Cart Wheel Your Serve Properly

Serves have become bigger and bigger each year. Besides it being the most important shot, it also makes your life easier when you can add power to it. I want to explain to you why the cartwheel on the tennis serve is one of the most important technical elements that you need to possess. In fact, it is a fundamental element that should be present on all serves, whether you're hitting a flat, slice, or kick serve.

What is a cartwheel? Well, if you aren't familiar with the term, a cartwheel is basically a move where you start standing up and then you roll your body over, your hands, and your feet go up into the air. This is somewhat similar on a tennis serve, and a lot of recreational players have a mistake in their toss arm positioning that prevents them from executing a proper cartwheel.

What happens to a lot of players at the rec level is that they toss the ball, but they don't continue to go up with the toss arm so that the shoulders are level. You can imagine that if I don't continue to go up with my toss arm, the left shoulder and the right shoulder are on the same level. As a result, today I will teach you how to do it correctly.

Proper Cartwheel

What should happen is the following: you should toss the ball and then continue to go up with your toss arm so that the non-dominant shoulder goes above the dominant shoulder, and you create a tilted position in your trophy phase. When you achieve that tilt, naturally, as you go up into the contact, you will cartwheel into the contact. This is something that will happen naturally; you are unlikely to continue to stay up with your left side if you allow the racket to go up towards the ball naturally.

A common question that is received is whether we should consciously pull down the toss arm after we have achieved the tilted position. This is something that you definitely shouldn't do because you're going to time your cartwheel the wrong way. In other words, if I consciously drag down my toss arm, I'm likely going to do this too fast, too early. I'm not going to time it right, and it's going to destroy the very important vertical momentum. You don't need to manufacture this movement; this will naturally happen as you start to go up towards the ball.

Now, the important thing for you to remember is that you need to create a tilt, and then as you go up naturally, that left side is going to go down.

Trophy Position

The tennis serve is one of the most unique movements in sports, and it is not really like a cartwheel. I'm going to tell you this because when we do a cartwheel, our upper body is straight, but we don't want to serve like that because we're not going to be able to maximize our vertical momentum. Therefore, what should we do in the trophy phase of our serve?

We should bend our knees, we should bend our body slightly forward and slightly backward if your body allows you to do this. Clearly, this is not how you would set up a cartwheel. What this means is that the cartwheel is going to be intact as we serve, but at the same time, the body is also going to straighten. Let me explain to you what that looks like.

As my body is straightening from a bent position, several things happen as a result of it. I will be leaping off the ground because that vertical momentum is propelling me upwards. But not only that, because I'm doing a cartwheel simultaneously, you will see that my back foot is coming off the ground first. You take a look at any high-level player, you will see that the back foot always comes off the ground first.

In other words, as the feet are leaving the ground, the front foot will leave the ground last, and this is a direct result of the cartwheel. It makes sense; as our body is going down on this side, the right side of the body will go up, which will naturally pull our back foot off the ground first.

Now, should you pay attention to this? Absolutely not. This will happen naturally; there's absolutely no adjustment that you need to make. Like I said, what you need to do is load the body correctly and then just simply unload it. All these things that I just talked about will happen naturally.

Racket Drop

Once again, you're going to have to put your body in the tilt; you're gonna have to bend your knees, get on your toes, maybe bend your body forward and backward a little bit. And now here comes the important thing. You're gonna have to drop your racket and unload your body simultaneously. Where a lot of recreational players get in trouble is that they are dropping the racket in isolation, which ends up in a racket drop leak.

If the racket drop is occurring in isolation, the body gets unloaded much later. If you have a racket drop leak, in other words, if you are not unloading the body simultaneously with dropping the racket, you're going to have a big problem. Your vertical momentum, in other words, your cartwheel and the straightening of the body, will be affected negatively by you leaking your racket drop.

Forward Momentum

Have you ever noticed that the pros land inside the court? This is actually a direct result of the players throwing the ball in front of the baseline. If the players were indeed throwing the ball more behind the baseline, they would land behind the baseline. Naturally, when the ball is in front of the baseline, what will need to happen is that the body has to go forward in order to adjust to a toss that's more inside of the baseline. Where this happens naturally, players land inside out of the court. Let me demonstrate that. Imagine throwing a ball more behind the baseline.

You'll see here that you will end up landing with my non-dominant foot behind the baseline. Now go out and toss in front of the baseline. You will see that you will land inside the baseline. The thing that you have to keep in mind is that you have to lean your body slightly forward as that toss is inside of the baseline. This will naturally allow you to land inside that baseline and get that so important forward momentum.

Now go ahead and imagine what happens to the service motion if you don't have the cartwheel. Try to execute the forward momentum. Do everything else the same. I myself would still bend my knees and bend my body and try to go upwards without having the cartwheel. Try it and see what happens to your serve if you do all those things.

Final Thoughts

At the amateur level, I can assure you that our serves aren’t perfect by any means, but one with a cartwheel will look a lot more athletic than one without the cartwheel. As a result, this proves that the cartwheel on the serve is one of the most important power sources that you need to utilize. There's a tremendous amount of power stored in the reversal of the shoulder positions.

When I reverse my shoulder positions, I'm able to accelerate upwards a lot more. There's a lot more range of motion compared to a serve that doesn't have a cartwheel. It goes to show you that possessing the cartwheel is one of the most important fundamental elements that you need to learn on the tennis court.