Fastest Tennis Serve Secrets Of Roddick Serve

Here we reveal secrets of fastest tennis serve i.e. Roddick Serve. It's inevitable. When a player reaches the top of the pro game, players and coaches begin talking about his or her strokes differently. Slowly but surely the references to the dominant players of the previous generation fade away.

When it comes to the serve, we are going through one of these transitions, from the glorification of Pete Sampras to the glorification of fastest tennis serve of Andy Roddick. It's analogous to what happened when Sampras displaced John McEnroe fifteen years ago.

I see the transition when I talk with junior coaches. Up until last year, most coaches still wanted to study Pete. The Advanced Tennis high speed video of Pete and the talks I did about his motion at coaching conventions were phenomenally popular.

I also did dozens of side by side filming comparisons using Pete as a model for competitive junior and club players. The impact of his unbelievable clutch serving and his gorgeous, fluid motion lingered well after his retirement.

But in the last year the conversation has shifted. Now these same coaches are asking me for high speed footage of Roddick Serve. No one talks directly about this shfit. It's more subtle than that. It's just become part of the atmosphere. When coaches discuss serving technique of fastest tennis serve they say things like, "Andy does this," or, "Andy does that," as the reference points in their arguments.

It wasn't like that when Andy was coming up. It fact, it was the opposite. Many if not most coaches and "expert" commentators said that Andy's motion, in particular that distinctive, super abbreviated windup, was dangerous and unsound. The conventional wisdom was that Roddick was going to tear up his shoulder and ruin his career.

One exception was Rick Macci, a coach who actually worked with Andy. Rick helped him develop his serving fundamentals when he was around 11 years old. In his article, Rick turns the argument about Roddick's "dangerous" motion on its head. He believes that the problem was never with Andy's fastest tennis serve.

The problem was with the so-called experts who didn't know what they were seeing. "Experts" fear what they don't understand. And Andy's motion was definitely different. Rather than really try to understand what was happening, the predominant response was to assume there must be something wrong with Andy's motion and dismiss it as dangerous.

All that started to change when Andy got to number one in the world and won the U.S. Open. Suddenly Roddick serve didn't look quite so weird. Junior players started trying to emulate Andy's abbreviated windup. A poll showed that over 50 percent of adult club players wanted to copy Andy's motion! And across the country, coaches who had criticized him vehemently began telling their students they had the secret to hitting the150 mph bomb, just like Andy fastest tennis serve.

I had an experience like that with a friend of mine who is a top junior coach in Northern California. He introduced me at a presentation I was giving to coaches and players that included some high speed video of Roddick's fastest tennis serve. As part of his introduction, he gave an impassioned warning about the dangers of copying Roddick's motion.

But after the presentation, he called me and got the Roddick DVD footage. A week later he called again to say that one of the elements I'd identified in Roddick's was a "jewel," and that a college player he coached had tried it and suddenly made a big jump in his serving velocity. (More on what that "jewel" was later on.) That kind of transition from critic to advocate is common in junior coaching, because it's all about referencing the top players. And now the move from Pete's serve to Roddick serve is approaching a landslide.

But let's go back to the original question, and ask what is really happening in Andy's motion. Are there actually valid reasons why coaches should be looking at him as the new model? How does Roddick's fastest tennis serve actually stack up technically compared with Pete?

In the series on Pete's serve (tennisplayer.net), we saw that Sampras had a unique combination of ball speed and ball spin that probably made his serve "heavier" than other players of his generation. We found that there were players that served as fast or faster than Pete. We found players who served with as much spin or more spin. But we didn't find many players serving as fast as Pete with as much spin. His first serve averaged about 118 mph with total spin of about 2500 rpm.

Then Andy came along. We recently had the opportunity to do high speed filming of his spin rates. This allowed us to compare Andy and Pete quantitatively. The results were surprising. My hunch was that Andy was hitting the ball harder but flatter. But the numbers showed something else. Andy was definitely hitting the ball significantly harder, but at the same time he was actually generating virtually the same amount of spin as Pete. Roddick, it appeared, was taking the "heavy ball" to a new level in his fastest tennis serve.

On the dozen or so serves we measured, Andy averaged about 130mph with a spin rate of 2400 rpm. That compares to Sampras at 118 mph and 2500 rpm. It appears then that Andy is transferring more total energy to the ball. To do this, Roddick must also be generating more racket head speed. But the question is, how? Does this racket-head speed relate to his motion? Is it just his raw physical ability? Is his abbreviated wind-up the key? Or is it also something else about the technical shape of the motion itself that may actually be different than the other top players?

