Are you one of the many people who play tennis regularly? Are you tired of a slow serve and your inability to return the scorcher your opponent sends flying your way? If so, these four tennis serving tips are for you.
The Serve
- Form
- Speed
- The Toss
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Anyone claiming to supply you with tennis serve tips should start with the form. The way in which you hold your body can affect everything from your speed and accuracy to your ability to respond to a quick return. Feel Tennis writes that there is something called the “trophy position”. Instead of starting with your racket vertical when you serve, they write, start from the same point you begin at to toss the ball. Accelerate from that point for a more accurate, faster serve. As with anything, perfect practice makes perfect.
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Scarborough East Tennis and Fitness Club points out that the key to speed when serving is your racket velocity. Many amateur players tend to grip the racket far too hard. Simply loosening your grip and being more relaxed about the serve is one of the easiest tennis serving tips to implement, and it will have an immediate effect on your serve speed. Scarborough East recommends you take your pinky finger off the racket to automatically reduce your grip on it.
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Many people have great form and speed but have trouble setting up the toss. Mark Baroso of Men’s Fitness writes that imagining the ball is attached to your hand by velcro is a great way to figure out how high you need to toss it. When you raise your hand to toss the ball, notice how high in the air the ball is when still in your grip. That is how high you want the ball to be when you release it for the serve.
The Return
No list of tips for tennis serves would be complete without mentioning tennis return of serve tips. Tennis serves tips cannot be only about offense, after all. Defense is just as important.
- Train Your Mind and Muscles
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The trick with returning a serve is having the mental response time to register where the ball is heading and hit it back. Dennis Van Der Meer of Active.com writes that you need to build up muscle memory and actual memory. How do you accomplish this? Van Der Meer recommends you “return an imaginary ball”. Consider a situation where your opponent has just served the ball into the net. By following where the ball would have landed had it passed the mesh, you can go through with the motion of the return. This practice increases reaction times.
Consider these tennis serving tips the next time you are locked in a death-match with your on-court rival. By paying attention to your form, your grip, and your toss you can greatly improve your serve speed and accuracy. Focus on building up active memory for improving your return game. If you put these tips to use, your competitive edge will skyrocket.