Jab/Shovel Service video

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This is a really good video/thread. The quick hand motion fakes right after contact, yet still maintaining that good spin action is really impressive.

I find this serve hard to do with penhold. I know Wang Hao somewhat featured this serve during a good portion of his career. But since your hand/wrist is kinda following behind the plane of where you're swinging, I can't/or don't really use wrist to engage the backspin version.

side & top? Easy. Just give a good punching motion to the side. Side & a lot of back with penhold? A little harder for me. Still working on it.

Thanks for the video.
 
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This is a really good video/thread. The quick hand motion fakes right after contact, yet still maintaining that good spin action is really impressive.

I find this serve hard to do with penhold. I know Wang Hao somewhat featured this serve during a good portion of his career. But since your hand/wrist is kinda following behind the plane of where you're swinging, I can't/or don't really use wrist to engage the backspin version.

side & top? Easy. Just give a good punching motion to the side. Side & a lot of back with penhold? A little harder for me. Still working on it.

Thanks for the video.

I used to do this serve by punching into it using pretty much no wrist and it has been effective for me.. but then I met Craig Bryant a few weeks ago and asked him to do 10 minutes of serving with me and he had a look at my serve. The way he does it and the way the japanese guy is doing it is by doing both. Like ttpshot said in the initial post, he's uncocking the wrist for topspin and I reckon you get more spin plus more deception by doing it this way. However, it has to be done quickly and subtly with the added appropriate deceptive follow-through. I'm now trying to do it this way but it's a bit too obvious.

The video posted above shows this clearly at 1:09 and again at 1:32


And trust me guys, Craigs serve is ridiculously deceptive and ridiculously spinny. He was also able to make the backspin variation look like it was going to kick by contacting it higher up. Once you know what cues to look for it gets easier, it's like magic until you know the "secret" ;).. still no easy task reading them you have to be 100% focused.
 
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Great video! I love seeing the behind view. Very good for seeing variations and what his wrist release action looks like. Also liked seeing smalls things like body movements , and foot stomp etc from that view point. after seeing the first video this was a great follow up getting to see variations play out throughout a match.


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What's The Japanese gentleman's name I didn't see it listed except for maybe in Japanese in the video?


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Take a look at the Newly crowned Asian Champion Miu Hirano use of the jab/shovel serve in her championship game.


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I've been messing with this serve and it's a really effective little serve with the different variations. I was wondering if any one else is getting a corkscrew type action when you vary the serve and cock or load the wrist like the first guy will do some times? It be honest I'm not sure what's going on sometime when you add the wrist load, but It seems like when you load the wrist on the take away if your wrist action on contact is more forward its side and if it's starting down, or diagonally down at contact i think it's corkscrew ish ?? Maybe I can shoot a short video tomorrow. Not sure to be honest but it seems to be an effective variation.
The variation I want is the no spin variation the first guy does off his straight back spin.

I see where Tenergy 05 did mention spin being on axis. I guess I'm wondering if others are getting this with the added wrist depending on contact.

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I'm currently slowly changing my main serve from pendulum variants to a serve I call the tomajab aka the one-inch-serve! It's a bit like the serve Craig Bryant demonstrates, only that it's even more tomahawky.

It started out by my usual serves not working too well anymore one day and fooling around with a very short jerky tomahawk. It wasn't meant for real, I thought I was just being silly, but once I incorporated a little body twist, hiding the racket/racket swing until point of contact, suddenly high ranked players (1.-3. league) started netting them if the execution was great and because they didn't know it yet.

Due to the motion being mostly hidden and the actual spin motion being extremely short - just an intense flick of the wrist - it seems to be really deceptive how much backspin there is. It even surprised myself since I thought it was more sidespin than backspin. The wrist seems to flick downwards heavily, which is really hard to see, while the body rotation and arm motion makes it seem like moderate sidespin with slight backspin.


TL;DR
I have trouble producing spin with the classic jab/shovel serve, but merging it with tomahawk has created a beast of a serve. It's definitely worth fooling around with these.

A lot of players this WTTC, especially women, seem to have these kinds of serves!
 
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i dont want to kill the actual point but the serves in this video are all long serves. since we are trying to hide actual spin of the serve, we need small wrist movement. and if we want decent spin with small brush, we need to push the racket to ball more to make contact harder and that leads to a long serve.

and multiple usage of long serves are not good imo. the opponent can easily adapt to play offensive against your serve.

these are all my humble opinion, and it's my first message of mine in here TTD, hello all :)
 
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Service tutorial video by one of the best server in Japan.
Will add the translation if anyone is interested.

1:15 For Topspin serve to look like backspin, the racket needs to start higher than the ball at the back swing. During the downward motion, cock the wrist to lower the racket head then uncock to impart topspin at the contact.

1:27 *Topspin disguised as backspin

1:53 Disguise it as backspin with scooping motion at the follow through.

2:23 *Backspin disguised as backspin

2:30 *Backspin disguised as topspin

2:41 For backspin server to look like topspin, start the racket from below the ball at the back swing. At the contact, cut the ball then have upwards follow through.

3:07 Vertical racket angle at the impact and swing from up to down.

3:13 As little downward follow through as possible to disguise it as topspin.

3:30 *Topspin disguised as topspin

3:52 Tactics: If the opponent swings hard, I tend to use topspin serve more. Vice versa for backspin serve.

4:19 *No spin

4:56 Tilt the racket forward so that the service looks like topspin.


Still one of the best demonstrations.
I think it deserves a resurrection.
;)
 
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