Whisper, one of the most prolific posters on the FYB Forums and a great coach, was nice enough to write an article on how to practice your serve. If you’ve got any follow-up questions or want him to take a look at your strokes (he’ll analyze your strokes if you embed them in a thread), ask him on the forums!
Put your hand up if you are the practice serve king or queen.
Many people make the mistake of putting 100% effort into each and every serve when they practice.
While you may get a lot of these practice serves in, when it comes time to hit this magnificent serve in a real match, it falls apart! Does this sound all too familiar to many of you?
To fix this problem here’s what you need to do when practicing your serve.
The main thing you want to focus on is trying to keep your entire service action as relaxed as possible. If that means chopping 10, 15, or 20 MPH off your serve speed and landing your serves a little short in the service boxes, so be it. You may even surprise yourself and find that hit you serve very well with a relaxed serve action, but you won’t know unless you try it and practice it.
A relaxed serving action is the key to the efficient delivery of a powerful serve, but the point of this article is that you need to have a reliable, decent serve in your back pocket. You are going to have a VERY tough time holding serve if your “A-game” serve isn’t on and you don’t have a backup. Serve troubles can easily kill your confidence and negatively affect the rest of your game.
I’ve lost count of how many people who have perfectly effective serves at 75% speed but choose to ignore their own stats and go for more than they should.
If you want to test how effective your relaxed serve is have someone attempt to properly return it. In fact, not having someone return your practice serves on a regular basis might be the largest error behind trying to hit too hard! I know it’s not always viable to have someone at the other end returning, but again, hands up if you have a fantastic serve when nobody is standing at the other end trying to return? You need to simulate match situations so you can accurate gauge where you — and your serve — is at.
Here is a demonstration (by someone who is not too shabby in the serve department) of what I mean when I say stay relaxed when practicing your serves: