How to Hit The Perfect Slice Serve In 3 Steps (with PRONATION)

[Music] in this video you're gonna learn how to get the best slicers of your life i mean the kind of slicer with the sick side spin that carves off the court stretching your opponent out wide and giving you that easy one-two combo that allows you to fly through your service games and we'll do it all in three simple steps well maybe not so simple step number one on understanding the slice serve is gonna be the contact point now to do this we're going to break things down on the first principles level using physics now fundamentally power or the ball's forward velocity is going to be driven through by the linear force of the racket driving forward through a motion called internal shoulder rotation that's this motion right here now spin is actually going to be created from the frictional force that you create when you brush up the back of the ball on a forehand or when you brush to the side of the ball to get the ball to carve off the core on your slice serve so to visualize how this is done i want you to picture your serve from above and now imagine there's a clock right around you as you're beginning your service motion generally speaking for your slicer you want your swing path to be going from about eight o'clock to two o'clock in your swing this of course will happen naturally if you close off your racket angle as you make contact and this should actually feel pretty comfortable now this should happen naturally if you're actually leading with the edge and actually closing off your racket head contact a little bit more instead of rotating it all the way in as you would a flat serve now you might notice upon trying this that your slicer is a little bit slower than your flat serve now don't worry this doesn't mean that we're lazy or that we're putting less energy into the slicer it just means that we're distributing force in a different way so let's take a look at the typical spin levels that a pro will generate top servers are swinging just as hard on their slice serve but because the racket face is contacting a ball while closed off to the side this same racketed speed gets transferred into spin so while you should accelerate just as hard on your slicer the overall swing should feel and sound more like a cut rather than a hit right into the net now in order to develop the proper contact positioning we're gonna have to master the toss right off the bat if you're tossing too far to your left you're going to notice that the slicer is a lot harder to execute because your natural swing path will be oriented upward so while tossing to your left is actually ideal for developing a kick serve tossing to your left for a slicer will actually hurt it now we'll have a video coming up on the kick serve so be tuned for that make sure to subscribe so you're the first to know when it comes out back to the slicer you should be making contact roughly over your hitting shoulder or your head and this position here should feel relatively comfortable you shouldn't be too high where you feel impinged or too low where you're starting to swing forward now this position here is also going to give you the added benefit of disguise which we'll get into now a common teaching instruction on the slice serve is to toss to your right now you might actually see this at your club because it's plagued at the rec level where they toss over to the right side of their body and then carve the serve and it actually does work until it doesn't while tossing to your right is a great tool to teach the initial feeling of creating side spin on the ball the problem with this technique is that it signals to your opponent exactly what kind of serve you're gonna hit so instead players like federer will make contact right over their hitting shoulder and hit the slice serve and flat serve on the same exact toss now of course there is an exception to this if you have difficulty with getting a full range of motion with your shoulder or let's say you're just recovering from a shoulder injury in this case tossing a little bit more to your right and then making contact is going to take a lot of load off your stroller so that might be what you want to go with but ideally as i covered in this video you want to start tossing with that leftward arc and then intersect the ball's flight right when it's above your hitting shoulder and now on to the final question how should we switch up the flap bomb down the t with a slicer that carves off the court at will well my friend that is all about the swing path now to understand the ideal slice surf swing let's take a look at the maestro himself let's see a clip of feathers flat versus slice serve now pause right before contact now right here can you tell the difference which one is flat and which one is slice well that was a trick question because they're both flat serves but for real even in slow motion there's almost no difference between federer's slice serve and his flat serve his stance his toss load his racket drop and leg drive are all the same so this means that the opponent can only rely on the last few milliseconds after contact to actually react to the ball now we'll be releasing a video very soon dissecting all about federer's serb so be sure to leave a like for that and that'll let us know to release it sooner now as federer enters the upward swing his elbow extends and he gets into this on-edge position that looks like he's about to chop the ball and this keeps his shoulder in external rotation and from this point he'll make one small but critical difference to get him from going flat down the t to carving out wide on the flat serve the hand and arm is going to rotate in earlier so that the racquet strings are directly behind the ball at contact and this gives you more of a plow through feeling on the slicer you'll be rotating the arm in later leading to the strings still facing sideways by the time you make contact now in order to achieve this motion try not to swing slower to get this effect but instead focus on the timing of this internal shoulder rotation and specifically for the slice serve you should focus on throwing the edge of the racket up to the ball even harder so like a forehand volley or slice you're going to lead with the pinky side of your hand toward the ball now this motion is very similar to the forehand volley or the forehand slice the pinky side is going to lead to the ball you're going to lead with the edge of the racket going down the back of the ball but take a look at this when i start making contact with the slice and as i incrementally increase the contact height with my shoulder you'll start to notice that it starts to resemble the slice serve but now instead of increasing under spin with the slice we're using the same motion to create side spin on the ball now you may start noticing that even on the slice serve you're getting a sort of natural forearm pronation through contact when you swing hard enough as does fetters serve but this motion should actually naturally happen as a result of the force of your stroller internally rotating the forearm pronation itself should actually be more of a byproduct not the creation of sidespin itself now in order to get all these pieces together i want to show you my top favorite drills to get used to the slice serve so here we go so like we mentioned hitting a slice serve is a lot like hitting an underspin slice so the way we're going to learn this motion especially for those of you who are slicers and dicers out there and are already familiar with creating backspin on the ball we're going to use that as a progression tool to get used to the slice serve so we're going to start off by slicing a few serves and really hear the cutting motion this brushing effect when you're going down the back of the ball what you should be looking for here is this frictional force that we talked about being created on the ball and therefore creating backspin now as we start to adjust the toss height you'll start to notice that the axis of rotation is going to naturally change so this time we're going to do the same slicing motion but toss at our head then a little bit above our head and then finally all the way up where we would serve and start to notice that that same underspin is now transferred into side spin on the ball from here once you're comfortable with getting enough side spin on the ball to get it to curve you're gonna start in your pre-throw position and focus on chopping the side from there i want you to start alternating between the internal rotation motion that you would do on your flat serve with the slicer the tweaks are not going to be in the toss or the wind-up but instead in the few moments before contact what swing path you're going to have and what your contact angle is going to be so i'm going to alternate between a flat down the t with a slice out wide based off the same toss so remember for a flat down the tee we're going to add in internal rotation a little bit earlier and for a slice serve out wide we're going to add in that slight delay on the ball all right athletes and with those drills i hope you start getting the cut effect on the ball and start seeing the best slicers of your life now we actually have a full-fledged bonus course inside of our racket flex serv system specifically on adding the variation of the slice serve we call it the slice serve revolution and you can actually get access to this as part of our very limited time black friday and cyber monday legacy bundle this is going to include all of our courses including week to winning forehands home court advantage and the racket flex serv system which actually includes the slice serve revolution bonus as well as a kick serve kickstarter bonus so if you're interested in that be sure to click the first link in the description below before the deal ends on monday the 29th at 11 59 pm as always athletes i hope you go out and train hard i love you guys and i'll see you in the next video [Music] it's

Channel: RacquetFlex

Views: 289,496

Keywords: slice serve ad court, slice serve down the t, slice serve drills, slice serve slow motion, slice serve tennis, slice serve tennis technique, slice serve vs flat serve, slice serve vs kick serve, tennis serve kick slice, tennis slice serve drills, tennis slice serve grip, tennis slice serve toss, tennis slice serve tutorial, tennis slice serve vs kick serve, best slice serve tennis, tennis slice serve

Id: JhDuIWaDvgM

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021