Tips for serving !

I find this video to be pretty good in making you understand serving and receiving serves better:

A good effective serve is a deception serve. You need to use same motion and can serve "no spin" and "under spin" or top spin.. side spin... whether it is no spin, under spin, top spin, it depend on the ball contact point with the racket and the motion of your racket.
it is not easy... you can look at mirror and start design your own set of serving....

You have to design a serve that confuse your opponent so that they don't know what you are serving....
If you watch Ma Long serve tutorial on youtube, you will find that when he serve a under spin his racket end with side top spin look....

You got some learning ahead of you and if you improve in this area, you will be on your way to a jump in level. Go practice.

Whatever you do for a serve, have a plan to control the opponent receive and have a plan to deal with the 3rd ball.

geotjakra said:

I find this video to be pretty good in making you understand serving and receiving serves better:

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This youtube video is just the advertisement for a video that you would buy. geotjakra, do have the whole video? Are you saying the actual video you would buy is a good video? Or are you saying that short video with Brian Pace talking about why his serve video is good, is good enough in itself?

I find the short video helpful enough. I don't own his actual video. I agree with Ahtu as well, deception is key in serving. And one of the best for deceptive serve is the pendulum serve in my opinion. Depending where and when you made contact with the ball, you can create an under spin, no spin and top spin, side spin serves while all looking like the same hand movement

Tips for serving: use a lot of wrist, not too much arm. Develop a few different serves where you can use the same motion and get underspin, sidespin, topspin and dead with the same motion: for example, the pendulum and reverse pendulum serves. If you can do that with those two, you have six serves that look like two serves. Hook serves are very effective as well because it takes such a small motion to generate all that spin and it is very easy to change from under, side, top, dead, and it is also easy to keep it so the opponent only sees the racket right before contact so that the spin is harder to read off the contact. So, if you could do Pendulum, Reverse Pendulum and Hook serves, that is 12 serves that look like 3 serves.

Deception is more important in serving than spin although both are important. But, all that being said, very short, very low dead ball serves are really good because, it is hard for the opponent to do anything to them that would cause you real problems, so those serves are great for setting up your third ball.

In the end, as you are playing better opponents, it is more important to use your serves to set up your third ball than anything else.

geotjakra said:

I find the short video helpful enough. I don't own his actual video.

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Interesting. He does not really show much of anything.

Here, here is the master serving. I think this video is pretty valuable.


Here is another:


The second video he explains some of what he might do in the serves.

Service

I'm on my phone, ill make a more detailed post later but something that really pushed me forward in the serving department was really focussing on my finger and thumb during the contact of the ball. Really use a lot of wrist but pressing the bat lightly with your finger and thumb to brush the ball.

Another tip is simply practice. Lots of players tend to find their own service action or serving techniques practising on their own. Nice bucket of balls and serve away

The second video in Carl's post is great I learned a lot from that video demonstration. Good luck!

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy

Dan said:

I'm on my phone, ill make a more detailed post later but something that really pushed me forward in the serving department was really focussing on my finger and thumb during the contact of the ball. Really use a lot of wrist but pressing the bat lightly with your finger and thumb to brush the ball.

Another tip is simply practice. Lots of players tend to find their own service action or serving techniques practising on their own. Nice bucket of balls and serve away

The second video in Carl's post is great I learned a lot from that video demonstration. Good luck!

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy

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That point about the pressure from the finger and the thumb is priceless. That really helps you get more spin. You do that in your forehand and backhand loops too and you will get more spin there as well.

Also, giving credit where credit is due, I first saw that second video of Werner Schlager's as a result of a post from you, Dan.

And the tips he gives about how to change the spin are top notch.

UpSideDownCarl said:

That point about the pressure from the finger and the thumb is priceless. That really helps you get more spin. You do that in your forehand and backhand loops too and you will get more spin there as well.

Also, giving credit where credit is due, I first saw that second video of Werner Schlager's as a result of a post from you, Dan.

And the tips he gives about how to change the spin are top notch.

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Yeah the finger and thumb is perfect, I might just make a youtube video about this. I think it could be very handy. Haha yeah I did post it originally, but you reminded me hehe

I want Werner to do more serving videos, would be class!

Tip for serving.

Serve 1000 balls a day.
Thats how many greats did it, and thats how I was taught too.

There is already so many great feedback above, as well as videos that you can see.
Do it times 1000 now

Hope it helped!

Good luck

Practising a service is one of the most important and difficult things in table tennis.

It's no use just to practise a serve when you don't know what to do and focus on.

So 3 basics (in my opinion) that must be considered when serving:

- hit the ball as low as possible (that's what the guy in the video also said)
- hit the ball close to the table (more distance makes the service unsafe)
- for short service place the ball close to the net on your side / for long service place the ball close to the baseline on your side

Then in the video it is said to use all parts of the body (legs, hips, arm, shoulder, wrist etc.) ... in my opinion this is the worst you can do!
The more parts of your body you use the more pars you have to control.
The secret of a good serve is that you can play exactly the same movement and a safe movement.

That's why I recommend to start as simple as possible and then, when the serve is safe, add more parts to the serve.


Example: Short service with backspin.

