The Serve Backswing: Part 1

The backswing; more complex than it looks, but with clear benchmarks. In my last article I covered the first phase of the serve, the wind up. Now let's move on to the second phase, the backswing. It may look simple, but far and away, the backswing is the most difficult phase of the serve to comprehend. So let's examine its components and see what makes it so complex. We'll also outline the conditions for maximizing the backswing in your motion. Since there are a lot of issues to cover, we'll analyze the backswing in two parts: part 1 in this article and part 2 to follow in the next issue. Before we start, let's review what we've established so far. First we divided the serve into 4 parts or Phases. 4 Phases: 1. Wind Up 2. Back Swing 3. Upward Swing 4. Follow Through In our previous article on Phase 1 or the Wind Up, we looked at various techniques for both the upper and lower body motions. We saw that there were pluses and minuses, but that varied techniques could lead to success in the later phases. Wind Ups can be circular, abbreviated, or somewhere in between. First, we...