The Toss

If the serve is the most important stroke in tennis (trust me...it is) then the service toss is the most important tennis skill. Service fails virtually all relate to a crappy toss. Without a consistent, accurate toss you cannot have a consistent, accurate and powerful serve. Conversely, if your toss is always in the same place (a volume no larger than a soccer ball), then your brain can build a great serve around it even if your technique is, shall we say, suboptimal. After the overhead, the ball toss is the most neglected skill in tennis. Most people just heave it up and hope. The toss it is well worth your attention at practice time. That is why it gets its own chapter.

Toss Basics

I have found a few toss "tips" in the tennis instruction literature but no in-depth analysis of where and how to toss the ball. We shall review the more time-honored of these tips first, but I will caution you that while valid, they are often insufficient to fix an errant toss:

Basic Serve Ball Toss Rules

1. Cradle the Ball
   • Hold the ball loosely between the thumb, index and middle fingers
     • If you turn your hand over the ball should fall out
2. Elbow and wrist straight and locked
   • NO wrist flick
   • NO elbow curl
3. Release the ball at nose height
   • buy simply decelerating the tossing arm
4. Follow through
   • Straight arm all the way to vertical

Toss Foundations

OK, now that we have gotten the "tips" out of the way, we can talk about the whys and wherefores because, let me tell you, the tips are just not enough. I have known and practiced the above admonitions quite successfully for my first 46 years of tennis. My serve was the best part of my game, and my toss was just fine - thank you very much - but for the last few years, I have struggled mightily with the toss to the point that more than once I have been inspired to throw my racket over the back fence in disgust. 'Yips' on the serve toss are just about the worst thing that can happen to you in a tennis match. Service yips can bring down your entire game. Perhaps the only thing more egregious than falling prey to the yips was that it took me two years to figure out what went wrong with my toss, namely everything and all at once.

Balance

It turns out that the service toss is a little trickier than just "keeping a firm wrist." The toss seems like a pretty basic skill - just throwing a ball straight up in the air in front of you, but this simplicity belies the crankiness of the toss. A lot is going on when you toss the ball; shifting bodyweight, arms flailing all over the place, bending knees, arching the torso, rotating the hips; it is a lot to keep in your head.

Meanwhile, you need to reliably toss the ball into a region about the size of a soccer ball, or your serve will be hopelessly erratic. Beyond that, to properly throw a 2-ounce tennis ball, you are also heaving up around 15 pounds of arm and shoulder. To be consistent, you must be on balance throughout this exercise, and since you are preparing to throw your entire bodyweight into your serve, the balance must ultimately be dynamic in character. Dynamic balance requires that your weight is shifting from one foot to another with your knees bent. Your weight should automatically shift to the balls of your feet. If your weight isn't transferring, you cannot develop the power that results in pace, spin and control in the service motion. But it is not natural or necessary to be moving one's feet when simply tossing a ball in the air, so up to the moment in the toss when the ball is released, you should be in static balance. In static balance there is weight on both feet, your center of gravity is not moving, and your knees can be bent but are more often extended and locked. The key is to toss the ball in static balance then immediately convert to dynamic balance upon release of the ball. The tossing arm goes up after you consolidate most of your weight on your back foot, and just before you begin to bend your knees and shift your weight forward onto the front foot.

You must wait with your weight on the back foot 'till the ball is (well and truly) on its way!

The deep knee bend of the serve begins after ball is released. A smooth, consistent serve requires full-body participation, so one must store a tremendous amount of momentum during the toss. You get momentum from the earth, so you need to have a foot planted with all of your weight on it to steal some momentum from the earth. This process of collecting and storing momentum begins after the release of the ball and this transformation from static to dynamic balance must be timed perfectly. If you rush this transition the toss will be disrupted and the serve will fail.

