90% Of Serve Power Comes From The Arm

The serve is super complex. There are lots of moving parts that occur at the same time. You have the toss, which has to be super precise, while worrying about bending your knees to store energy. Then, you have the trophy position in which you try to think about coaling in the midst of the same milliseconds. Later on, there is the racket drop and pronation. “Did I open my strings up too soon” is probably what you have asked yourself. However, what if all of this didn’t actually matter.

By sitting in a chair, you will still be getting good speed. You get possibly 80 or maybe even 90 percent of my power from the arm action alone. Now, it's not truly the arm action alone. Naturally, when we serve, there's going to be torso rotation involved. So the torso, even when I'm sitting down, is helping the arm to accelerate more. Nevertheless, the fact is that the arm action is truly responsible for the vast majority of power on the tennis serve.

Standing vs Sitting

Yes, there is a difference, of course. Just by looking at the speed of the serve, the one from the chair is slower. But how much slower? I would guess it's somewhere between 10 and 20 miles an hour, which means that most of the power comes from the arm action. But I don't want you to get confused with the message that I'm bringing to you in today's article.

You are not supposed to serve from the chair. Neither is it a good idea to go up to the baseline and arm the serve. Why don't you want to do this? Well, if you do this over a long period of time, there's a high risk of injury. In other words, the arm is not supported by the body. The body's number one job is to support the arm. Of course, the body does add power, not as much as some people think. Once again, I would guess it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of additional power from the body.

Isolating The Arm

The overall context is even more important than the actual additional power that you get from the body. You are accommodating your arm by using your body and therefore protecting it. Not only will this protect you from potentially getting injured, but it also feels a hundred times better to use the entire body that's supporting the arm movement than just to stand there and use the arm in isolation. Try to sprint without using your arms; it seems impossible to me.

Not utilizing your whole body on the serve just feels awful. I actually feel something in my shoulder, as opposed to a serve where I'm using my entire body. That serve will always feel super effortless. It feels as if I wasn't even using the arm at all. And that is the key. You have to utilize the power sources on the serve to support the arm, and the serve should feel as if you're not using the arm at all.

Power Sources

So what are the power sources? I like to use a ruler, which is a good illustration of how the body should be loaded on the serve. Basically, have one end of the ruler on one side and the other end of the ruler on the other, and where the body is loaded somewhere in the middle. So let me break down the four power sources on the serve.

The two power sources that you are able to utilize on the chair were swing momentum and angular momentum, which I call rotational momentum. Basically, by swinging the arm, you do get some swing momentum. Of course, this will depend on your style of serve. There are some serve styles that will give you more momentum than other serves. For example, a serve with the lag has a continuous motion, and you will be able to generate more swing momentum from that particular style.

In addition to that, naturally on the serve, there's going to be torso rotation, which gives you additional power. If you are able to coil your body and get the elbow on the outside, you are going to increase this torso rotation and potentially get even more power. Now be conscious of the fact that coiling a lot is not something that everybody can do.

Some players are not able to get out of a coil that's too large. The minimum amount of coil that you need on the serve is your elbow being in line with your torso. If you can get away with going further back, by all means, continue doing so. Therefore, swing momentum and rotational momentum are two important power sources that will give you a tremendous amount of heat on the serve.

Momentum

The next power source I'm going to explain is probably my favorite one, which I call forward momentum. Take a look at any high-level server; you will see that they land inside the court on the vast majority of their flat and their slice serve. Now, this landing inside the court is correlated to a toss that's inside the baseline and also to the body leaning forward into the ball. In other words, the entire body weight is going into the contact.

Some people are of the belief that there is no forward momentum on a kick serve. I'm here to tell you that there is. When you observe high-level players or elite-level players, you'll see that they land inside the court even when they're hitting a kick serve. Thus, even though you are going to throw the ball further behind than you would on a flat or a slice serve, there's no doubt about that. You still want to lean in and get your body into the court, ideally making contact right above your head.

And last but not least, the fourth power source on the serve is vertical momentum. There are several actions of the body that make the player go upwards. First of all, players achieve a tilt in their loading phase in their trophy position, and that tilt is reversed. So this reversal action of the tilt, accompanied with the rotation of the torso, is an upward force and propels the player violently upwards. But that is not all.

Tilting

Players will also get on their toes, they will bend their knees. We're also going to get into some stylistic elements where some players will arc their body backward in what is a reverse C formation. Other players will instead do a forward reverse C. The greatest servers of all time will do a combination of all that. For example, Pete Sampras, where he has a forward C, and a backward C and an extremely large coil and an extremely large tilt. So when the body is loaded in this particular way, the explosive movement upwards is so violent that the player gets propelled off the ground by a lot.

Now, listen, some of these things are stylistic, so you can't necessarily serve like Sampras if it doesn't suit your body type. But here's the thing that you've got to do: the tilting. It doesn't really require any athletic abilities, so anybody can achieve a tilt, and anybody can reverse a tilt. How much you load your body is going to depend on your physical limitations, but everybody can get on their toes and bend their knees. That is what you can do. You're going to have a coil and how much backward and forwards you can bend; you've got to test this out.

Final Thoughts

Please understand the message of this article. Yes, a lot of the power comes out of the arm action. But most importantly, this applies to players of all levels. The arm action needs to be supported by the body to prevent you from injuries and to make the serve motion more effortless. On top of that, you do get additionally up to 20 percent more power by using the body's power sources.

One caveat is that if you're doing progressions, if you're learning a serve, wait on the power sources. Then there's no problem to serve stationary, and as you get comfortable with the swing path of the racket with a looping action of the racket, you can slowly start incorporating more power sources. Eventually one day you can support your arm perfectly by utilizing all four power sources on your serve.