Improving Service

For the reverse pendulum, it is much easier to do if you have a slightly different grip than for the regular pendulum. For regular pendulum I leave the thumb and index finger basically where they would be for regular strokes and just remove the other three fingers. I use the middle finger on the side of the handle to help the wrist move the racket. This way, it is very easy to regrab the racket. I do not even notice this process.

With the reverse pendulum, it helps the wrist movement to hold with the thumb and index finger a little off to the side of the handle. This makes it so you have a lot more wrist movement and the wrist movement is more comfortable in the reverse pendulum movement. It does take a little bit more effort to regrab the handle though. A little practice and you get used to this. I almost never notice this either but once in a while I notice the transition after the serve.

If you watch some of those videos, Timo Boll does even more than this when he does the reverse. Sometimes he has his index finger almost at the edge of the blade. But if you look at Werner Schlager's serves, and his serves are at least as good as anybody's, he can do all of his serves while fully holding the handle even though he can also do them while only holding with the index finger and thumb.

Reverse Pendulum gets a lot of spin but takes a lot of patience and practice. However, I am like Wiwa, I don't usually practice my serves. I like to create while playing. But when ever I get to practice my serves they get a lot better so it is worth it.

I have recently discovered that if you practice serves penhold, you can figure out a lot of stuff about how to improve your serves shakehand. Because you have so much more use of your wrist when holding penhold, it is easy to use the same motion to get underspin, sidespin and topspin. Once you feel how to do that with the penhold grip you can translate that to help yourself understand what you need to do to get the wrist action for those spins with a shakehand serve grip. With a penhold grip it is very easy to get short, low, very spinny topspin serves that look like they are underspin to someone who is not paying close attention and watching the bounce.

Carl what is the difference between pendulum and reverse pendulum? I'm not really familiair with those terms, I thought there was only one version of reverse/pendulum serving xD

For right handed player, when you do the pendulum serve, the ball will bounce and rotate to your right hand side. When the opponent return it, supposely the ball will bounce to your left. So, reverse pendulum (or the back hand style serve in some sense) just the other way round

Okay thanks, so the pendulum serve is actually just a normal sidespin serve?

Work on your impact and your timing in your impact, it can be a quite a big change.

Wiwa, if you look at the Timo Boll video in the first post of the thread, you can see Timo do the pendulum up to the 45th second, and he starts doing reverse pendulum from the 46th second onwards.

- With normal pendulum, you brush the ball with your blade coming towards your body (regular FH sidespin)
- With reverse pendulum, you brush the ball with your blade going away from your body.

In a sense, reverse pendulum means you do a backhand serve with your forehand...
The reason players do this, is to
1. disguise till the last fraction of a second what serve they are going to produce
2. maintain a standard serving position at the table, no matter what serve they are producing
3. being able to produce short, long, fast, slow, side-, under-, float- and topspin serves in all possible directions with a serve that is 100% identical in movement until the last flick of the wrist.

Really worth while to practice and master!

Olvarox has explained this well.

"- With normal pendulum, you brush the ball with your blade coming towards your body (regular FH sidespin)
- With reverse pendulum, you brush the ball with your blade going away from your body."

This is a nice explanation as well:

"In a sense, reverse pendulum means you do a backhand serve with your forehand..."

That is a great way of thinking of the reverse.

The important thing to understand, which olvarox also explains, is that with a pendulum or a reverse pendulum serve you can:
-deliver an underspin serve with varying degrees of sidespin.
-deliver a serve that has pure sidespin.
-or you can deliver a serve that has topspin with varying degrees of sidespin

The motion is the same with all the spin variations, the angle of the paddle can change a little, but the main thing that causes you to get a different spin is when you contact the ball. The motion of the racket is a swinging motion, almost a half circle. If you contact the ball while you are going down, or under the ball, it will be underspin. If you contact the ball while the blade is going sideways, parallel to the ground, you get side spin. If you contact the ball when the blade is coming back up, this will give you topspin.

When you are doing a regular pendulum serve, the side spin will be trying to pull your opponent's shot towards your backhand side (it does not matter if you are lefty or righty, the spin will pull the ball towards your backhand). When you do the reverse, it will pull the ball towards your forehand. This is another reason to use these serves depending on what setup you want.

