Tennis Game Improvement - Power Serve

Jimmy Nguyen: Hi, Jimmy Nguyen here, Founder of Easy Tennis. Today, I'm going to teach you how to improve your tennis game. In this segment, I'm going to teach you how to hit a power serve. First and foremost, we have to remember this three important components for hitting a power serve. The very first, the first component is to actually check that toss. When you're tossing, you want to make sure, when you're doing the toss, that you're kind of get your tossing arm slightly in front of your body. So you will pretend, notice how my arm is directly in front of me. Let's assume we have a 90 degree angle. My arm right here is at 90 degrees, over here would be 0 degree, so we doing the tossing arm. You want to make sure that when you're tossing, notice how my body is semi-closed, I'm not doing a serve like this because we don't want to do an open serve, we don't want to do a open stance serve, you want to make you do a semi-close serve. That's why you want to make sure you close off your shoulders, tossing arm again 90 degrees, 0 degree, your tossing arm should be 45 degrees. When you do the toss, you want to make sure, a lot of questions are; how high do I toss the ball? Well, if you raise your racket up high, your toss should be as high as the tip of the racket. So again, you raise your racket should be as high as that racket and the reason why we want to do a high toss is we want to allow ourself to get that elbow extension, which is our second important component. Upon point of contact for the serve, you want to make sure when you hit that ball, notice what my elbows are doing. They are above my shoulders. That allows me to get that elbow extension into the serve. Notice how I didn't do this. Because if I am serving like this, notice where my elbows are. They are shoulder height or they're below my shoulders and that's not going to give us that power that we want. So again, your toss as high as the tip of the racket, as you are swinging, notice my elbows, above the shoulders. Now into our third component is the weight transfer. So without the ball, with the weight transfer when doing one complete motion, slight toss and shift my weight forward.

Notice how I take a hop forward. So if you look at my feet, they are pointed -- they're parallel with each other. It's not this, not this, but they're parallel with each other. As you toss, my knees are slightly bent. The reason why we got to get our knees bend is because we got to load our power into our knees. Load, elbow extension. Again, look at the elbows above my shoulders, you should see the balls of your feet. After that point of contact, then you can do that little hop. So a complete motion. In our next segment, we're going to look at hit and recovery at the baseline.