How To Add More Power To Your Tennis Serve

Your serves are the backbone of your tennis game. Having a strong, powerful serve is one key way to give yourself an advantage against any opponent. If you're not serving up aces and putting your opponents on their heels, you may be missing out on some easy scoring opportunities that could make all the difference in a match. In this blog post, I'll be dissecting the power behind an effective tennis serve and how you can use specific techniques to take yours up a notch.

Toss The Ball In Front

When it comes to adding power to the serve, tossing the ball in front is an important but often forgotten factor. It is typically taught to throw the ball high, in line with your body and the baseline. However, to add more strength to your service, you need to toss the ball in front instead. This will ensure your weight and momentum are both travelling forward, which will improve your balance after contact with the ball. You'll find that you might lose your balance if you toss the ball too far behind you.

Use Your Shoulders

The proper unit turn is a critical technique to learn in tennis if you want to maximise the power of your shots, especially when it comes to serving. Before you swing, turn your shoulders so that you are almost facing the back fence of the tennis court. This move will enable you to use more of your body for momentum instead of just relying on your arms, allowing you to produce greater power and consistency with each serve. By turning the shoulder correctly, your serve will benefit from an increased velocity and spin rate due to having harnessed the kinetic energy generated by your body rotating during the motion.

Use Your Legs 

Using your legs for weight transfer is an important part of executing a powerful and successful serve in tennis. The legs are the strongest muscle group in the body, so you should use them to their fullest potential. Using your legs for weight transfer ensures that your momentum is going forward through the serve instead of backwards.

To start with, set yourself up with your feet shoulder-width apart and place your weight on your back foot. As you toss the ball up into the air, transfer your weight onto your front foot so you can feel yourself leaning forward in anticipation of making contact with the ball. Using your legs' strength, push off from the ground and reach high with your racket to make contact with the ball for additional power and height on the serve. Doing this will help you generate maximum power when hitting a serve without having to rely solely on your upper body strength or arm swing velocity.

Stay Relaxed

Staying relaxed is an essential part of adding power to your serve, yet it can be difficult to achieve. Although muscling the ball and tensing up may seem the natural thing to do when attempting to hit with more power, this is actually counterproductive. When muscling a serve, your effort is increased but the racket head speed is decreased due to a lack of fluidity in the motion. To generate adequate racket head speed for a powerful serve, it is important to create a whip-like motion rather than using forceful strikes. 

A tip to staying relaxed when serving is to employ breathing techniques. Taking deep breaths and releasing slowly can help keep your nerves at bay and relax the body before sending off a powerful serve. You could also use repeatable routines before each serve; for example, bouncing the ball three times before hitting it. Doing so helps create routine and consistency which will carry through into each successful shot.

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Play Tennis Better

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