A superfast serve is a tennis player’s deadliest weapon, but it’s not just big shoulders and the grunt of an aggrieved gorilla that helps the ball over the net. Science applied at the right moments can turn fault into fortune.
In which he serves
“There’s no doubt the serve has become the most important shot in the game,” says Jim Edgar, chairman of TennisCoach UK and a leading performance coach. “Andy Roddick holds the men’s speed record of 155mph (249kph), Venus Williams the women’s at 129mph (208kph). They achieve incredible speeds, and if you look at the top seeds, more often than not they’ll be a top server.
“As soon as your racquet makes contact with the tennis ball you can feel, from the crispness, the cleanness of it, whether it’s good, how much damage it’s going to do.
“A good serve is like a javelin throw mixed with a basketball slam dunk. With your arm you’re throwing the racquet at the ball like a javelin thrower, while propelling the body upwards as high as possible as you would in basketball. If you can get the two actions to work together, that’s when you’re onto a winner.
“It starts right down in the feet, the toes, to get a strong launch, then the trunk and the hips rotate, the shoulders rotate and then the throwing arm pronates. The idea in the old days was that the wrist snapped forward, but actually the hand and wrist turn away from the body, and that’s pronation. As much as 40 per cent of a serve’s power comes from that one element of the move, so it’s incredibly important.”
In which we calculate
“Cannonball servers like Andy Roddick are born with it,” says Dr Martin Apolin, physicist and sports scientist, “and have many fast-twitch fibres in their muscles. They can only marginally improve performance through practice, but it is possible.
Read the full “Winning Formula” in this month’s Red Bulletin.
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