick obviously has a hugely powerful serve, and he really gets up into the air behind his serve. The pinpoint stance is helping him get higher off the ground and generate that extra power because he can jump up off of both legs instead of just one (or one-and-a-half [back toe]). Let’s finally look at John Isner’s serve, which is also a monster. John uses that hybrid pinpoint stance where he starts in a party stance but gets to a pinpoint stance in his trophy pose. In the first picture of John at 3:35, he’s in his party stance, but at 4:41 when he gets to his trophy pose he’s now clearly in a pinpoint stance with his feet practically touching. This allows John Isner to transfer his weight forward but at the same time jump very high off the ground and use that height to bomb his serve down at his opponents. Let’s finally go back to Tim Henman and split screen his stance on the deuce court and the ad court at 5:00 in the video above. If we draw a line through his back foot, we can see that it is basically parallel to the baseline when he serves to deuce and it is angled further back when he is serving to the ad court. So what he has done is to change his body position so that he can serve effectively in a different direction.
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8 ?. ?; \. F$ \$ h+ p' F8 VHow the Arm Moves from the Racket Drop to Contact
This video looks, in detail, at what exactly is going on as a high-level player swings from the racket drop up to his contact point during the serve.
( e1 q) O  ]7 l6 p/ CIn this video we’re going to talk more about how the hitting arm moves from the racket drop position up to your contact point on the tennis serve. Behind me in the video I’m shadowing the racket drop position, and what happens first is that my arm swings up towards the tennis ball. I’m swinging up on edge, not with the strings already open to the ball. This is key. I’m also not pronating yet, or using any other part of my body; it’s just my arm.
4 m' _; A" W+ [. KAs you continue to swing up on edge at the tennis ball, your arm and racket will form an L relationship about halfway up to contact. Again, at this point, you still aren’t really pronating. Just after hitting this L relationship is when you begin to pronate to get to your contact point.
2 X$ P* U/ B$ l5 L7 Q, gAt 0:50 in the video above we have a shot of Frank Salazar hitting his tennis serve from above. I want to go through the various steps of the serve in slow motion to see how his arm moves. We’ll start Frank out in the racket drop position, with the tennis racket pointed straight down at the court. As he begins to swing up at the tennis ball you can see that he actually *supinates* his arm. Supination is the opposite of pronation. In effect, supinating early in the upward swing allows him to pronate further/harder because he now has further to “unwind” his arm by pronating. This is a very advanced-level service technique. A lot of tennis pros with big serves will use this technique, and Frank hit about 130mph when he played on tour.
% i: }+ i9 G& |# n* b2 b% K$ i% pNow from this position, Frank starts to pronate and hits his L position. Again, we note that you pronate a little early if you’ve supinated earlier in the upward swing, but club level players should concentrate on hitting the L and then pronating immediately afterwards. He pronates and his wrist releases up, again because he is swinging up. This release is not something that you should focus on, it should happen naturally as you swing up at the tennis ball.
2 c' E- X, M. i, x% oI want to briefly mention one other thing, and that is to clarify a little bit about the pronation aspect of the upward swing from the racket drop. When I swing up, I reach the L position. But if I only pronate, you can see in the video at 2:20 what happens to the tennis racket. It rotates sideways above my head. Obviously, this isn’t how you should hit a tennis serve! You also have to reach up to the tennis ball to get your wrist to release naturally. Again though, this isn’t something you should ever have to focus on if you keep your arm relaxed. Focus on the pronation and the wrist release will take care of itself.
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Leading with your Hip when Serving

Getting your core muscles into your tennis serve is very important. This video discusses a specific technique – leading with the hip – that will help you get the middle of your body, and not just your arms and legs, into your serve.
One of the things you want to make sure you’re doing when you are serving is getting your core muscles (abs, obliques, lats) into the serve. More generally you want to use as many muscles as possible when you’re serving, but especially the core because it is such a large muscle group. The most effective way to make sure you’re getting your core into your serve is to lead with your front hip into your trophy pose. The way to accomplish getting your front hip out is to imagine that your body should be in a bow shape, with your feet and head behind the baseline but your hip extending out over it. By leading out with the hip like this, it will stretch your core muscles and allow you to pull yourself up and forward into the court, almost like the beginning of a cartwheel motion. If all you do is bend your knees, you won’t get your core into the serve at all. Let’s now take a look at some pros at about 1:05 in the video above. First is Marat Safin, and you can see that he’s leading with his front hip and his body looks like a bow. From this position, he will use his core muscles to pull himself up and out into the court, and that power will be transferred into his swing and the tennis ball. At 1:40, when he is in his racket drop, you can see that he has now straightened his body out and used those muscles. If you look at the two split-screened, you can see the dramatic difference in body position that getting your core muscles into the serve causes.