Olvarox and Carl, thanks for the explanation. I understand it now. At my level mastering the backspin version of reverse pendulum is gold, because whenever a player get a reverse pendulum served against them, they expect sidespin/topspin. I am desperate to master this within a year or so, but it is really hard to a good load of backspin on it. I once saw a righthanded person serve reverse pendulum backspin against a lefthanded player. He just served all his services long to his opponents FH, none of them came back over the net. And this lefthanded player was really an awesome player, but jut couldn't return that serve. So impressive.

scylla24 said:

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.

Click to expand...

I have the utmost respect for Timo's serves after having analysed his match against Ma Lin. I haven't seen ay other player who varies his serve as much as Timo.

Timo uses an extremely fast wrist movement and rotation of the wrist to get his racket moving fast and brushing the ball in order to get maximum spin. It's not just his wrist moving in isolation though and his body is generally moving towards the ball as he is making contact.

In that set you mention scylla (below) you can see Timo's heavy topspin serve at 02:25, 06:08 and 07:52.

We've got a coaching video specifically about the reverse serve under the intermediate section on ttedge.com. Players often don't use enough wrist on their reverse serves which means they don't get enough speed or spin on the serve.

This is an excellent thread. Thanks guys.

use body forearm and wrist to get the most spin. make sure to graze the ball and not hit it flat

I recommend watching this two part serving clinic.

It is by a guy named Richard McAfee, who is a US coach, and who despite not being in great shape and movable anymore, is still ranked 2200-2300 which in the US is pretty impressive. Anyway, he gives a pretty good overview of serving and some tips. It probably will not be all that great for anyone who is intermediate level and above, because most of the stuff he talks about you should already know by then, but it still is great for beginners, and also may fill in some holes for even intermediate players.

Ah its Sir Richard McAfee.
He also made TT books

Wow!
Thank you for that!! Even if it's a bit ago! ^^

WiWa said:

Olvarox and Carl, thanks for the explanation. I understand it now. At my level mastering the backspin version of reverse pendulum is gold, because whenever a player get a reverse pendulum served against them, they expect sidespin/topspin. I am desperate to master this within a year or so, but it is really hard to a good load of backspin on it. I once saw a righthanded person serve reverse pendulum backspin against a lefthanded player. He just served all his services long to his opponents FH, none of them came back over the net. And this lefthanded player was really an awesome player, but jut couldn't return that serve. So impressive.

Click to expand...

I use a similar hook serve with a lot of backspin on it, and most of the time people think it's sidespin/topspin, when in fact it is heavy side-unders. I think with serves, you need to go "against" the crowd in order to have success. Most of my hook serves are heavy side-under, but most of my pendulum serves are heavy side-top. Most of my long serves are underspin variants but most of my short serves are topspin and no-spin variations...

My tips in improving service:

-If you want the most spin, try to contact the ball lightly, so that the ball doesn't go long. I know many players that can't do a spinny backspin serve unless it's long because they are contacting the ball too hard.

-Think about spin + placement combination; for example in general it is a bit more difficult to return pendulum serves from the backhand corner and reverse serves from the forehand corner because of the angle of the blade that "has to be" used when returning. This is more about tactics but equally as important to learn as technique. And again in general if you want the ball returned to your backhand, serve reverse sidespin and vice versa. Just watch the pros, the backhand oriented like Wang Hao and Zhank Jike serve a lot of reverse sidespin whereas forehanders like Ma Lin and Ma Long serve more pendulum.

I just should start to think about this tactical stuff more instead of just playing. It was a pleasant surprise to see my serving tactic work at least once: I was leading a game 10-9 and serving, so I was thinking about how to put this one in my pocket. My opponent was a lefty and he had backhand flicked a couple of my serves to my wide forehand so I served short reverse side(similar serve to Wang Hao's, hopefully I'm not breaking a copyright law) to the middle of the table to make the chance of backhand flick smaller, but still make him think about whether to take it with bh or fh. He misread the spin and pushed the ball high to my bh, from where I finished with a diagonal forehand "smashdrive". After this I was like dauym, maybe I should use my brains more often.

Just wanna encourage what Sir Moriguchi said..
Using the BODY is important indeed!