Tennis Serve TOSS - Secrets to the PERFECT TOSS LOCATION (Flat vs Kick Explained)

often named as one of the most critical elements of the entire service motion as well as one of the most difficult to master this element of the serve has been the most mythologized mythologized the most mysterious part of your entire motion that is going to affect the timing of your swing the perfection of your contact point and the prowess of your confidence and yes of course i'm talking about the serve toss by the end of this video you're going to understand exactly where you should be tossing the ball based on our three dimensions that we've defined in the arc the depth and the height you're going to learn exactly where you should start hitting the ball is it at the apex or should i let it drop or should i hit it while it's rising you're gonna learn whether it should be arcing to the right or to the left or just straight up and down and you're gonna learn the number one important goal of the toss so that you can toss exactly where you need to each time by the way our youtube analytics showed that about 70 percent of you guys actually aren't subscribed so if you want to subscribe make sure to hit the subscribe button below hit the bell notification icon and make sure so that you can stay tuned for our weekly brand new videos that we come out with we're going to be launching a bunch of serve content so i definitely want you guys to tune in so without further ado i'm excited to get into the video i'll see you inside [Music] in order to master serve toss location we first have to look at the toss height now a lot of players when they're starting out they believe that the toss height is going to sland somewhere around the apex the apex is basically where the ball you toss the ball up right and it's rising up as it rises up it reaches its highest point before it decelerates and then changes direction and goes straight down now on first glance this makes sense to try and serve the ball at the apex because well first of all if the ball is rising and then falling there's a little bit of a time right there where the velocity is at zero and maybe that might seem like the easiest time to go ahead and swing at the ball because it's virtually not moving at all but most players on the pro tour are tossing the ball one feet sometimes even two feet higher than their contact point what happens is that when you toss and try and make contact at your apex in order to do so you're going to end up tossing lower hence making you rush for a shot and maybe you've felt this before maybe you've tried to toss the ball and then you feel rushed and you end up sacrificing any bit of racket head speed generation just so that you can you know reach that contact spot and it's not a good look so if you take this approach instead you're going to be able to achieve the key specific spots in your acceleration to get that fluid effortless perfect contact spot now the exact height that you're going to toss varies amongst how big your wind-up is going to be if you take a look at players like roddick or even curios you'll see that their toss is only a couple of inches higher than their contact specifically because of how fast they get in and out of that wind-up phase but if you take a look at somebody like federer who has a larger wind up you'll see that he tosses somewhere between one and two feet above his contact but the main commonality here is that it's well above the contact giving them enough space to be able to swing up and out on the ball as daytree discussed so we covered what the optimal height is now we're going to talk about how deep how far into the baseline should i be tossing now most of us players will probably land somewhere between tossing too far out onto the court and too far behind now i'll talk about the the problems with both of these but i want to start out saying that if you heard the common teaching method of tossing the ball and having it land somewhere on your head then you're probably gonna find that two things are wrong here number one the specific contact position is gonna make it so that you're not really in that optimal position that daytree discussed in the serve contact series where you want your racket head to be aligned with the front edge of your torso at contact and also you want to have a little bit of hip flexion to get that forward tilt to get the center of mass of your upper body going into the court so in order to really allow your body to get into that position we really need to get the toss right for this so let's again take a look at the most elite top servers in the game and take a look at how far into the court that they're tossing you'll notice that a lot of players are going to toss several feet into the court so that they can really optimize for exactly what i was just saying that contact point getting well in front of their body and really being able to transfer their momentum really well into the shot and even in some extreme cases you'll see players like john isner toss four feet into the baseline and that's probably you know one of the contributors to his crazy ace count other than his height of course now that doesn't mean that i want all of you to start tossing you know four or five feet out into the court because what will probably happen in that case is you'll first of all you'll either start hitting it into the net because now if you're tossing too far into the court the contact is going to make it a lot more closed of a plane and second of all to compensate you're probably going to start pushing and doing a variation of the waders tray so starting out i really want you to experiment with somewhere between a couple of inches maybe five to ten inches to even a foot in front of the baseline and then start experimenting once you've gotten the timing and gotten a lot more comfortable with getting that forward trunk tilt now if you really want to take this a step further i want you to keep both of your feet planted on the ground instead of trying to launch each time and in this case what it's going to allow you to do is optimize for that contact point isolating the upper body segments and then you know obviously once you get your toss down once you get the forward trunk till a lot more comfortable in your stance then you can start to progress to using more and more leg drive until you're eventually off the ground so we've got the height we've got the depth so that's pretty much all there is to a perfect toss right well not quite so we still need to cover one more thing and that's going to be the toss arc now this is arguably the most critical dimension of the serve because it's gonna affect how tilted you are with your contact point and that's gonna affect your spin as well as your power now one common teaching principle has been spread around and that's basically where you wanna toss up straight up and straight down and make contact to your right but there's a critical error here that's going to jeopardize your contact and it has to do with how vertical your racket plane is on contact you see if the racket head is straight up and down then that's going to limit extremely limit and jeopardize the amount of topspin that you can create on your shot because the leftward component of how your contact is oriented is going to affect how much topspin you get so if you're hitting the ball with the racket straight up and down you're not going to get a lot of topspin unless you're you know you're doing this motion like a viking rally cry or something and if you take a look at a lot of wta servers you'll probably see this where their rack head is straight up they're turned all the way in and you know you probably can still hit a hundred plus miles per hour with this serve but top spin again is very limited so it's going to lead to a very flat and inconsistent shot