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% O+ u# ]$ ~. a5 IHow the Back Leg Kicks Up on your Serve
The main reason your back leg kicks up during your tennis serve follow through is that it helps you stay balanced. This video takes a closer look at some of the particulars of the leg kick.
One of the things your back leg does when you serve is that it helps you stay on balance when you follow through and when you land on your front foot (if you jump during your service motion, of course). Because your upper body leads when you serve and you are exploding up and into the court, your upper body gets ahead of your lower body. You therefore need something to serve as a counterbalance to your upper body when you land and follow through.
At 0:25 in the video above, you can see Oliver Akli hitting a flat serve. Notice that as Oli swings, he explodes up and into the tennis court and his upper body gets out into the court ahead of his lower body. That’s why, as he comes back down to the ground, he kicks his back leg upwards to serve as a counterbalance as his front foot comes down to the ground. The other key point to take in here is that his back leg doesn’t just kick out in any random direction. It kicks up almost straight back because his weight is moving basically exactly the opposite direction, straight into the court.
What this should tell you about your own serve is that if you notice your leg kicking out in a direction that is not straight back, it may mean that you are not getting your body weight moving correctly into the tennis court during your service motion.
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Choosing Between Speed and Consistency on your First Serve
7 P# l3 m# F* q  V3 R, x+ GHow hard should you hit your first serve? This video makes the case that by taking a few mph off your first serve you’ll turn it into a more potent weapon.
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Transitioning from the Trophy Pose to the Racket Drop
In the serve fundamentals section of the website we discussed how you should get to the trophy pose. We taught getting to the trophy pose because our method makes it easy to transition from the trophy pose to the racket drop later in the serve. This video discusses some variations in the trophy pose and how that affects transitioning to the racket drop.
4 ~, I# o; K9 o( vIn the fourth video in the serve fundamentals section, we talked about getting to what we call the trophy pose by timing your upper body and lower body preparation to complete at the same time. At 0:15 in the video above, you can see a clip of me serving where I time my upper and lower body preparations to complete at the same time. When I get to the trophy pose, my non-hitting hand is extended up, my hitting arm and racket form an L-shape behind me, and my knees are bent with my weight equally distributed on each foot. The reason that we taught timing the trophy pose like this is that from this position it is very easy to get to the correct racket drop position a little later in your service motion.
" ^( `0 U$ ?& ]' ]  W# y% x: HFrom the trophy pose position that we taught you need to do three things to get to the racket drop position. First, you need to drop the racket down behind your head and get your hitting arm elbow up above your hitting arm shoulder. Second you need to drop your tossing arm down to your body, and third you must push off your legs so that when your racket drops straight down behind you you are just pushing off your toes. You simply need to time it so that you achieve all three of these things occuring at the same time. Now, we want to make it clear that you don’t necessarily have to prepare exactly how we have taught you. You don’t have to time your upper and lower body preparations to complete at the same time in the trophy pose. We feel that it is very easy to learn in this way, but that is not the most important thing. The most important element of the serve is getting to the correct racket drop position, and if you prepare in a different way that still allows you to get to the correct racket drop position, then that’s fine.
/ \% F3 C) V9 |! OAt 1:40 in the video above, we’ve split-screened the trophy poses of Andy Roddick and John Isner, two guys who both have monster serves. The first thing you’ll notice is that their preparations look a little bit different. Andy has his racket angled diagonally back, his tossing arm is extended backwards as well so that his hand is over (or even behind) his head), and his knees are highly bent. John’s tennis racket is pointed more or less straight up, his tossing arm is extended out into the court rather than above his head, and his knees have a little less bend in them. But now let’s look at the these two pros in their racket drop positions. They are identical, and this is critically important. Even though their preparations were slightly different, they have both gotten to the exact same racket drop position on their serves. If we look at Marat Safin and Tim Henman, we can see that those two have identical-looking racket drops as well. So again to reiterate, the purpose of the preparation on the serve is to allow you to get to the proper racket drop position later in your service motion. The racket drop is the real key to the serve.
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