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Welcome to the Atlanta Tennis Podcast.

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With that said, let's get started with 10 minutes of tennis.

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Justin Yo, today 10 minutes of tennis. Justin is our world-renowned tennis coach,

Australian in Puerto Rico. And right now, he's not in Puerto Rico, looks like he's in a car.

But today, we're going to talk about the serve.

And you say you've got some easy tricks.

Or is it tricks for an easy serve?

Or is it easy tricks for a better serve?

What are the tricks easy?

Or is this something that's going to make my serve easy?

Where are we going with this, Justin?

Wow, that's, yeah, you said it.

It's a lot of questions for 10 minutes of swear on the serve.

But the serve, probably the easiest trick in the world is,

I've had, I've probably had two things that have really

based my career on teaching serves.

And that is just teaching people how to throw.

Learning how to use the palm down.

Learning how to use the two fingers on the ball,

because that tends to be where you snap on the racket.

Learning how to use left and right arm together as a combination.

Learning how to rotate your hips, because you're driving your serve as your back hip.

It's not necessary, you shoulder.

Yeah, and then teaching a female how to serve like a female in a male,

serve like a male, that's another whole 10 minutes of tennis on a tone.

Deal, I already have that.

Yeah, well, people don't understand this, and this is where it goes wrong even on the tool level.

If you try to teach a female to serve like a male, it just can't happen for the reason that

a male uses his torso and rotates a lot from there.

A female tends to use her legs more because she's about two-third legs.

And so she drives a lot from her legs, the men drive a lot from their torso.

And so you have to teach to serve differently for that reason.

That's why we see a lot of females with a more modified style looking serve.

And you see the guys with a bigger, bigger wind up.

Females has been proven over the last, I don't know, at least 20 years,

that majority of their issues, they usually tear abdominals or shoulder joint because they are

serving like a male and winding up too far and not using enough legs.

So there's a lot of factors that need to go right when teaching a serve

for male and female, but I would say the biggest thing of all is teaching them how to throw.

The amount of people even male and female.

So as a trick, and I'm going to say, all right, I'm going to ask for one to three tricks and say,

okay, there's one trick. Throwing gets me that snapping thing. Is it the elbow back?

What about the throw? And that maybe again, is it's only, it's only 10 minutes or 10 minutes.

But the throw, all the things, the components with that, it's the snap of the wrist,

but it's also the elbow back versus the elbow forward like the baby throw.

Right. Usually easiest way is to teach slight rotation.

Because when you rotate, you generate from the hip so you're already learning that,

you're already learning the internal muscles of internal rotation around the core.

But what that does is it tends to break away from the elbow leading this way, because as you turn,

you start to generate a decent throw. But it is amazing how many people that struggle to throw,

that obviously then struggle to serve. So I've taught a lot of, especially females,

how to serve correctly just by teaching them how to throw. And utilize the left and the right.

A lot of people struggle to use both together. It's a coordination thing that they, you know.

Obviously junior development, every kid should be learning how to throw, even the little girls,

especially throwing is, you learn weight transfer, you learn angular rotation of the upper body,

you learn linear movement between the legs, you learn rhythm around the whole body,

you're learning all the mechanics coming together to generate the pace on the ball. So there's a lot of

factors that happen from the age of young, from learning how to throw and palm down. I mean, palm

down is the absolute. If I was going to say if there's nothing that's a trick, but a fundamental that

has to happen is palm down. Okay. Tell me about palm down. Well palm down, you're using, when you go to

throw, you're using your mechanics correctly, you're using your pack, use your shoulder, and then

everything joins forces to let go. If you don't have palm down, the first thing you're going to do is

lose the pack, and you use your shoulder joint incorrectly, you also can't use the shoulder,

tend to be external rotation because you're already, you're already up. See? So palm down allows the

external rotation of the shoulder as well, which is where you generate a lot as well. So there's a lot of

factor. The leader tree thing with everybody can be perfect. Yeah, yeah, the bartender serve. Yep,

you get rid of that. But the palm down is definitely probably the number one thing that you want to

make sure every, every child or every person is learning to throw. They have to learn from here and

learn what it feels like to get all the mechanics to go together. And that's probably the biggest trick.

You know, obviously then when you're teaching to throw, you want to throw towards the sky versus

throw down towards the net because they're in a tennis serve. You're going this way. You're not going down.

But overall, once they learn how to throw and probably another one is the chicken wings. If they

learn how to get the chicken wings going, they tend to learn how to get the elbow there and get the

other arm going at the same time. So that's an easy way to get both arms going as well.

Well, in the chicken wing, you have to use as a good thing on the serve because we always say that's

a bad thing on the forehand, right? Yeah, well, it's not that bad on the forehand though because

on the forehand, it all depends on the wind up. You know, if you haven't got time, then you don't

want to have that big chicken wing. But you've got time. Yes, it's been a very effective way of

wind up on the forehand. But yes, on the serve, the chicken wing is hard to express in the car, but

the whole concept is to get both arms going at the same time so that you get into a position where

one elbow is one way and then the other chicken wings there, but really it's an extension doing a full length.

Okay, so what we have to do one on court with this is a follow up. It makes me think there you go.

There you go. You've said also that you've taught some former volleyball players and some former

baseball players. I think that's a nice incoming client, so to speak. Like if you've done some

previous sporting, maybe quarter back obviously, but if you've done some previous sporting and you've

done some catch and throw, you're serve. I've seen this in my career as well. You see that one adult

that just has the serve that seems to work better than the rest of them. You can always ask and

every single time they've played some sort of sport where they were throwing as a kid.

Yeah, well, we haven't got enough time for that one because that's we can do a quick intro, but that's

what I call mind mapping and we've talked about this before. We're basically the person already has

a short throwing action, which means really you should be designing a short serve versus a long

serve. I learned very quickly in a I met a baseball recruiter going from US to Australia on the

plane one time and that was over 20 years ago and he was explaining to me that he recruited people by

the way they threw for the position on the field and what that made me realize is if you look at someone's

throw, see what's already mechanically automatic for them and then you build the serve around that.

That is a lot smarter way of doing things than trying to build everybody with the same serve.

It just doesn't work. It does naturally, exactly. Correct. Correct. And so I have a volleyball player

right now. She was a very high level volleyball player just started learning tennis and we built her

server in a volleyball serve and she crushes it. As you say, let me guess her serve is the best thing

about her game. It is definitely her best thing about a game. It's our word and she just and we don't

have to work on it because she just I built it around her volleyball serve. We just released the ball.

Her elbow is too high, but it's where she's used to being. It's where she's easy to just let go and serve.

And it's effective. She can place it anywhere she wants and that's all she needs on a serve.

So, and the greatest thing about the volleyball service, she doesn't like overfollow through at the

end and not being prepared for the next ball. So it's really to her advantage to just use what she

knows that she's done a million times and that makes it really effective serve. I love it. So my my tricks,

I've got calm down. Yep, and that is part of the throw or do I also need to just go play catch with

my kids and that's going to help my serve anything else for 100% playing catches the best thing you

could do and it's giving you time when you kid at the same time playing catch and family time. That's

fantastic. Absolutely, but throwing throwing is the biggest trick with palm down if it was you know

without going into all the other thousands of things that we can do. Yep, and it really does help.

Obviously serving towards a target too is a good trick because it teaches them to let go towards

something because that's eventually what's going to control the racket face. So there's another trick.

I like it. A bonus trick. Justin, yo Australian in Tampa, usually in Puerto Rico. I appreciate it.

Thanks, mate. We'll talk soon. Well, there you have it. We want to thank Rejovenate.com for

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