Improving Service

I agree with Azlan the most important thing is dwell time this can be increased as said above by throwing the ball into your body slightly. you can use as much wrist as you want but if its only a very quick sharp contact you will struggle to get lots of spin. Try learning to reverse serve as it is a more natural angle and you will generate more spin.

this is probably the best service video on youtube notice how he throws the ball in to him

I think you need to use all of your body when youre making a service, not just the vrist. If you are just making the service with the wrist you will fail often... Try to rotate your body towards the point you want to serve, then lover the shoulder of the service arm just as you hit the ball. Its kinda hard to explain, you just have to experiment yourself.. try to make your own service, not everybody elses'

Good Luck!

throwing towards the body helps a bit for sure. but just make sure that it's 'mostly' a vertical toss....if not, then you might get called on it. as i said before, the ability to spin is directly linked to your ability to IMPACT the rubber. you can jab, wrist flick...whatever, as long as you get to spin the ball a lot. it's all linked to the feel of the ball. if you can't get better at your feel for the ball, then it will hinder your serves.

thought tossing the ball towards the body was illegal?

Click to expand...

Yousa was right, covering the serve as we know is illegal. When I say tossing the ball towards your body, I mean tossing it, NOT throwing the ball horizontally towards your body and into the bat (which is a foul = illegal).

When people say feeling is it the same as dwell time yes ?

Not actually the same.
Dwell time is the time when the ball sinks into the rubber and sponge which make the rubber able to produce spin.
Longer dwell time = moooaarr spin

feeling refers to the ability to control the dwell time, to know how much spin you're putting on the ball, what kind of contact you're making with the ball (roll, jab, heavy, etc...)

damn right tpgh thats feeling..

I am glad the conversation got around to contact, feeling and dwell time. In my opinion, that is really where your serves get more spin. The contact you want is a lot like the contact you want for doing a touch loop against underspin. When you do that, what you do is try to contact the edge of the ball. A lot of people at the club I play at call this "brush contact". It is sort of right but not detailed enough. What you are trying to do is catch just the edge of the ball but you are trying to let the ball sink in to the rubber and you are making solid contact with the edge of the ball rather than brushing past it. As you catch the edge of the ball and let the ball sink in to the rubber, you feel for when the rubber grabs the ball. Then, when the rubber has grabbed the ball you accelerate the stroke, or snap; and here is where you would add extra motion from your wrist: not before. When you do that you get a ton of spin on the ball on your loop.

When you are serving you want to do something very similar. There are a few drills I do for looping underspin and when I have done them and then I practice my serves I notice that I just naturally am getting way more spin than normal. At a certain point I think that just becomes natural and you don't need the drills to find that contact as you are warming up. So practicing serving could help your ability to loop, and practicing looping underspin could help your ability to get more spin on the serves.

The main differences between looping underspin and serving are obvious. When you serve, the ball does not have spin of its own, you are tossing the ball to yourself and the stroke is a different motion. But how you contact the ball and how you generate spin are the same. When you contact the ball, you are looking to make contact with the edge of the ball. You want to feel the edge of the ball sink in to the rubber and you want to feel the rubber grab the ball. Then you want to accelerate your stroke. It does not matter how you generate that acceleration, the speed is actually not as important as the acceleration: that the racket is going from a slower speed to a faster speed while the ball is on the rubber. A wrist snap works really well, but in some of those shovel serve variations, there is very little movement from the wrist and there is still a ton of spin. However, the wrist motion is probably the easiest way to get that acceleration and that snap.

If you get that contact, it feels like you can do almost anything with the racket to get a lot of spin. However, if you have the movement in place, get the contact and time the snap of the wrist so that the blade accelerates after you contact the ball and the rubber has grabed the ball, you are going to get a lot of spin. Then when you do your no-spin serves they will be very effective as well.

damn, that's a +1000 right there. great post Carl! my serve motion is more of a jab than a high toss roll. i find that it helps me keep my serve more consistent and it allows me to get the spin i want. the only downside i have so far is my ability to vary the amount of spin. i can do heavy, really heavy, medium. but dead and very little spins are going to be hard with my motion. i have to open up the bat if i want to.

back on topic, also remember to vary your bounce so that the opponent doesn't get in a rhythm. vary the bounce placement and also vary the bounce tempo. that'll drive people nuts =)

Very good post Carl. Thanks for the insights I have to say I'm not patient enough to practise my service often. I use tons of different serves, which I kinda make up on the spot. None of them are very strong or hard to return I think, but my opponent never knows what he is gonna get, and that is an advantage as well. But I know I'm gonna have a very hard time getting into a good service rhytm again when I'm recovered.

Hi there

I'm always having this problem:
I know how to serve with pendulum, but I can only do it while holding my blade in a normal fashion.
Whenever I try to hold it like Timo Boll, or Michael Maze - so not by the handle, but by the rubber - The service goes well, but I just can't get my blade back into my hand in time to hit my 3rd ball.

This is very frustrating, since I know perfecting my service means holding my blade differently, but then having the "perfect" serve, I can't hit another ball, cuz I'm seemingly too slow to do this.

Is there any hint or trick to this?

@ sir olvarox- I had encountered that problem when i was beginning to serve pendulum, however i have surpassed that problem by doing the same grip as ma long's which is slightly covering the handle with ur mid-finger ,ring finger and pinky.
hope this helps )))

@Olvarox
The grip while serving is practically the same, with this difference that only two fingers hold the racket. To get in normal grip u just put the other three fingers around the blade in shakehand grip I thought. Do u maybe have a video of ur pendulum serve?

@EnglishWelshMan
That is so awesome. Totally owned him there xD

yeah, reverse pendulums are pretty hard for me. When I do them, they are always either no spin or some top spin, and I never can usually get any good amount of backspin on them.

Does anyone have any advice on how to do a good short topspin serve. I have a really good short backspin and short no spin serves, I just need to incorporate a good short topspin serve also that also looks roughly the same, and it will allow me to win a lot of points easier because my opponents find it hard to tell which one i am doing.

I tend to always have trouble with the short topspin. Since its topspin its usually faster and bounces higher than other serves so its hard for me to do a good short top spin serve such that my opponent can't attack easily. Just from watching the commentary Will Henzell made where he analyzes the game between Boll and Ma Lin, Boll uses the short top spin serve often and its pretty effective against Ma Lin.

short topspin is basically trying to get the ball to 'hop'. that's going to be the hardest thing probably. you can't bounce it onto the table because it'll sail long. also remember that you need to emphasize on spin rather than speed.