now most elite atp servers well at least with the exception of a few serving giants who might as well be serving from the service line are going to have their racket their contact point align with sometimes their head or with their hitting shoulder if you take a look at sampras you'll see that his contact point is aligned with his head and that's one of the biggest contributors to how he's able to get upwards of 2000 to 2500 rpm on his flattened kick serve and then you'll see players like federer who are more aligned with the hitting shoulder which really allows you to drive that racket forward through that long axis rotation the internal rotation of your forearm and your shoulder so in order to replicate this whenever you're tossing the ball from the point of your release i want you to think the ball is going to travel about two feet to the non-dominant side the left side if you're a righty so that you can really get that tilt with your contact and therefore get that racket to drive forward and outward alrighty so now that we broke down the dimensions of the perfect toss the height the depth the arc now we're going to cover the differences between the spin variations and how they affect the serve toss so starting off with the flat versus the slice serve now a lot of us probably when we're starting out learning the slice serve or even continuing to play we're gonna hit the slicer by trying to carve it and you know you've probably seen a lot of players and sometimes even coaches advocate that you want to toss the ball further to your right to hit a really good slice serve and there is some logic behind that but if you want any power behind that slice serve you're going to want to toss a little bit more to the left because as always a few problems arise with tossing the ball too far to the right number one it's going gonna be virtually impossible to get any of that internal rotation that's gonna drive the racket forward so even if you are able to carve the ball if you're playing a righty you're just gonna be carving it with a weak shot straight into their strike zone on the forehand allowing them to tee up on the serve so in order to avoid that we still want to get that internal rotation and still get the side spin that we need to along with this if we toss too far to the right we're sacrificing one of the most critical objectives in the toss which is making it unpredictable you see when i'm serving the ball and and my opponent's watching me serve and they can see exactly how i'm tossing the ball based on if i'm hitting a slice or a flat serve well i'm basically showing my cards i might as well just say hey you know what i'm going wide this time i'm hitting a slice serve right so the objective here is to make sure that i have a serve that i can rely on but my opponent can't rely on does that make sense so to keep your disguise intact for the slice serve instead of trying to focus on tossing far to the right i want you instead to focus on when you go into the acceleration phase just delay the amount of internal rotation you have and just think of it as you're hitting on edge more with the slice serve and if you want a dedicated video to the slice serve mechanics then if this video gets uh 1 000 likes then we'll make a video on that alright and if you keep working on those drills you're going to start to see all of the shots starting to make it on a diamond you're going to increase your confidence on both your slicer and your flat serve when you're going for that down the t winner now my goal is to transfer that same confidence onto your kickster and i always tell my students this but my goal is to get you a kick serve that your opponents are so afraid of they wish you just hit the first serve in now the biggest difference with the kick serve is going to be that right to left arc that we mentioned now this might be something that you've heard before where on a kick serve you toss more behind you so that you can kick it up but again with the kick serve even we still want to get that long axis rotation and drive the racket forward into the shot so that we could still get considerable pace and spin on your shot and the only way to do that is to get considerable depth in front of the court but when it comes to the arc we do want to toss it slightly more to the left side for righties on the kick serve you'll see pros making contact mostly over their head if not slightly over and this is great because now this is going to change the trajectory not not the orientation but the trajectory of your racket head to be more upward and vertical as you hit the shot so you can think of your kick serve as pretty much a flat serve with just a little more top spin not not a completely spinny serve because that's going to lead to just you know a ball with a lot of top spin that your opponent can easily easily attack now just like with the toss depth i think it is easy to overstate how far to the left that you want to toss because you see if you toss too far behind you too far to the backhand side now it's not going to allow you to lean your body and your your upper body forward into the cord enough and that's going to lead to a very spinny shot but one without a lot of pace and one that your your opponent could easily attack and by this point you know you might react by trying to get even more racketed speed but as long as the as long as the orientation and the trajectory of your racket is off it doesn't matter how fast you try and swing it's just going to be really spinny and it's not going to go anywhere so instead for the kick serve the toss should only be a few inches behind the flat serve at contact and instead of trying to you know adjust your your arc by a whole foot instead just try leaning forward on your kick serve and see where your contact is over your head again uh and try and get your ball to that position and you'll start to notice how much more top spin you can generate now the exact height of the toss on the kick serve is going to vary from player to player you'll see some players tossing a little bit lower and this is because when you make contact with the flat serve compared to the kick serve the kick will be slightly maybe a couple of inches lower to get a little bit more of that upward vertical component in the shot but either way you should let the ball drop to a lower position so that your racket can intersect it with the upward and forward force all right so now that you have the perfect arc and you have the depth going into the shot and you have the perfect height now we're gonna pair all of that with your perfect backswing position and pairing a perfect toss with the perfect backswing timing you're going to be well on your way to mastering that serve and hitting with tremendous amounts of power so what i've done here is i've whipped up a free backswing quiz that you could take to find out based on your favorite type of player your actual serving uh contact height and all these different things your preferences what exactly is the best backswing for you so feel free to check out the first link in the description below and take our free quiz and let me know in the comments below what you got until next time guys i'll see you in the next video go out and train hard [Music]

Channel: RacquetFlex

Views: 40,448

Rating: 4.9683437 out of 5

Keywords: how to toss the ball in tennis, kick serve toss, serve ball toss, serve toss, serve toss fundamentals, serve toss placement, serve toss tips, tennis serve toss, tennis serve toss height, tennis serve toss in front, tennis serve toss issues, tennis serve toss location, tennis serve toss placement, tennis serve toss position, tennis serve toss technique, tennis serve toss tips, tennis serve tossing arm, toss consistency, tennis coaching

Id: CWEdccTar68

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021