Transcription
If you struggle to hit harder serves, there's a really good chance you're making one of these seven mistakes, so let's fix them. Everyone should serve harder. Like, chances are you're not serving hard enough, and if not, you're probably making one of these seven mistakes. No, none of that made the video.
Okay, so there are seven mistakes people are making. Here's mistake number one: people are standing too narrow and too tall. What's the fix? Wider and lower. Yeah, wider and lower, right? So I prefer to set up with my left foot at a diagonal, and I have my right foot parallel to the baseline. You don't have to serve like this, okay? You can serve with an open stance if you like. You'll see guys like Tyson McGuffin do that, but this is the way I like to do it because I like to have a little lean with it, rock with it going on, right? So, so I'm going to be in a wider stance. Narrow makes me unbalanced. Narrow makes me weak. If I get a little wider, like a boxer, I can apply more pressure into the ground and more force out of my arms. So that's the fix for mistake number one. Change your feet into wider and lower. Okay, okay.
Number two. Ah, this is one of my favorites. This is the old, so we're in our stance, right? This is the old back foot fadeaway serve. It's a little exaggerated fading back, but there is a lot of people that do it. The more common one is there's no weight transfer. People stay completely neutral, maybe they don't go back, maybe they don't go forward, they just stand here flat-footed and hit the ball. You're stealing power from yourself if you stand flat-footed. So let me use a boxer example real quick. If I was going to punch Tyler, and I just stayed neutrally balanced, okay, what did you do right there? The moment you actually went to give me the pop, right, your weight shifted forward, right? So I wouldn't do that because I lose power. Less power, a little more power, most power, most impact. So the same way a boxer would shift their weight forward, I typically get onto my front foot first to bounce the ball. That's part of my routine. Then, kind of like a server in tennis, right? They step back and they'll often step forward. I like to step back, shift my weight from my front foot to my back foot, and then back to my front foot to actually go and swing. And one of the things about this is like, there's a lot of ways to hit the ball hard, but what we want to do is have effortless, efficient power because what that's going to do is it's going to allow you to be more consistent.
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Here's the third mistake that steals power from players: they're stiff. So they have a stiff body, right? Even if they shift their weights and they have a stiff arm, they have a stiff body, they have a stiff arm. Part of what helps you hit efficiently with a lot of power is actually having a loose body, a loose arm, and accelerating through. I've realized this recently in my own game. The more I try to guide the ball in, the harder it is to actually control the direction it goes. So I want to accelerate through the swing because acceleration actually gives me control. So, how do we do it? Two ways. Take a deep breath before you serve. It'll relax your... Get your ass back trying to get the ball out the side. You're being distracted. I swear. I'm kind of... Are you kidding me? I invite you to my film shoot. I pay you as much money as I pay you. So, how do you, how do you do it? There's two ways. Number one, take a deep breath. It'll relax your body. Okay, so I take a deep breath. I do this a lot before I serve, and then I just want to loosen up my grip. The tighter I have my grip, the stiffer I'm going to be overall. The tighter my grip, the stiffer I am. So I'm going to loosen up my grip. Okay, I take a couple bounces before I'm going to lean back, and I'm just going to, and I'm going to shift my weight forward, and I'm just going to be loose with my arm. Okay, well, I like that. Isn't that actually pretty crazy how much more power you get? Try that one time. Take a deep breath, loosen up your arm. Wow. Let me actually try with my, uh, with my left. That actually looked pretty good. Wow. Okay, I'm learning how to hit with my left. This is actually a good test of what I just talked to you about. So let me loosen my grip. Yeah, I felt better. You couldn't see any of the outcomes, but they all hit the net. So let me add one addition to this. The, the looseness. What naturally happened when you were just hitting two is you, you, you naturally had some rotational power. Rotational power. It's in every sport. What's the sport itself? In golf, golf, right? Rotational power. Here, you would never hit a golf swing like this because one, that probably hurt, but two, the ball wouldn't go anywhere. What's another sport? Baseball. Baseball, same exact thing. Same thing. You're closed. Volleyball. Volleyball. Um, the one that people might not think about, but Tyler and I used to coach basketball for a long time, is basketball. When you look at guys back who were shooting in the 70s and 80s, they all shot squared up to the rim and they pushed the ball, but they weren't shooting from very far. But then you get a guy like Steph Curry or Damian Lillard or Caitlin Clark, and they're all turning and using rotational power to be able to generate, to be able to generate more power to be able to shoot from a greater distance. It's the same thing here, right? So if I'm here and I don't actually use my hips, I'm stealing power. Can you still hit it hard? Sure. But the moment you do all these things and you actually rotate your hips, and that's one of the things Ty that you mentioned that I really like is that by getting your foot forward, you actually kind of naturally doing it. This is a hard one for me to teach just because I'm not, not having a tennis background, like the, the whip of the wrist. So I'm going to do my best here. But one of the ways to generate topspin, right, is you have the paddle, and when the paddle tilts down this