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KM, I have seen this gym on some of Next Level's Vids... so you can ask him directly.
One thing I see is your elbow position... WAY to the rear... for the pendulum to get a good whip, the upper arm ought to run into your rib cage side and then lower arm go forward... you get maximum leverage and whip that way without losing any control... prolly better control that way.
This is not saying your serve is wrong. When one wants to do a SHOVEL SERVE, one would have an elbow position like yours. One GOOD thing about training your short underspin serves witht the elbow way in the back like that is that when you establish your good shovel serves... you now have a way to show shovel serve, then give opponent a hopefully unexpected conventional underspin serve.
This is a good capability to develop... an ability to serve multiple kinds of serves from the similar motion and arm slot.
Thanks Der_Echte,
Ya, me and NextLevel are club buddies. He is a very nice guy and I owe him a lot for his kindness and friendship.
By the way, these are old videos, I did change my serves quite a bit now, keeping the core principles the same. Will try to shoot something with latest ones as well. Ya, when I learned serving that time I was beginner and without any guidance. I did all of the efforts on my own so may be this self induced medication is responsible for my unconventional technique. Not sure, if I can fix it now but will surely try.
The interesting part is that since I used to practice my serves a lot, my serves became far better than my follow up game. So I can put a very heavy underspin serve but couldn't follow up with an opening loop consistently. I believe that one should think holistically and try to put only that much spin which he is able to counter with his topspin or drive. If a good player returns the whole spin back then I was mostly in trouble. Well, I tried and tried and kind of cured that problem as well. Now my advice to anyone practicing serves would be -
- Serve with the intent of keeping it low over the net
- Have variation to control the spin example, light to medium backspin and heavy backspin - it is good to generate heavy spin but remember that it is a double edge sword
- Practice coming back to the neutral stance once you have served, I didn't do it and this integration took a lot of time later
- Once you have a decent serve then let some one receive your serves and practice your next move against it. Have at least 2 approaches example, a opening topspin and a push ready for the follow up.
- Many people want to kill the third ball, that includes me as well. But remember, it is calling 'opening' because of a reason. As a player you are opening the rally and this should be with good placement shot and not necessary a kill shot.