Rhythm

Fundamentally the toss is a balletic dance between the hitting arm and the tossing arm. As the weight goes back, both arms come down together, but the tossing arm turns around immediately and heads briskly back up into the toss while the hitting arm drops straight down and back under gravity, hanging limply for a moment, relaxed with the elbow straight. This casual and diffident treatment of the hitting arm is actually an important trigger and results in several significant effects on both the service toss and the service motion itself. As the hitting arm falls under the influence of gravity, the elbow extends, and the biceps relax. This position of the hitting arm rules out sympathetic contraction of the biceps of the tossing arm. When you contract a muscle of one limb, there is a tendency for the same muscle on the opposite limb to contract. This phenomenon is called sympathetic contraction and has been well studied; an injured limb can be conditioned by exercising the opposite limb, and using your free hand while holding a firearm can result in an accidental discharge. Sympathetic contraction mostly happens when your brain is busy doing multiple tasks, such as tossing a tennis ball with your left arm while bringing your right arm into position to hit a serve. If your right elbow is bent or bending before you release the tennis ball with your left hand, the left elbow will involuntarily bend and hook the ball over your left shoulder (see Toss the Bouquet Syndrome). A subtler version of this syndrome may result in a mysteriously erratic toss and an inconsistent serve. A video survey of pro serves reveals that 80-90% of pros keep both elbows extended until after the ball is released in the toss. Getting the tossing arm up early - before the hittting arm, is a race that you must win every time if you want your toss to be consistent.

Freeing Up the Tossing Arm

You throw the ball with your legs, your back, and shoulders. Remember that there are two joints in the shoulder; the superficial glenohumeral joint at the top of the upper arm and the deep shoulder girdle - representing the movement of the scapula over the chest wall (this is what you 'rotate' when you shrug.) You must use both shoulder joints to toss the ball. If you bring the arm up using only the glenohumeral joint, you will start to feel resistance just before you release the ball and that will result in a disastrous toss. Similarly, if you don't tilt your shoulders (tossing shoulder up, hitting shoulder down) and lean your body back (see Attack Angle of the Serve) both the glenohumeral joint and shoulder girdle will meet with resistance as you bring the tossing arm up. You need the tossing motion to feel as effortless and smooth as possible or it will be jerky and difficult.

Reverse-rotation

Finally, you need to get your chest "out of the way" of the toss. That means the shoulders and hips have to turn your body away from the net (i.e., show your back to the net) so the tossing arm has a clear and unobstructed path. This move away is reverse-rotation and is the foundation of the unit turn of the serve. The feeling should be that the toss is not in front of your body, it is beside it, and since most pros bring the tossing arm up more or less parallel to the baseline, you really have to get your hips and shoulders cranked around before you release the ball.

Spindirection

Closely related to the need for Counter-rotation on the serve is the need to resist, with all of your heart, mind, and soul, the almost irresistible temptation to turn towards the net during the unit turn portion of the serve. We all carry, in the deep recesses of our brains, a distorted and false image of a serve that culminates with our shoulders square to the net, hitting arm up and leaning forward like Superman about to take off. A proper serve is not hit that way. All of the effort of the server, the toss, the swing, and the body should, no, must be oriented towards the right net post (for you lefties, that would be the left net post). The reason gets back to spindirection, the principle that all balls in tennis must be hit with spin, not because we want the spin, but because we want to maximize control, power, and consistency all at once, all the time.
Spindirection is nowhere more essential than in the serve. Hitting with at least some spin on both the first and second serves maximizes all of these goals and prevents one of the most grievous errors on the toss: rotating your shoulders towards the net during the toss. The toss occurs during the Unit Turn phase of the serve. As in other stokes, this phase is responsible for establishing dynamic balance and turning the hips and shoulders away from the net, roughing out the body's position and the racket on the way to a consistent pose. The unit turn of the serve is by far more complex, elaborate and finicky than in any other stroke. For one thing, the serve unit turn includes the ball toss, so it cannot be as violent and "rough" as, say, the topspin forehand unit turn. That is fine because we have plenty of time to execute the unit turn in the serve - there is no way for our opponent to rush us. So with this happy surfeit of time, there is no excuse for not reaching a satisfactory trophy pose on the serve. And yet, we are all a little afraid to turn our backs on our opponents during the serve unit turn. There is a strong, paranoid impulse to reverse the unit turn before we get the racket all the way back, and that always monkeys up the toss. I am convinced that this is the reason for the popularity of very closed, back-to-the-net starting positions of the feet that we see today. It promotes the reverse-rotation portion of the unit turn by making the back-to-the-net position part of the initial stance.

