During a tennis match games are won or lost on the effectiveness of the serve. The serve acts as the start of each point and when utilised correctly can provide the offensive advantage, making the serve one of the most important skills a tennis player can acquire. The foremost purpose of the serve is to successfully hit the ball into the opponents serve box. In terms of offence the serve lets the player assert control of the ball, dictating as to how their opponents must counteract while minimising the reaction time due to the immense amounts of velocity delivered behind the ball if done correctly. There are many different variations of the serve such has utilising a slice technique in order to cause the ball have topspin which adds to the …show more content…
The primary purpose of the windup phase is being able to create an appropriate amount of force for the serve. “The combination of forces produced by different parts of the human body. When a person is moving or attempting to move an object, several different parts of the body act together to maximize the force.”(Sandercock, 2009). Newtons third law of motion is vital throughout this stage, the third law of motion states that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’. During my serve, at the initial ball toss I have been ineffectively not leaving my arm skyward until contact with the ball is made. If my service was to be biomechanically correct the …show more content…
In Figure 1 it is evident that Sampras’ serve consists of a fluent kinetic chain of motion whereas my technique is lacking in specific elements. As Sampras commences his serve, he begins to gain momentum and power, his racket barely moves even though his legs are thrusting off the ground and he is rotating his torso towards the ideal direction to hit the effectively as shoulder, elbow and wrist are coming down from over the racket as where I constantly find this a struggle and lack ball control when serving. The predominate reason as to why this is crucial is to maximise the use of elastic potential energy, He starts to gain momentum and power you can notice that the racket does not more a whole heap, but his legs are pushing off the ground, torso is rotating towards the direction he is hitting the ball and shoulder, elbow and wrist are coming up over the tennis racket. The theory behind doing this is the use of elastic potential energy, “tendons are highly elastic, which means they store energy when they are stretched by a force and can then recoil rapidly” (Blazevich, A, 2012, Pg 201). Henceforth the reason why the wind up stage is crucial is to gain the most velocity and accuracy in the tennis serve by allowing the kinetic chain flow efficiently from the feet making contact with the ground, through the torso and following into the shoulders, elbow,