Normally I'm leery when people say "I have the Gustavo Kuerten forehand," or "Can you teach me the Tommy Haas backhand?" or "I want the Andy Roddick serve," as if the signature strokes of certain players were somehow technically unique. The core elements in good stroke production are usually very similar from player to player. The problem is that these commonalities aren't always obvious to the naked eye. In the effort to find the secret of some pro player's stroke like Roddick's fastest tennis serve, lower level players end up copying the individual idiosyncrasies--and unfortunately--frequently exaggerating them. This is usually at the expense of the underlying fundamentals.

But you know what? Roddick may be the exception. When we look at Andy's motion in high speed video, there are significant differences in the biomechanics of his motion, compared to other top servers. These technical differences may help to account for his supersonic delivery, and his ability to combine new levels of ball speed with heavy spin. Whether other players should copy these elements of fastest tennis serve or not, well, that is another question. We'll address that at the end.

Let's take a look at his fastest tennis serve from the ground up and in particular, at three factors. The first is his serving stance and the related leg action as he goes upward to the ball. The second is his body turn. Third, is his swing path. This is where we get to the invisible part.

We can see that Roddick Serve has a different wind up, that much is obvious. What the high speed video shows is that Roddick also has a different swing path upward to the ball. This variation in the racket path would be difficult, if not impossible, with a conventional windup. For all the talk about Roddick's motion pro and con, these differences have gone completely unrecognized by coaches and commentators. This is because they happen so fast. they are literally invisible to the human eye. They are too fast for TV cameras and other standard speed video as well. It takes a much higher frame rate to see the fastest tennis serve. But the differences magically appear when you look at his motion at 250 frames per second.

The video also reveals that the overall timing of his motion is different than other top players. These differences are all interrelated and part of a new biomechanical synthesis. When we look at them together we can see his racket-head speed as it develops literally frame by frame.

Let's start by taking a look at Roddick's stance, and let's see how this is related to the use of his legs. Unlike the supersonic movement of his hand and racket around the contact, these elements aren't invisible, but you do have to look closely to see them with the naked eye. All the top players have some differences in their stances, many of which are idiosyncratic or ritualistic and/or irrelevant to the actual bio-mechanics of their motions. But with Roddick, his narrow starting stance makes a difference in the way he uses his legs in the fastest tennis serve.

Roddick starts with both feet almost parallel to the baseline, with the front toe at a slight angle. What makes this different is that the feet are only a few inches apart. The back, right foot is also offset behind about 6 inches to his left. It appears that the tip of the toe of his back foot is roughly lined up with the middle of his front ankle. I don't think we've filmed another player with a similar stance. But what is more unusual is what happens to this stance as the motion starts.

At the start of the motion, Roddick does something I've never seen in a high level player. He moves the front foot backwards, narrowing the stance even further. Just as the knees are starting to bend he picks up his front foot off the court and actually steps back probably 2 or 3 inches. At the same time he turns the heel slightly backward on an angle. The heel of his front foot is now no more than a couple of inches from touching his rear shoe. Maybe you've noticed this movement watching Andy play. But when you see it for the first time, especially on video, it looks bizarre.

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But that's not all that is different in his stance. As Roddick moves the front foot back, his rear knee comes forward so that his weight shifts more forward onto the toes of his rear foot. Then he reverses course. His knee actually moves back the other way, so that his weight shifts backwards again. The result is that his weight is much more on the ball of his rear foot. He completes this shift just as both knees reach the point of maximum bend during fastest tennis serve.

Notice how Roddick shifts his weight to the back foot at the maximum knee bend.

What's the effect? The distribution of his weight in the narrow stance makes it possible for Roddick to push off with both feet. He gets a very deep knee bend--probably equal to any player, including Sampras. And this knee bend combined with the push from both feet gives him tremendous leg drive. Unlike most players, he takes advantage of that deep knee bend in both legs to hit fastest tennis serve. (Interestingly, another player who does this appears to be Maria Sharapova).

Leg Drive and the Stances

There has been a lot of discussion, in tennis coaching and also in the Forum on Tennisplayer, about the role of the stance in creating leg drive. Check out Bruce Elliot's great article on the Power fastest tennis serve, in which he finds pluses and minuses to both stances. You can also compare it to my article in the Advanced Tennis section for an argument that the platform stance is superior.

Obviously, there have been (and will be) great servers using both stances. But one of the main claims about the advantages of the pinpoint doesn't hold up if we scrutinize the high speed video carefully. This argument is that players with the pinpoint stance automatically push with both feet and therefore get higher off the court and further upwards to the ball.

