The tennis serve is often neglected in practice and one of the reasons is that
it's quite boring to serve into an empty box. Players therefore only choose to
commit a few minutes of their practice to serving. Serving into an empty box is
necessary however to learn a proper serve because we cannot always work on
our serve when playing out points. When we play out points we're concerned with
several things, we're trying to construct a point we're also very competitive and
want to win and therefore are not willing to experiment with the serve and
potentially make double faults or miss a lot of first serves. So the big difference
between serving into an empty box in practice versus serving in a real match
is anxiety that you're feeling when you're serving in a match. Under certain
score lines you will get tight and you're gonna have the fear of missing
and we have to find a way to somehow recreate this when we're practicing serves.
And a great way to mimic this fear of missing in practice is to do the
serve percentage drill. Basically, you're going to take ten balls and now you're
going to select a serve you can do a flat serve a kick serve or a slice serve
and you'll serve ten times. You're going to keep score how many out of ten
you've made. In this instance, I'm gonna work on my kick serve. To make this
drill even more difficult I'm gonna force myself to serve to a specific
location, in this case, I'm gonna aim out wide. If my serve happens to go down to
T or to the body I'm going to count it as a mistake.
You don't have to do this you can simply serve anywhere in the box and if you
make it it counts as in. And the great thing about this drill is if I start
missing serves early I'm gonna get pressure right away. Also if I continue
to make serves and I get to eight out of eight or nine out of nine then all of a
sudden I have pressure because I have to make the last two. So it works great
either way. So let me get started the kick serve is gonna go out wide and
let's see how many out of 10 I get in.
Okay here's the last one. I missed two this is a disaster so far so I
got to make this one to make it somewhat acceptable getting eight out of ten it's
okay, seven out of ten is a disaster that means it's three double faults and we
can't accept that. Alright I made it normally I would keep going until I get
nine out of ten or even ten out of ten it that's what you can do as well if you
don't get it on the first try you can keep going until you get to the desired
number of balls that you want to get in. So now I'm going to do a flat serve
here it's okay to get six out of ten sixty percent I would be happy with
because I'm going to hit it hard I'm gonna aim out wide just like I did on
the kicker so I got to redeem myself now. Come on Nick!
I just got rained on in the middle of my flat serve exercise and this is great
because now I'm even more agitated so it's a good mental practice. So let's
start over, this is the flat serve drill. I'm trying to get six out of ten.
Alright I only missed one, there were a couple that were kind of in the middle
but I'm gonna give them to myself anyway they were enough on the out wide. Okay
so I got eight out of nine that's pretty good. Last one! There's a little bit of
tightness now I'm gonna try to relax stay calm
take a deep breath and get nine out of ten. Come on Nick!
Alright, so you can see this adds a little bit of excitement a little bit of anger. This is good. So
eight out of ten on the flat serve I'm very happy with that. So I really encourage
you to try out the serve percentage drill. It's a good way to spice up your serve practice.