Simple Tennis Serve Technique Masterclass for Beginners

your serve is one of the most complicated shots in the game so let's simplify it today I'm going to teach you five ways to make your serve unbreakable get ready to take your serve to the next level using the correct grip perfect bols easy to learn technique and positioning with effortless timing and Rhythm and look out for my bonus abbreviated serve tips number one your setup routine now firstly let's position ourselves correctly before starting the serve and this you can do every time you step out on the court to serve so when I'm serving onto the juice side of the court want to be maybe one step away from the middle so give myself nice space there still have good angle to go into on the other side and this is where want to be now when you're serving onto the ad side we stand maybe two steps away from the middle and the reason being is we want little bit more angle going into our opponent's backand and it gives us nice space to go into from that side now when we're positioning ourselves here you want to make sure that your toe so the toe of your front foot is pointing towards the Net post and this is really easy way to line yourself up before the serve now my my toe is going to be pointing there therefore at about 45° angle to the Baseline and the back foot so my back leg is following the same line what don't want to be is my back leg to be somewhere around here because it's going to make me too open prior to the serve want to have nice wind up want to be sideways onto it when serve so let's look at this in more detail I'll draw an imaginary line going to the NIT post and you want to keep your back foot to the left of that line not to the right you don't want want to break that line at any point another thing to consider is how far you step back on your setup if you're someone who has quite wide stance make sure you position yourself more to the right not to foot fault over that middle line with your heel now with foot positioning we talked about the front foot pointing towards Net post being at about 45° angle to the Baseline this is to give you the ability to turn against it and go up and forward into the court now the back foot can be parallel to the Baseline this is to give you balance and the ability to push up now this foot position is exactly the same on the ad side it follows exactly the same principle again I'm pointing to that Net post so I'm nicely closed against the direction where I'm going incidentally enough when you are then tossing this also helps you with the toss because can actually line up my tossing arm so that that the hand that I'm going to toss the ball up with it can line up into that direction as well which makes this really easy to follow and remember so every time step up you have few checkpoints my toe pointing to the Net post my back foot in line with this toe and now my arm is going to toss the ball in exactly the same line so here you can see nice line there going to the Net post I've lined up perfectly here and I'm ready to serve wait before continue and if you're still enjoying this video make sure you press that subscribe button and the notification Bell so you can get further videos from us to come number two the grip now you want to get into continental grip here this is where you if you get your shape here with the hand you line it up so that you're Rack you're almost holding it like hammer like this make sure that the your index finger is going little bit there's little space here between the fingers so you don't want to do it like this really tight fist because this is going to be difficult to release and relax you want to have slight angle here this will also allow you to reach little bit higher now the chopper grip or the Continental grip that I'm showing you here is perfect for the serve but as you know if you're used to serving like this if you're just starting out and it it's little bit more difficult for you to serve because obviously as you throw the ball up with this kind of grip you end up going like this to the ball which you'll feel like you're applying lot of slice to that ball if that's happening to you and you're unable to make good contact this is probably because because you're lacking that wrist pronation or the rotation of it so you're not getting the full part of the ball it could also mean that your Ball Toss is bit too low now if that's happening to you you can also start by going little bit off this grip so you can be in an Eastern forehand grip now this is you know as you're starting off eventually you want to get into this Continental grip but if you're just starting out this could be good grip as starting point because you're not opening up like this and you can still start to feel little bit of pronation here but it's actually becoming lot more easier to do so so if throw the ball up here can actually get nice contact here it becomes little bit easier for me to to do that to show the strings to the ball because essentially that's what you want to do when you toss that ball up show those strings to the ball to get nice contact number three your toss and body position the toss we could even call it more of placement rather than toss you want to place that ball up make it easy for you to hit that ball when it's there here we have to make sure that we don't toss the ball too high we don't place that ball too high or too low it has to be in that optimal position for me to be able to reach up and get it on the stretch so that can go from high position down to low so always want to hit my serves from high down to low unless you're hitting kick serve so now how do we hold the toss so many times see players struggling the The Ball Toss is going everywhere and they're not able to hit serve consistently because of that toss now an easy way to remember how to hold this ball and this this will make huge Improvement to your toss don't grip it too tight you don't want to hold it in the Palm here you want to let the ball go more into your fingers and and you want the arm to be nice and straight here so we're throwing the ball up from our shoulder keeping that arm nice and straight and at the end here the the ball is staying in my fingers the fingers are open here almost like in crown here where the ball is placed in the fingers and it's actually very easy for me to release I'm keeping my hand as still as possible I'm not doing anything else with my wrist I'm simply opening those fingers and allowing the ball to naturally fly out as my as my hand reaches this optimal position it continues going up as if I'm placing it onto little platform there at the top I'm placing the ball onto the platform and what I'm trying to do if you have good toss if you've done it correctly and you can test it yourself is when you're tossing that ball see if you can make the ball not spin so there shouldn't be much rotation going on as it's going up it's it's going up nice and still up and down so I'm releasing and it's not doing too much rotating if you've not done it properly if you flicked it you're going to have lot of rotation there and it's going to affect the direction of your toss so so now that we've mastered the bols it's time to get our body synchronized with it so where want to get into nice trophy position where the players like this unlike the you know the normal trophy you're not trying to get into this so make sure that you are getting into this trophy position where your left shoulder here your left arm is pointing all the way up you have nice shape here between the top of the arm going all the way down creating an here with my arm notice how my left shoulder is now above my right shoulder and this is the perfect