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5 Critical Serving Insights

The serve is a technically difficult shot, but that doesn’t mean you can’t master it. Below are five critical insights that aren’t immediately obvious when you start your serving journey. Internalize them, and it will greatly simplify your learning process.

1. Don’t throw at the target.

The tennis serve is not identical to a throw, but the misunderstanding that a tennis serve is not fundamentally a throwing motion (which it is), is often fueled by one of the small differences between the two:

Serving is throwing, but serving at a target is not throwing at a target.

The service motion is an upward forward explosion.

Stand at the service line and pretend to throw at the deuce side service box. Pause at your release, then put your racket in your hand, in the continental grip. If you’ve done it right, your racket should be slapping the ball straight down, and way off to your left (for a righty).

In order to serve into the service box, you need to orient your throwing motion up and right of where you want the ball to go (or left, for a lefty). The service motion is an upward forward explosion, not a straight forward explosion like pitching.

Throw your hand up and past the ball. As your hand passes the ball, your shoulder will internally rotate and your strings will slap it into the box.

2. 90-90 Preparation

Iga Swiatek doesn’t prepare in 90-90 (left), but, like all effective servers, she does enter the position (right) before explosively rotating her torso.

The 90-90 idea is common in baseball, but for whatever reason, tennis players don’t always learn it. Funny enough, the best female player in the world actually doesn’t use it (to start, she gets into it later in the swing).

You should, though. Keep your elbow joint at 90o, and keep the humerus (your upper arm bone) in line with your shoulders, perpendicular to your torso.

This alignment, where the hitting arm is in line with the shoulders, is the biomechanical position we need in order for our third tip – axial rotation – to safely and efficiently generate high velocity.

Use the muscles around your scapula (your shoulder blade) to “connect” your elbow to your torso. Lock it in – down and back – into that 90-90 position, and when the torso explosively rotates, the elbow will naturally rotate with it.

Possibly the two greatest height adjusted servers of all time, Andy Roddick (left) and Pete Sampras (right) both employ a nearly exact 90-90 loading position as they prepare.

3. Axial Rotation

Throwing rotation occurs perpendicular to the axis of the spine.

During Andy Roddick’s rotational explosion, his shoulder rotation is exactly perpendicular to his spine.

Imagine a point on each of your shoulders. As you rotate, those points are going to draw a circle in the air. Your shoulder line should be the diameter of that circle, and your spine will point up through its center.

Since the serve is an upward throwing motion, you are going to be tilted – hitting shoulder above non-hitting shoulder – such that when you rotate, your racket hand is flung upwards.

If you struggle with coordinating that initial explosion, work on this axial rotation. Internalize that swinging up to the ball means engaging your core muscles, adopting a balanced, stable core posture, and then violently twisting around. Since you’ve used your upper back muscles to attach your elbow to your torso, this rotation is going to accelerate your arm quickly and safely.

The better your posture while rotating, the more efficient your rotation is going to be, and the faster your racket will go.

4. Long is good.

A few fractions of a second before contact, Ash Barty’s racket is still open; were the ball contacted here, it would fly well long.

If Ash Barty contacted her serve in the image shown here, rather than a few fractions of a second later, she’d sail the ball out past the baseline. This means that if you yourself sail a ball out past the baseline, there’s a decent chance your fundamental motion is fine. The corrective tweak to bring the ball down into the box is small.

Toss

What if Ash had tossed the ball such that, when she reached this point in her swing, she was contacting it? Well, she’d hit it long, or she’d have to contort her swing to drive the ball down, killing her velocity.

Tossing the ball sufficiently far forward is necessary such that, when the racket is striking the ball, it’s on slapping towards the box part of its trajectory.

This will vary depending on the type of serve you’re hitting, but, in general, if you hit a few serves long, try the same motion with a farther forward toss, before making larger changes to your motion.

Timing

There exists a point during the swing at which the racket is aiming towards the box. If you are hitting long, that point is later in the swing than your contact point. Start your rotational explosion a little earlier, or execute it faster. You need to be deeper into your motion by the time you strike the ball.

The primary pitfall I see students run into, when self-correcting their long serves, is that they interfere with the efficient motion they’ve developed. Thinking it’s not “down” enough, they try to volitionally “snap down” using the hand and forearm muscles, thereby breaking the efficiency of the chain.

For most students I’ve worked with, the “snap” internalization doesn’t work at all. I’ve heard it countless times:

“They just tell me to snap, but it doesn’t work. I’ll never be able to serve.”

Twist your trunk, and relax your hand. If you’re hitting long, toss farther forward, or twist earlier and faster.

5. Commit with your eyes.

A serve is a much easier interceptive task than, say, a serve return. You know where the ball is going to be, and, if you’re tossing properly, the ball is moving very slowly at the time you strike it.

Because of this, almost all elite servers don’t watch the ball all the way into contact when serving. To do so would put the head in a bit of an unnatural position – it’s much more comfortable to allow the head to rotate with the torso as you explode.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t harness vision to improve our serve. As you’re about to initiate your motion, your gaze should be locked on the ball. Do not allow your gaze to move until you’ve fully committed to your swing.

