Initiate tennis serve with shoulders/elbow?

 I shot some video yesterday of myself trying to execute serve checkpoints laid out by various YouTube channels. One, to have my right elbow lined up with both shoulders, (I’m right handed.) I failed at after multiple attempts, by which I mean, 50 serves. I also tried knocking off the birthday hat as recommended by Ryan at 2minutetennis.  I wasn’t wearing the birthday hat. When I wore the birthday hat before the racket would sometimes hit the top of the hat and push it back away from my face. A lot of serves went in, but I should’ve been paying more attention to my technique. I often forget: pay attention to technique and how the strings contact the ball— the ball will take care of itself. Trust the process—the ball just goes in. 

How would I get y elbow in line with my shoulders? Before this morning, I thought about how I moved my racket when serving. My brain had sent instructions to my hand to move the racket; the elbow followed or just did some random thing. The change for the morning: Initiate movement with the shoulders or the elbow. I also remembered what Ryan had said about “elbowing the enemy” with my elbow and pulling it back to line up my elbow and shoulders. At the same time, I wanted to tilt my shoulders so that I could set up the shoulder over shoulder motion of the serve, as if performing a cartwheel. I also noticed that on some of the serves, I was hitting them flat, when I really wanted to hit a slice serve. That meant having the strings face the target while swinging across the back of the ball.

How was I going to make my serve better? I really needed to bounce the ball a few times and decide how I wanted the ball to move after contact. Did I want a slice or did I want a flat ball? Did I want to hit a kick serve? where did I want the ball to land? Could I place the ball there? How fast was I going to swing? Where was I going to make contact with the ball?

I resolved that I should execute several practice swings before serving every ball. Maybe even use a fake toss before hitting balls, (tossing the ball so far out of range I’d have to take two or three steps to reach it). I want to see how this goes