- Angle of the racket: horizontal to the table = "flat" - most players have problems with this. Their angle is too steep. To generate a lot of backspin you must hit the ball as tangential as possible.

- Movement of the racket: the movement is from back forward. Try to stay with your racket on the same level during the serve (many players have the bad habit to go up with their racket when they throw up the ball)

- Parts of the body to use during the serve: First only with forearm. Try to keep everything else fixed, even the wrist. You can generate a lot of backspin only with moving your forearm if you have the right angle and speed (if you move too slow, you cannot generate enough spin). When you feel that you hit the bal tangential and get safe with the forearm in your serve, then add the wrist.

- Where do I hit the ball: South Pole of the ball.

How to control the quality of the serve?
With the serve in the example it is easy. If the ball jumps 2-3 times or comes even back to the net on the other side of the table then you have a good backspin serve. You can also have a look at the stamp of the ball. If you can see the stamp clear, there is not much spin on the ball. If you cannot really see the stamp anymore, you have generated a lot of spin ;-)


PS: The serves he shows in the video above are ... not good quality.

Fab said:

Then in the video it is said to use all parts of the body (legs, hips, arm, shoulder, wrist etc.) ... in my opinion this is the worst you can do!
The more parts of your body you use the more pars you have to control.
The secret of a good serve is that you can play exactly the same movement and a safe movement.

That's why I recommend to start as simple as possible and then, when the serve is safe, add more parts to the serve.

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I have to disagree with you on this one. Using the body is what gives you control when trying to get good spin because you don't need to swing your arm and wrist so aggressively since they are allready moving due to body rotation. It's the same as in every other stroke in table tennis; if the power comes from the bigger body parts - legs, waist - you get more control because bigger muscles are easier to control when you try to get max power-> max speed for your hand. This works with serving also and should be the first thing to learn in my opinion.


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Me demostrating some variation of underspin serves - unprepared: didn't even use my primary racket and haven't practice serves for over 10 years.

JustAlt said:

I have to disagree with you on this one. Using the body is what gives you control when trying to get good spin because you don't need to swing your arm and wrist so aggressively since they are allready moving due to body rotation. It's the same as in every other stroke in table tennis; if the power comes from the bigger body parts - legs, waist - you get more control because bigger muscles are easier to control when you try to get max power-> max speed for your hand. This works with serving also and should be the first thing to learn in my opinion.


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Actually I agree with Fab, at the beginning all you have to do is try to do same movement using your wrist and forearm. After that you can do all other things, but firt you need to be sure that your basic movement is correct.

Sali said:

Actually I agree with Fab, at the beginning all you have to do is try to do same movement using your wrist and forearm. After that you can do all other things, but firt you need to be sure that your basic movement is correct.

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What I'm trying to say is that using your body actually makes is simpler. At first you don't even need to separately use your arm and wrist at all if you don't want to. That is because as you may have noticed your arm is connected to your body and will move when you move your body. Just try it. Try serving without moving your arm and wrist separately at all and just rotate your body. The idea of this approach is to go from bigger and more easily controlled muscles to the smaller ones.
First use body, then arm, then wrist and fingers.

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I know what you mean, but for me it is wrong. Your body should be stable during service. At the beginning I really focused on serves I had about 30 of them, I focused on cheating with my body. I was doing a lot of movements to diffuse my opponent. But after some time I realized that I cannot repeat exactly the same serve (especially during the match) and the spin was not enough. I think that everyone should start with the wrist to get the idea about spin and placement. After having 90% of effectiveness you can try doing other moves.
I just tried what you told and the spin is much weaker.
I know what you mean, but for me it is wrong. Your body should be stable during service. At the beginning I really focused on serves I had about 30 of them, I focused on cheating with my body. I was doing a lot of movements to diffuse my opponent. But after some time I realized that I cannot repeat exactly the same serve (especially during the match) and the spin was not enough. I think that everyone should start with the wrist to get the idea about spin and placement. After having 90% of effectiveness you can try doing other moves.
I just tried what you told and the spin is much weaker.

I think for starters, just focus on control and placement.

Control in terms of getting the ball where you want and it must be low when passing the net.
Placement is where you landing your first bounce and where you landing your second bounce.

Can do the above with gentle underspin service - why I said gentle is, only once the control aspect is reached, is the player able to add heavy topspin while still keeping control and placement.

I start my students with trying to get the ball to land just before the right side (server FH side net post) and get the second bounce to land just after the net - close to the edge of the table. In other words, its on the extreme BH side of a right handed receiver.
I would say - go for 100 of this, then go for one down the line, first bounce close to the net, and 2nd bounce just after the net, and do another 100.
So this is 200 serves x 5 for a night, and do this for 7 days straight.

Once you have 7 days straight, you can start adding in some heavier underspin and x 7 days
Then you can add left side spin - then x 7 days
Then you can add reverse side pin - then x 7 days.

After 1 Month, i'm sure your service will have improved.

Then you can do the long fast - cross court and down the line - 14 days
The above with side spin - 7 days
The above with reverse side spin - 7 days

So after 2 months, your long and short serves will be so much better.
Now once you figure out the control, placement, then you can start doing fake movements etc.

Remember, it is not to out spin your opponent but rather:
- Out smart your opponent
- Out place your opponent
- Out trick your opponent
ETC