During the upward explosion (left), Nick Kyrgios’s eyes are still locked on his contact, but by contact itself (right), he has allowed his head to rotate forward (matching the natural rotation of his torso).

Maintaining your gaze on your target will improve your motor performance. When throwing a baseball, that target is, well, your throw’s target. In tennis, on the other hand, we’re “throwing” our racket, and thus our “target” for that throw is the ball itself. At the moment you initiate, you’re visualizing flinging your hand past the ball so the racket can strike it towards the box. You have a mental image (or brief movie) of the contact you’re trying to create, and your throwing motion is the means by which you create it.

Then, after you are fully engaged into your swing, you can begin to let your head turn.

I find many students pull both their non-hitting arm, and their eyes, down too early in the service motion. While we don’t have to watch it all the way into contact on the serve, we still need to fully initiate our swing before we allow our gaze to shift.

15 Comments

  1. Henry
    June 18, 2022

    I find that the issues you mentioned in the final paragraph (pulling the non-hitting arm and eyes down too early) certainly apply to me. A couple friends have pointed it out to me recently when I was struggling with my serve.

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      June 26, 2022

      Great, glad you became aware of it! That’s a common one.

      Reply
  2. Pg
    September 5, 2022

    Is corner angle service a good practise

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      September 5, 2022

      You’ll have to clarify the question.

      Reply
  3. Anonymous
    September 21, 2022

    I need to experiment with tossing further ahead. Hitting to many kings. Thanks !

    Reply
  4. Manoj Tolety
    February 5, 2023

    Your blog and advice has been such a blessing for me in my tennis journey! I read the entire FTF book’s 150 pages in 3 days – every sentence there is gem of an advice 🙂 I feel so much more confident and controlled on my forehead now. Your 90-90 advice on serve is another great advice that is instilling so much more confidence in my serve. Amazing what the right advice can do your game! My goal for 2023 is to get bumped up to 4.5 at the end of current season – if I do achieve that, it’d have been due to FTF book and this amazing blog. Thank you! I’m very grateful for all your amazing analytical advice 🙂 And please keep writing!

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      February 9, 2023

      Wow, that’s awesome!

      Check out: https://faulttoleranttennis.com/smashing-through-plateaus/ if you ever get stuck.

      Good luck on the 4.5 push. I’m rooting for you!

      Reply
  5. Raul
    April 20, 2023

    Looking at the pic of Roddick and Sampras trophy positions
    It seems that Sampras has noticeably more lateral trunk flexion (side bending of spine) than Roddick. Is that correct?

    I suspect that this is a matter of personal style and comfort. Both of them get into an upwards shoulder tilt, with elbow in line with the shoulder point. All high level servers do this. From that point the server can choose to increase the side bend, depending on his comfort and athleticism. But in general, it will be beneficial for rec players to increase the trunk side bend as we see with Sampras.

    Do you agree?

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      April 23, 2023

      Great question. I’m actually not a fan of coaching lateral trunk flexion itself. I prefer the cue “stretch the left arm up and out,” and whatever degree of lateral trunk flexion results from that is appropriate.

      The serve constitutes throwing your racket up and out. I find that insight is what allows students to find their own, personalized staring positions, and lateral trunk flexion is one component of that.

      If anything, the difference in lateral trunk flexion between these two world class servers (of similar heights) shows how variable the optimal range is.

      Reply
  6. Sigurd
    April 22, 2023

    This is a very interesting article. Through my whole career I have tried to muscle and arm the serve. Thinking of the stroke as a product of axial rotation is great. I do believe the majority of tennis players are focused on racket drop and arming the ball. Thanks!

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      April 23, 2023

      Agreed. Over-focus on the arm leads to tension, slow serves, and often injury.

      I have an adult student in his 50s, and he’s finally able to serve pain free (and faster). He was amazed that, the whole time, it wasn’t his shoulder or age that was the issue, just the way he was swinging.

      Reply
  7. Phil
    June 28, 2024

    The back view of pros hitting a top spin serve in a pinpoint stance shows many of them, during their knee bend, tilting their trunks in a straight line from their knee cap to the top of their head toward the left (if a righty) side of the court along the baseline. If a plumb line were dropped from their head down to ground, it would be to the left of their rear foot. It does facilitate the upward rotation of the shoulders around spine. The ball is still contacted above their right shoulder. Am I seeing this tilt correctly?

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      June 28, 2024

      That all sounds correct to me.

      Reply
  8. eric
    July 19, 2024

    As I do not have much talent or feel on throwing, after we get into the trophy position, is there any volitional movement on the arm (i.e. shoulder/elbow etc) before we start rotating our torso?

    Reply
    1. Johnny (FTF)
      July 25, 2024

      No, the first movers are the legs and torso. The volitional arm motion comes later in the swing – flinging it forward with your chest, and guiding the rotation of your forearm to hit the kind of serve you want (flat, slice, kick). The feeling of “hitting” the ball, on purpose, with your arm, starts late in the process, just like on the forehand.

      Reply

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