position to be in because when hit the ball I'm going to change that around I'm going to have to hit with my right shoulder being above my left and it allows me to involve lot of my obliques and get my hip involved in the action number four is timing and the Loop behind so timing of the toss and your body is vital to getting good serve here so see lot of players tossing the ball going down with their legs and going up to toss the ball now the ball is light object it doesn't require your legs to toss it so try not to involve the legs you're trying to toss the ball with just the arm so as you're doing this as toss the ball want to be on the back of my on my back foot and as go forward then toss the ball see lot of players being already here tossing the ball and then they have nowhere else to go so you want to start on the back foot here notice how my toe here is up so my my my left left toe is up so I'm on the heel here and as go from my back foot my arm will then drop so with toss you want to go down then up and this ensures nice consistent toss you don't want to just wait here with the with the hand and then toss the ball because you're going to struggle to get it consistent toss it's like almost like I'm drawing the line of where that ball is going to go with my arm so now that I've got this I'm going on the back foot and then throw the ball up at the same time time my arm starts to go back so it looks like this and I'm getting into that nice trophy position so the timing is back to front back foot front foot and notice how when I'm on the front position and now the ball is up I'm now on the toe with the back foot and I'm fully stationary on my right foot now this works with both the platform stance or the same way as you toss the ball up if you're doing the pinpoint stance at this point would move my back foot in to then Propel myself forward with it but let's not complicate things too much to start off you can start with platform stance and see how well you do see if your toss is in the right position see how balanced you are when you're doing this so you can start to actually practice your toss going down and notice how go down as the ball is going up so as the ball is released from my hand I'm now going down with my legs so the ball's going up and I'm going down then as the ball starts to drop go up to reach that ball so now that we're in this position in that trophy position we have the Loop behind and this is important because this is where your racket accelerates and this is where we get all the power on our surve from as well as from our legs of course and our body this is the opportunity for the racket to carry some momentum into the shot you can think of it as like two pendulums when I'm doing it here I've got pendulum so I'm nice and relaxed can even do it with two fingers so it's nice and relaxed pendulum then when get here there's another pendulum where release the so it goes from here to being released here so it goes back and release see lot of players going very tightly down and they're unable to carry speeds through the stroke you can do the whole move with holding just with your fingers look as the racket is going back this pendulum here allows me to get power to get to get the speed of the racket head to go up so it's almost like it Twirls around the back it goes from here from my left shoulder down to my right and this point is when my my right shoulder and my right elbow is then going to go forward and up into contact so you have to synchronize this so as you this rack is dropping this way my then elbow is going up towards contact and it creates nice Loop behind and it can be really effortless you don't have to manufacture that Loop because you're going to lose speed here you want your arm to be nice and relaxed and it's the top of the racket the the the the strings that is what's going to be carrying the speed into contact so it looks like this now the important thing to remember is this motion never stops it may slow down here as you reach the racket here you want it to be nice and relaxed and loose here as it reaches up but it doesn't stop lot of players see either stopping here or pausing here and they're losing that momentum the speed of the Racket and this is what you're going to need to hit the shot now lot of players struggle with maybe get getting this bottom part of the racket they they struggle to synchronize their arm and the their hitting arm so the toss and the hitting arm so for if you are one of those players you can start to do one of two things you can either put your racket here already so you know you're going to have to reach here and then you toss the ball and you're already in this trophy position and all you have to think about is dropping and hitting so it looks like this and when you get better at this you can start to do an abbreviated serve which again again may be easier for you to handle this is players like rodic players like mon like to do this kind of serve so this is where you don't go through the bottom part of the pendulum but you go from here straight up so it becomes lot quicker on the way up so you're not having to do the whole bottom part and you can get into this trophy position lot easier so it looks like this and what's good about this way of serving is you get quite lot of snap on it because you're not letting your arms come out too far everything feels quite Compact and you get quite lot of wrist snap quite lot of power on those serves now if you are someone that gets shoulder issues or shoulder problems this might not the abbreviated serve might not be the way to go because this way you can be lot more relaxed and getting that racket up carrying little bit of speed through it so it's going to be little bit more forgiving on your arm so if you are one of those players you may have to actually Master the whole routine the whole move but for now play around with it and see which one suits you most and lastly contact the most important part of that serve for consistency what you want to do is get nice flat racket face to the ball especially if you're just starting out don't think about doing any slices where you hit the right side of the ball or Top Spin kick serves just simply try and get nice flat contact towards your Target and this happens with pronation so lot of coaches would discuss pronation what is it it's simply you opening up your wrist so you're doing this as you're hitting the ball so superation is this so I'm in supered position as drop the Racket and I'm pronating the wrist this way in order to open the racket and in order for me to achieve pronation must make contact high up in front and little bit to the side now the moment the ball is little bit lower here my wrist is going to struggle to pronate so if you your toss is not high enough you're going to be slicing that ball especially if you're holding that Continental grip so you're going to be you're going to end up slicing chopping at that ball and you're going to struggle you be like how is it possible for me to open my strings when my hand doesn't allow me to do that it will only allow you to open it up there the top and this is where that grip is important and it's important that you have nice little space here between your index finger and your the rest of your hand thank you guys for watching not such simple lesson after all but hope there were few tips in there that you can Implement into your own serves let me know in the comments below what you think of the lesson what else you struggle with on your serves and the rest of your game make sure you've subscribed to the channel press the notification Bell with that all settings enabled and hope to see you soon on our next video