It's commonly believed, but it's not true. The video shows that the majority of pinpoint players don't really push off the back foot, or at best they get a minimal additional push. Some pinpoint servers like Greg Rusedski slide the back foot up until they are standing on the tips of their toes. This makes it very difficult to push with the back foot. Try it yourself. .Stand up on your tip toes and try to jump up and maximize your vertical leap. It's hard to get very far up in the air off your toes.

The feet of many "pinpoint" players like Phillippoussis leave the court at different times.

Other pinpoint servers like Mark Philippoussis don't come up on the back toes. But if you look at the timing of when the feet leave the court, you can see that the back foot isn't really pushing. This is because the back foot leaves the court well before the front foot. If you really were pushing with any force with the back foot, it would lift your whole body up off the court-. Your feet would leave the court at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Stand up and just push up hard off the balls of your back foot. You can't keep the front foot on the court, even if you try. But the pinpoint players don't do that. They leave with the back foot first with the front foot still down. What really happens is that the back foot gets pulled along by the action of the front foot and the front leg.(See theMyth of the Pinpoint Stance here)

The leg drive for both the platform and the traditional pinpoint players comes mainly from the front foot. But Roddick's fastest tennis serve appears to be the exception. The video shows that Roddick actually does push off with both legs. In fact the push from the rear leg appears to be about the same as the push from the front leg, or just slightly less. Roddick doesn't stand up on his back toes to hit fastest tennis serve. He pushes off with the balls of his back foot, the way the way the other players push with their front foot. His feet leave the court at almost exactly the same point in time.

Roddick's leg drive comes from the narrow stance, a deep knee bend and the push off from the balls of both feet.

For Roddick, this push with both feet is possible because of the narrow stance. Again, try it yourself right now. Stand up and narrow up your stance like Roddick. Push off upward and to the left. You'll feel it. With the narrow stance you can actually get a good push from the back feet. You'll feel that your feet leave the court at the same time.

Once we understand how Roddick is pushing during fastest tennis serve, we get a possible clue why he picks up the front foot and moves it back. It's probably related to finding just the right spacing for that narrow stance. In addition to giving him a better base to push from, it's also conceivable that picking up the foot and then putting it down actually increases the loading in the muscles compared to the equivalent stationary position (as suggested to me by Scott Riewald, the head of sports science at USA Tennis High Performance.)

However it works, there is no doubt that Roddick gets massive leg drive during fastest tennis serve. If you look at how high Andy gets in the air, and how far he lands inside the court, he's at the top or near the top in both dimensions compared to the other top servers.

The Role of Body Rotation

This close up reveals how Roddick gets as far into the air--and into the court--as any player.

When it comes to another major factor in the service motion, however, Andy's stance appears to be a limiting factor. This is body rotation-- the turn away from the ball in the wind-up and then the rotation of the body back the other way into the contact. Andy does have a discernable body turn, but it's nowhere near as much as Sampras or even Roger Federer.

This is due to the positioning of his feet in the stance. The narrow stance makes it impossible. Sampras and Federer are probably the two players with the greatest amount of body rotation. They both start with much more of an offset between the back and the front foot, and then turn away from the ball on the line of this stance. (To see my Sampras stance article, Click Here.) This gives them both more rotation forward into the hit.

But this rotational pattern away from and back to the ball takes time. The rhythm of Andy's fastest tennis serve is way too fast for that. This is due to his relatively low toss and fast wind-up. If we count the frames in the high speed video, it takes Andy less than a second to reach his maximum turn position away from the ball. By comparison, it takes Sampras about 1-1/2 seconds. From the turn it takes Pete another second to rotate back the other way and reach the contact. Andy goes from his turn position to the contact in two-thirds of that.

Even with the narrow stance, Roddick manages to achieve a significant turn.

Because he does have some offset between his feet in his stance, Roddick is able to create some body turn. This has got to be an overall positive factor in his motion. He actually turns more than many other pro players, even players with slower motions and wider starting stances. It's just not nearly as much as the more extreme platform players. It appears that this is the trade off he makes for being able to push off with both feet to hit the fastest tennis serve, and it's not possible to have it both ways.

So those are the first two factors. His leg drive and body turn are key pieces in the puzzle to understanding Andy's fastest tennis serve. The video makes it clear. And if you know what to look for, you can see these factors at work watching Andy's matches.

Now let's turn to the invisible elements and use the magic of high-speed video to look Andy's controversial wind up and his unique swing path to the ball, something we are analyzing here for the first time. They help to unlock the secrets of how he is able to generate new levels of racket-head speed and ball speed while still maintaining fearsome levels of spin.

Resources : www.active.com

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