Snap-back

The idea that we need to be shoulders-square-to-the-net when we hit the serve is pretty hard to shake. It goes hand-in-hand with the mistaken idea that a stroke is through the ball with the racket face traveling along the intended line-of-flight. (I have an unfortunate tendency to picture myself in the serve as King Kong swatting biplanes out of the sky from the top of the Empire State Building.) Consequently, during the toss phase, when we get to a certain point in the reverse-rotation (backswing) of the unit turn, our brain screams "Too far! Stop! Turn around!" and forces our bodies to do just that, reversing the rotation of the shoulders. If this happens before the ball is out of hand, it forces a terrible toss; over the left shoulder and out of reach. The cure for this sneaky little bug is to complete the unit turn all the way to the Pose and to remember our bodies do not have to face the net until after the ball is long gone.

The Circular Service Toss

The simplest way to toss the ball is to stick your arm out in front of you and heave it straight up. Simple in theory, perhaps, but in practice, the hardest figure to draw accurately is a straight line. Creating straight lines is difficult because our joints are all rotational Creating straight lines requires excruciating coordination of many joints at once, a challenge for the talented but nearly impossible for a physical Luddite like myself. Arcs are easier to perform but harder to visualize. The best way to toss a tennis ball is to create an arc that begins by keeping the ball close to the racket's throat as it goes down and back early in the service preparation, then continuing an arc across the opposite shoulder in front of the body. When the ball is released, it will follow projectile motion up and out towards the opponent's court. Because this motion is so natural, the tossing elbow remains straight throughout the toss, obviating the tendency to 'toss the bouquet' back over one's shoulder. The ball will peaks just beyond the baseline, reaching a pocket that great servers covet.

Conclusion

I hope you find this degree of complexity around a simple matter of tossing a ball in the air intimidating. I do. I think it stinks. It turns out that tossing the ball in the serve benefits greatly from an excess of talent. The good news is that all of the effort invested in producing a consistent toss ends up earning you a powerful, consistent serve. Each of the movements that lead to a consistent toss is also essential for maximizing power in the serve. So that is pretty cool - these techniques are multi-use and, in that way, magical. The target of all of these movements is the "trophy position" from which all power and control in the serve ultimately derives. They are the foundation of, and the reason for, the so-called "Full Serve" or "Pro Serve" - as opposed to the "Half Serve" or "Push Serve." Professional tennis players' tosses all comprise the following, even the serves that look like half serves (e.g., Nadal's) but are just attenuated full serves:

Advanced Serve Ball Toss Rules

1. Static to Dynamic balance
   • Weight on both feet but mostly on back foot as ball goes up.
     • = static balance
   • As ball is released, begin transfer of weight to front foot and bent front knee.
     • =dynamic balance
   • Bodyweight shifting, knees bent, weight on balls
   • Timing is critical
     • You must wait with your weight on the back foot 'till the ball is (well and truly) on its way!
2. Keep toss smooth and free of resistance
   • Use entire body
     • Lean back from knees
     • tilt shoulders
       • hitting arm down
       • tossing arm up
3. Turn away from the court (reverse-rotate)
   • Frees up the tossing arm which should not go across the body
   • resist temptation to snap back
4. Coordinate with hitting arm
   • arms down together
     • elbows lock
     • hitting arm falls
   • Tossing arm up EARLY and FAST - hitting arm limp and relaxed.
   • Ball must be released while hitting elbow is fully extended
     • to avoid flexion due to cross-linked elbows
   • don't wake up the hitting arm until after the release of the toss
5. Target the trophy position
   • Body tilted back from knees (attack angle)
   • Shoulders tilted sideways - front high, back low
   • hitting elbow flexes
   • Continuous motion