way and it lifts up on the ball, that's where topspin is generated, right? If I hit the ball here and I come through it, that's going to be backspin. So that's the general way. Now, to generate even more topspin, I want to have a bit of a looser wrist that allows for the wrist to actually lag a little bit and whip through. I mean, we're two basketball guys, so we're giving you our, giving you my best tennis type teaching. But I think one other thing I've heard, there's a lot of people play pickleball that don't come from a tennis background, they need these. Because it's that's a great point. Another thing I, I, I've tried a lot when I, I think it was my left hand, how I started learning a lot, cuz I hurt my wrist, so I was playing lefty, is I actually, I wouldn't whip my wrist very much, but to generate topspin, I would just tilt my paddle. I'm a left, playing lefty, but I would just tilt my paddle here and brush up on the ball, right? So the whip of the wrist is an advanced concept. You don't need it to hit with more power. The most important thing is getting your weight shift transferred forward and using rotational power, right? But then if I get my paddle tip tilted down, right, I'm here. One side note, like I would sacrifice some power to be able to hit the ball deep into the court. If you tilt your paddle up to down, shift back, lift up, you can still hit with quite a bit of power, even if you're not whipping your wrist. But then if you do whip your wrist, I like Tyler's. Cuz imagine your pointer finger's down, okay? If I took it off and you're going to whip it over, so it goes from down to up, is that correct? That's correct. From down to up. Well, I kind of like that. I'm your coach.
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All right, here's number five on the serve: it's the jam toss. So if I go exaggerated a little bit, like some people will toss the ball with a bent arm, maybe not this much, but the moment you bend your arm like this, everything gets jammed in, and then you can't use your kinetic chain, per se. It's a big word. I see that a lot, for what it's worth. I see that, I see that a ton. Looking across the net, it's right here, and it's like, I see a ton of that. That's pretty powerful. Instead of that, I would extend my arm either all the way out. Now, for your serve, for the record, some tours right now, we're in 2024, if you're seeing this video, but there's some serve rules. Say you have to drop it from your hand, top of your hand being up. Some say you can still do it with a slight toss. So look up the serve rules before you play in whatever event you're playing in. But for now, I'm just going to keep my hand on top of the ball. So I am either all the way extended, or maybe have a slight bend in my arm here. And I also don't want to drop it over here because then I have to like, I have to like come around and hit the ball, right? So what I really want to do is have the ball probably, let me think about this for a second. If I'm looking at this camera, and this is my stance, my arm is at a, probably what angle is this off of what, off of my body? Oh, you're about like, uh, 45 degrees. Oh, okay. So about a 45-degree angle to the side. It's actually almost in line with, it's almost in line with my paddle, so I can use the leverage, rotational power to actually swing through and make contact. This is kind of a surprising one, and it's good to hear you say that, because the toss being in the wrong location will affect everything. And if you're doing all the other stuff, it doesn't really matter because you're probably going to end up missing because it'll hurt your direction. Yeah. So anything else? Like if you're throwing a baseball, like you're taught to extend, right? You get extension for power. It's the same thing on the serve. We want to get extended, right? So if we stay jammed up in here, we're limiting our... You have to extend for power. So we're here, extend, and then get into your power. Yeah, it's a little like overheads too. Here, to extend. It's all like basketball. I extend to shoot.
All right, so those are five things. Let me give you a bonus, though. Maybe two bonuses, maybe real quick. Bonus: Can you give the martial arts comparison? Yeah. When trying to break a brick or break a board, you make an explosive breath to tap into maximum power. That's why in tennis, you hear all the grunting and groaning, which I wish we heard more on the pickleball court. Okay, let's do it together one time. All right. Then here's the final bonus, and I don't know if it's a mistake or it's a thing. I'll just tell you what it is. It's fear. It's a mistake. Sorry, I'm getting emotional. No, it's true. Like, you can practice having all the big serves in the world that you want. It's something I practiced for a long time, and then when you go up to your match, fear often enters your mind, and you're afraid to miss. So two things. Number one, you have to start to adopt the mindset of courage, especially when you're practicing. And one of the things I do when I drill serves and returns is we'll actually give the server two serves just to like, give him freedom to miss because you do want to try to get the ball deep into the court as often as possible because it will give you an advantage and a point. So adopting a mindset of courage is number one. And then a physical cue when you're actually playing is, especially when you're feeling nervous, if you're at a tournament, or you're in some type of league match, or you're playing with better players that you want to impress so they invite you to more games, is to take a deep breath right before serving. I mentioned it earlier, but it matters so much. And then just send it. And if you do those five plus two things, you will serve harder. You will avoid slow serves. You will gain more advantages. That's a wrap. This is serve video. Hard to hit harder at your serve. I stumbled there. That we cut that. We cut that. Yeah. All right, talk to y'all soon.
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