Serving

willy choon Asked 16 years ago

How can i upgrade my serve????I know that i must brush the ball but my opponent always know what kind of spin i am putting.......How many kinds of serves are there???

Jeff Plumb Answered 16 years ago

Hi Willy,

There is no limit to the types of serves. It is all up to your imagination. However there are a set of standard serves that people base their own serving style on. The most common serve is the Pendulum serve. I will attach a short video below showing this and the reverse pendulum in action below.

To improve your serve, you need to remember spin, speed and placement.

With spin, you need to learn how to generate a lot of spin. The main points here are to have a fast contact and a brushing contact. Once you have mastered generating lots of spin, you can confuse your opponent by varying the amount of spin. Try a really heavily spun serve followed by a serve with almost no spin. The key here is to make the actions as similar as possible.

With speed we are referring to whether you serve long or short. As a general rule of thumb we recommend that you serve 80% of your serves short and 20% long. Of course this is just a rule of thumb and you should vary this according to how well your opponent receives each type of serve.

With placement, there are good and bad areas to serve to. Take a look at our lesson on the placement of the serve to find out where you should be serving.

Good luck and remember that serving is a very fine skill. It takes lots and lots of practice to develop a good serve so keep working at it.