Hi I'm Alois Rosario from PingSkills. Jeff Plumb and I are going to show you how to do the
very basic serve. If you have never played Table Tennis before and you are wondering
how do you serve, let me show you some basics. The first thing is that when you serve in
Table Tennis you have to hit the ball so it bounces on your side of the table and the
other persons side.
You can't just hit the ball straight over to the other side of the table you have to
hit it down into your side first. That is the only time in the game where you do hit
the ball onto your own side.
You might be finding the basic serve fairly complicated to start with if you are here's
a really simple tip. Start with your bat and ball really close together and then all you
need to do is to do the hit. So you are doing the hit and the ball will bounce on your side
of the table and then your partner's side of the table. So it is hit, bounce, bounce.
Really important to just keep practicing this to start off with just the hit, bounce, bounce.
Once you are feeling fairly comfortable with that you can move on to the next level of serving.
So the next level of serving is to make sure that the ball is behind the end line of the
table when you are throwing it up and hitting it. So you are not allowed to hit the ball
from over here for the serve, it has to be behind the end line. So let's have a look
at that. So now we are going to do the hit, bounce, bounce from behind the end line.
Let's progress a little bit further. The next thing we are going to do is to get this serve
legally correct. You need to have the ball on the flat palm of your hand. It has to be
on the palm, it's not allowed to be on your fingers or thumb and your hand has to fairly
flat. You can get away with having your hand a little bit cupped like that but it needs
to be basically flat with the ball on the palm of your hand.
The next thing is that you need to throw the ball up at least the height of the net off
your hand. So around that high off your hand before you hit it on to your side. This is
what a serve looks like. The ball on the flat hand, throw it up and then we do our
hit bounce bounce.
Now that you have got our basics right you are holding the ball correctly behind the
line now we are going to try and make the ball travel a little bit faster and to
a better position. To get the ball faster we need to get the ball lower over the net.
We also need to make sure that we are hitting the ball forward. If you hit the ball on it's
head the ball is going to bounce high. You want to hit the ball on it's back to get the
ball moving faster.
When you hit the ball, the ball also needs to be fairly low. If you throw the ball up
and try to hit the ball from here it has to bounce high over the net. So make sure
after you throw the ball up the ball comes down back to your bat level and your
bat moves forward. A common error I see is that when people throw the ball up they
also lift their bat up and so then they are going to hit the ball from too high. When
you throw the ball up keep your bat steady and then it just comes forward to get a nice
low fast serve.
I hope now you have got the basics of the serve. Make sure that you progress to
a level where you are able to hold the ball on the plan of your hand and you throwing
the ball up to the correct height from behind the end line of the table and getting that serve
nice and low.
If you have found this lesson useful and have learnt how to serve correctly go to PingSkills.com
and learn a whole lot more about Table Tennis.