Tips for serving !

Practicing serves is the least practiced thing players do besides practicing serve receive. That is almost 2/3 of the game right there!

ANYONE can practice serves as long as there is a table open somewhere. In Iraq, I could only manage to practice 3 minutes a day, since the cheepo table was in the trailer where everyone calls back home, but those 3 minutes a day 3x a week helped me instantly improve one full level without any other practice.

Everyone has pretty much stated the objectives of serving and HOW to do it, but we as players really never seek out the chance to practice.

Heck, even if you are sitting down WAITING for a table, you can practice slicing under the ball to practice impact, timing, and feel. Simply toss ball up, slice under, and make ball come back to you on the floor. Repeat, as long as you can do it without making ball go into someone's match!

Sali said:

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.

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Of course the spin is weaker if you only use body rotation vs body, arm and wrist. But you can also try how much spin can you get if you hold your body and arm totally still and just use your wrist to get spin. I bet the spin will be even weaker than with only body rotation. In the end a good service needs all of them. Every pro player uses body rotation when serving as well as in other strokes. Liu Guoliang himself said that he uses lots of body rotation during service to get good control and spin.

Also I don't understand but you mean by having your body stable when serving. I guess rather than stable you mean stationary. By holding your body still you get less spin and it is also slower getting into ready position after service. Using body rotation when serving doesn't mean your body isn't stable and controlled.


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Der_Echte said:

Practicing serves is the least practiced thing players do besides practicing serve receive. That is almost 2/3 of the game right there!

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Yeah, so agree here, and this seems to be the common problem/mistake in 80% of the places.

I walked into the South African TT circle, and I see 2 players doing FH to FH top spin - far away from the table.
It was so beautiful, the top spin, and later with heavy side spin. Going on for like 20 hits.
Great show, very beautiful, big smiles on every ones faces.

The moment they go overseas. The rally ends within 5 hits...... I'm not suprised.
When the rally is long, our players don't have the spin and power to keep those rallies long.
The game plan should if been finishing the point as early as possible, as the better player will get more advantage once the rally is longer!

Conclusion.
They train for this FH to FH top spin rally, which is like going to be 2 points (at most) in a 11 point game.
But left out the important thigns of service, service receive, 3rd ball, 4th ball - all at the table play - which is over 80% of the game.

So they use 80% of the time to practice something that is less than 20% of the points in a real live match.
Really clever.....

So when I took over the coaching role for my 2 main players last year. I only work on at the table technique, short game, and at the table attacks.
Within 5 weeks, one defeated the number 1 seed, the other defeated the number 2 seed. Sadly, it wasn't both my students in the final, but ended with 2nd and 3rd place for U17 Girls Single in South Africa. Both they highest achievement in they young career to date, both made the junior national team, and both was members of the bronze winner team in the African U21 section.

I did no fancy FH to FH with them at all!
Speaking about it, they both don't know how to serve. I doubt they have been practice services of min 1 hour a day, every day a week (at home) as I instructed. I'm going to make them run laps when training sesson starts again

Tony, we amatures do that (Practice those sexy Fh to Fh physics-bending counter rallies) because we are undisciplined, are misguided in goals, do not see the big picture, have egos, are bored, want to have fun, etc... We can list our excuses. Yes, we are not pros, and we gotta have some fun sometimes, because if TT wasn't fun, we wouldn't be playing it, since we do not make a living from it.

Still, many of us in the Amature ranks or especially the hobby ranks... we all state that we want to improve hugely. Many of us get coaching if we can and that is great. Yet, we still waste a lot of time. Look at Korea, a great TT nation with drive and discipline, yet 99% + of their amature players... of the ones who get lessons, next to NO ONE practices the short receive game on their own, only the top Div 1 players or above! You see SOME, maybe 5%, practice serves on their own regularly.

When I went to Korea, I already had tricky serves that worked two levels above my playing level. You could say I was getting by on serves, attacks, and staying in the point on receive. Basically, I was Dr Jeckle and Hyde... I was aggressive on serve and high percentage win, and passive enough on receive until opponent gives me a chance. The rest of my game was a level or two below my level. When lessons improved my overall game and tactics, I naturally got better. Serves were a great foundation that fortunately, became a good habit before I exploded in growth.

Why we spend OVER 80% of our useable training time on something we rarely use at our level... YES, loop to loop rallies are not very common even at USATT 2000 level! Maybe you see one or two of those a game and they are not really that long... so why we do that? Comes down to our objectives in the sport. I guess a lot of us either desire more to have fun or do not realize the effects of what we do.

I think mis-inform if more likely here.

The kids see the older players do that 80% of the time, so the kids copy.

I still remember a Heilongjiang prov coach who had a 1 year stint there saying.
In China we done the BH flick for 10 years.
The world started to do it 5 years ago.
In South Africa, you guys don't even know what it is.

I just burst out laughing lol. I guess the local players got offended by my laugh, but that is the truth

BTW, the circle I am in here is more national players, so maybe it is different to your "basement" fun only players etc.

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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I agree with you for any stroke in table tennis, but not for the service!
Any stroke will become safe and more controllable if you use your body as the basic of the service.

The reason why I recommend to use arm and wrist only for service is that most players have difficulties with controlling their body during the service. They move their body, yes, but not in the right direction, with unnecessary movements, they change height of their body and distance to the table.
And this can be one of the reasons why they fail to serve constantly and safely.

If you only use arm it is very easy to serve, because you only need to focus on one part of the body. Same with the wrist but this is more difficult to control.
By the way, according to kinetic energy it is easier to transfer energy from arm and wrist to the ball than from the whole body.

The spin on the ball depends on two things: speed of the stroke and angle of the racket. You can also add direction of the movement but this determines more the kind of spin than the quality of the spin.

Of course a Chinese national player uses his body in the serve, but he is practising services during his whole table tennis life. They can change the length of the service just with their bodies. But that does not mean that it would be easy. Regarding to my experience people learn an easy serve when focusing on the main parts of the service (wrist and arm) and forget the other things.

This last post by Fab is a dig. He dug through Dracula's native soil to bring this thread back up.

Some dig posts are spam and some are not. Some are Golden.

This post by Fab is good on a lot of levels, especially reminding us about serving, something we amatures pay too little attention to at all.

BTW<<< Fab ought to listed as a verified pro member, maybe he'll drop some moar nuggets like this our way as well...

There are prolly a dozen threads in the forum that are worthy of periodic "digging" that new forget the important content.

Yeap great insight about practicing serves by Fab. LGL used his whole body to serve, but Waldner Persson Schlager Ma lin were all excellent servers yet they just use only the forearm and wrist snap. Eventually serving is mostly a matter of personal preference and imagination, practicing serves should be about experimenting most of the time than trying to execute perfectly the same serves all the time

Interesting discussion. Service lets you control the game by giving you an opportunity to place the ball where you want and prep up for the 3rd attack. More difficult the serve , more difficult will be the return. Keeping the serve short and simple and getting back to your position after the serve , sets the direction how you will the set the rally.

Interesting discussion. So many points to learn !!

This video looks really interesting. However it needs someone to translate to english as a voice over.


I find the difficult thing with serving is that other players gradually get your serves worked out so you constantly find yourself wanting to develop new ones to have something new and surprising for them. I am also learning that it is increasingly difficult to win points against better players with the service itself, it becomes more a question of working out what type of second ball you are likely to get so you can gain advantage from that when you play the third ball.