 Hey guys, welcome back to another video. Thanks for watching. In this video I'm going to be talking through three of the most common struggles that I see people have on their serve and some of the ways that I like to fix them. As always my aim with these videos is to help tennis players, tennis parents and also tennis coaches to get as much as they can from the sport. Now in this video in particular we're talking about the serve So hopefully some of the things that I go through if you're a tennis player or tennis parent These can be some useful tips, but also as tennis coaches. Hopefully they'll give you some good ideas as to how you can help your players Let's get into the first struggle and it is an inconsistent ball toss Now the nice thing about the serve is it's the one shot in tennis that you have full control over You don't have an opponent at the other end trying to move you out of position You have full control over what this ball does before you make contact with it If you can have a consistent ball toss where the ball is always in the same place Up in front of you all the time and you throw it It's going to allow you to have a lot more consistency with your serve. If you picture it like this Playing golf the ball is on the floor. It's in the same position every single time you step up to tee off Now in that situation you are able to continue with the same swing shape every single time and have a good connection However, with the serve if the ball is in different positions every time you are having to constantly adjust your technique to make up for an Inconsistency and therefore you'll never truly master one service technique. You'll always have to adjust The ideal position to get the ball toss is straight up in front of you at 12 o'clock So if you picture a clock face in front of you here, this would be 12 o'clock Your one o'clock would be here And your 11 o'clock would be here So it's very important that we keep the ball at 12 o'clock to give you the best chance of hitting a good serve The height of the ball really depends on how tall you are But a good indication is if you reach your racket up as high as you can You want the tennis ball to go slightly above how high you can reach because naturally as you hit the ball The ball is going to drop ever so slightly before you make contact with the ball So some of the reasons why people have inconsistent ball tosses It could be down to the way that you hold the tennis ball Now the best way to hold the tennis ball to throw the ball up is just to place the ball at the end of your fingertips And rest your thumb in here. You don't want to be gripping the ball too tight Rest the ball here to throw the ball up You want your arm to be pretty straight because as soon as you bend from your elbow There's a risk that the ball can go behind you or could end up too far in front as well So keeping a straight arm is very important Now one of the best practices and one of the most successful ways of getting the ball toss to go straight is By simply throwing the ball up and trying to avoid the ball from turning Okay, so we're limiting the amount of spin the ball has now you'll see lots of professional tennis players throw the ball up And the ball does turn the reason they can get away with that is because they practice that ball toss so many times That they have perfect accuracy every single time But as players that don't practice the serve quite as much as professional tennis players If we can take the spin out of the ball the ball could only go in one direction and it's up from your placement So I'll do a few here Watch the ball. I'm trying to place the ball up You can see there that the ball was turning very very slowly as opposed to spinning like so Okay, so watch again We're trying to place the ball up limiting the amount of spin that the ball has on it Now it's always good to practice skills like this with the full action if you really find it tough Just do the throw first But soon we want to introduce the take back as well because if you only practice this action As soon as the racket comes into play it can throw you into different positions Okay, so we'll go the same again. I'm going to place the ball without spin place again I'm just going to place the ball up in front of me Without spinning you can see there that the ball toss stays in front at 12 o'clock Give me a good chance to get a good contact Another exercise that can help you to avoid bending your elbow and using your wrist to throw the ball up is quite an odd one But a good practice and it's called the coke can now I want you to imagine you're holding a can of coke in your hand and you're going to place the tennis ball on top of Your hand like so now what this does is it forces you to keep your elbow straight and your wrist in a solid position Rather than using your wrist to flick the ball or using your elbow like so So you're going to place the ball on the coke can and you're simply going to Quite challenging so you're going to push the ball up Give that one a try is quite challenging But like I said it helps to force your elbow and your wrist to stay nice and still through the throwing action Another way to improve the consistency of your ball toss is to try to make sure that the ball stays in front of your body Rather than going behind you or too far in front And a good way to do this is by using a ball or a fence like I've got here And you're going to set yourself up sideways on as if you're going to serve in that direction With your ball toss arm just away from the fence. So you don't want to be touching the fence You don't want to be too far away So just kind of in line with the fence here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to toss the ball up And my aim is to trap the ball with a nice straight arm in front of my body Okay, so I'm going to do a half serve action here So we're going to place the ball up and trap Now if you throw the ball behind you, you won't be able to trap the ball It'll be very very difficult and if you throw the ball too far in front the ball won't go upwards So a really good one up and trap A good one for kids But it's definitely good for players who find it really tough to control the depth of the throw How far forwards and how far back it is Moving on to the second most common struggle that I see on the serve and it's getting into a poor pre-throw position Now what I mean by that is when you're setting up for your serve Some coaches call it the trophy position when you get to the back of the swing here before you launch the hitting action You get into this position here. Now the ideal position is somewhere around 90 degrees with your elbow and 90 degrees under your armpit This is the best way to throw and the best way to hit a serve You don't want to be too tucked in or too straight if you were to throw a tennis ball with your elbow tucked in It wouldn't go very far. The same goes for with the serve Impinging on your motion your range of movement If your arm is too straight on the take back and too high your racket is too close to the ball So there's nowhere to generate power Like I say you want roughly a 90 degree angle at the back and under your armpit Just like a throwing action When you see some professional tennis players play sometimes it does look like their elbow Drops down beneath that 90 degree angle and it would appear so but the reason that happens is because they have a very good Shoulder tilt now as the left arm goes up They will tilt their shoulders which will give the impression that this elbow is dipping But actually the body is moving as opposed to the arm just dipping in