A bouncy serve gives opponents easy attack opportunities. The fix: drop the ball from the same spot every time, align your feet toward the target, and strike down with a slice motion, chopping under the ball with speed rather than lifting up. Practice the horizontal swing off-court against a wall or netting.
Chapters
If you are finding that you have a bouncy serve and you are below a level of 4.0 in Playtomic, for example, you are missing out because you could be hitting aggressive winning serves by having good technique. Anytime the ball is bouncy, it means your opponents can attack you back, you can't take advantage, and even sometimes it's difficult to hold a good net court position. Stop thinking of your serve as a point starter. And if you want to hit accurately and consistently, you need to have a consistent setup position. It's no good just picking up the ball, walking, starting, and getting into the rally. That won't be consistent. So set yourself up in a good position, drop the ball from the same height, from the same position, start with a racket in the same position, feet pointing towards where you want to serve, drop and hit down with slice. And you can be aggressive with that shot. Again, same position, you're going to get the same bounce, the same rebound, so you contact at the same height, so the serve looks the same, and you can start to be accurate with that serve. Now, if you're someone that wants to get slice on your serve, you need to have that racket face come down the ball. You need to go directly from take back to contact. You cannot go down and up to the ball, otherwise it's going to be bouncy. So you need to get to this position and and have the racket come down and almost chop underneath the ball. It's a combination of coming down the ball, but also with speed on the racket head. If you are going from a topspin or flat serve and you want to hit slice, you are not going to get this straight away. You need to practice this. This idea of coming down the ball is quite a difficult concept to get if it is new to you. So we have a whole load of videos that you can practice at home. You can practice this exercise at home. Drop the ball at home in your garage, in your garden, somewhere with a bit of space, hitting into a netting or to a wall, and you can practice the technique of brushing underneath that ball and hitting a horizontal shot so that when you come to the court, you can actually put this into your matches. This is almost impossible to put directly into your match because you've only got 2 serves and you don't want to slow the game down. Head to the link in the bio to find out more about all of our off-court exercises you can do to improve your serve.
