A practice session is where you have to work on the smallest little thing of the game. Most of the people make a lot of mistakes even without knowing about them. This article will be helpful for you in identifying the common mistakes that you do in your serve practice.
Top 3 common mistakes:
1. Improper warm up: almost all the time, people are on the go to hit big serve shots, jumping high, hitting as high as they can with aggressive moves without a proper warm up. Being unaware about the disastrous results of such a mistake people ruin their game eventually.
Problems:
- This is very risky, as it amplifies your chances of getting an injury in the elbow or other severe injuries.
- It is going to affect your whole match, as it will affect your confidence by making you void of being in contact and rhythm of the ball and its spin.
- It will perturb your balance, and if you start off-balance, you may never find it again in the game, and that is very bad for a game.
- It will get you real panicky and will make you lose some points.
Overcoming the problems: 4 step progression
- First thing you should do is to get the feel of the ball, strings and also of the balance. Keep both your legs on the ground, without any displacement of the body, do the serve by throwing the ball in a nice and easy manner every time. Do a minimum of 5-6 serves to get the feel.
- Then Start stepping around after throwing the ball in a serve, like a baseball thrower. Still no jumping. Just a step ahead will do. This will make the serve go a little faster.
- Start taking lazy jumps while serving and practice some easy going movements without applying full power, this will increase your agility.
- When you are finally ready to play go for full power serve practice. So, make sure your kick serve, slice serve, flat serve, spins, etc. are all warmed up.
2. Lack of Specific Target: It is a fine idea to aim the ball in the box, but the problem is that it is still a very large area to target. Just trying to get the ball in there is not enough for a tactical serve. When you plausibly miss the extensive target area, the ball goes out. So, bigger the target area, more you tend to miss on hitting it.
To mitigate this risk of missing more shots, you should aim at smaller and more specific target, this will make you more accurate. Even if you miss the small target, you will hit somewhere around without letting the ball going out of the box, you will still make the serve.
3. Cumbersome position after serve: the people who are jumpers or perform kick serves make this mistake most commonly. They perform a wrong toss which makes the ball go up high taking an archaic path behind the body plane. And to make up to this they jump and fall back completely off balance after the serve. Sometimes they stumble reaching the most inappropriate place in the court, moreover in an incorrect position. This makes them vulnerable to miss the shot as the court is rendered empty and gives the opponent a chance to place the ball anywhere in the wide area. Off balance position makes it impossible for the player to reach the ball in time and make a considerable return.
To correct this make a feasible toss, then place your serve and come back immediately in a split step position after the serve, this will make you ready to receive and return the shot without getting off balance.
As stated earlier, serve is the most important shot of all, hence you should extract the most from this article to learn about hidden mistakes and must correct them instantly. You can anytime refer to the very amazing and absolutely free e-book that covers 7 steps to a powerful serve. Download the book and follow instructions to become a pro.