here So some of the ways that I like to work on this with players if they are Too high and too straight with their arm or too tucked in is to start with a half serve set up So instead of starting in the full action which can encourage players to do their old habits We simply start in the half serve position. So you can see I've got a 90 degree angle here I'm going to throw the ball up Same position up Now the goal with this is to try to create some form of muscle memory to make this position feel more comfortable So that when we do go back into the full service action It's more of a natural motion to get to here as opposed to what they were doing before whether it being here or up here too high Half serve is quite a good way of doing this But it's important that you know what the longer-term plan is to get back into your full service action now some players like the traditional service action of drop Through the pendulum kind of hit Some players more like an Andy Roddick style may take the racket back in a more abbreviated action But the key is to get into that good pre-throw position Another way you can improve The pre-throw position is by practicing your throat now all of the junior tennis players that I coach I always always practice over arm throws with them So way to practice is simply how far can you throw so set up behind the baseline? Get ready to launch and Set yourself a target If you hit that target try to go further a good benchmark is can you throw from baseline to baseline? Depending on the age and the height in the build of the junior player You can set different goals to try to improve the overall throw The only difference with a service action compared to an overall throw is actually you you want to aim slightly higher with the serve So sometimes to get the ball to travel at a distance you'll see big rotational energy Rotating around this axis here, whereas a serve there is more shoulder over shoulder Rotation this way so another good practice is to throw high over the net so rather than just having straight Actually, can you point up higher and look all up into the sky and that creates the shoulder over shoulder action that we want in the serve So the third and final way that I like to work on the pre-throw position and everything to do with the serve in that matter is Video analysis now if you don't have a tennis coach or you know You don't have access to somebody else to play with you can simply hit the serve by yourself and record yourself Now if you can record your service action I think you'll be probably be surprised at what it looks like sometimes It feels different to what it actually looks like but just by doing some serves on camera Do one now You can actually see the angle of the elbow and whether it's in the right place So do five to ten serves on camera See what you think if there's something that needs to be improved if your elbows too low or if your elbows too high Have a practice do a basket of serves and then after that basket video yourself again to see if you can see some improvement What we want is to link the feeling of the movement to how it looks on the camera If it doesn't feel right at first do more and more and more until it starts to feel more natural So the third and final most common struggle I see with tennis players is gripping the racket too tight Now this can happen for a number of reasons. Normally. It's when you're learning a new technique You're learning a new grip you want to really get that racket in the right place You grip it for your life or when you're feeling slightly nervous if you're in a match situation And you're desperate to get that serve in and on second serve at juice It's very common to grip the racket too tightly now the problem with gripping the racket this tightly is Your forearm tenses up and as soon as you tend to your muscles in your arm your racket moves a lot slower through the air You also risking injury So when you hit a ball with a really tense wrist here and you're gripping the racket tightly all of the shock from the impact Goes through your wrist goes through your elbow and the quite a common injury in tennis tennis elbow and golfers elbow So the looser your grip is the more natural power you'll get and the less injuries you'll get to I actually made a video Recently on drills that you can do at home to improve the rhythm of your swing And this does link quite closely to gripping the racket too tightly So I'll put the link above and in the comment section below But some of the things that I like to or drills that I like to do to try to help people that grip the racket too tightly This is the first one So a simple shadow swing now when you're hitting with shadow swing There's no pressure So we're looking for your service action Bricks be continuous So it's not stopping at all and you can see that my rack is moving in a figure of eight action here Now the reason this is good is because to do it You've got to grip the racket quite loosely to let the racket do the work if you were to grip the racket really really tightly Your racket would stop and you'd have to force it to start again become very jerky So a nice smooth and fluid motion and help you to be more real a second way I like to encourage a looser grip and instead of holding the racket Like this like you normally would so the chopper grip you're gonna just hold with two fingers You see here two fingers and your bottom two fingers are gonna be off of the grip now by doing this again It gives you much more of a loose feeling so you can do the same exercise We just practice and the shadow swings, but again with your two fingers hanging off the bottom Straight away when you do this you'll feel how loose the racket is in your hands It may feel like you have to grip the racket but actually it's creating a very nice and loose feeling The third way I like to improve the looseness of the grip Sounds quite obvious, but it's to breathe to breathe out during the shot People don't breathe enough through their strokes when you see the pros play the reason they're grunting is to exhale during impact Now when you exhale the rest of your muscles in your body relax and loosen Okay, if you hold your breath during a shot, you're more likely to grip the racket tightly So when you're serving try to breathe out during impact a simple practice Do some serves and blow out as you hit the ball and just by breathing out during impact It helps you to feel a bit more relaxed through the shot So there you go They are three of the biggest struggles that I see people have on the serve of course They're not the only struggles There are plenty more if you have come across a certain struggle on your serve and you don't know how to deal with it Put it in the comments below and I'll see if I can make a video for you So to recap the three biggest struggles that I see on the serve is an inconsistent ball toss Getting into a poor pre-throw position Maybe too tucked in or too straight and actually gripping the racket too tightly So in general when you next go out on to the tennis court to serve try to relax try to breathe through the shot Don't overthink it and if you do have a struggle Film yourself and have a look back because you'll be quite surprised at how the serve looks compared to how it feels and You'll definitely be able to help yourself Hopefully from this video, but some other the other videos that I've put on as well As I mentioned before if you did like this video, please do hit that subscribe button It massively helps and if you do have any questions or any comments Please put them below and I will hopefully see you soon. Take care