The serve toss can be a difficult thing to master and this happens to be the
biggest problem on the serve at the recreational level. And the toss is so
complex that even some professional players have trouble with it. So what
better time to practice your toss then now. In today's video I'm gonna give you
some realistic toss drills that you can do in the safety of your home that will
give you a good chance to improve your tossing technique. And one thing you
should never do when practicing your toss is isolating the toss arm. So if you
just stand and toss the ball up without doing anything else it's actually quite
easy to get a consistent toss but as soon as you involve your dominant arm
all of a sudden the toss has a tendency to start going bad. And the reason is
that your're doing two separate actions with the toss arm and the hitting arm. So
by going up with the toss arm and going back with the hitting arm this makes the
toss a lot more difficult. And the first exercise you can do at home involves
both the toss arm and the hitting arm and you don't even need a racket. So
basically you're gonna toss the ball at one o'clock and then you're going to
catch the ball with your hand and you can do this until you get consistent at
it. And what I suggest that you do 10 in a row and this is gonna work on
getting a more consistent and accurate toss and you also are working a little
bit on your coordination by catching the ball up on top.
Once you've done this a few times now you are going to take your racket and
you're going to practice toss locations. So basically if you're
practicing a kick serve toss you should leave it at 12 o'clock. If you're
practicing a flat serve toss you should leave the ball at 1 o'clock and this is
also the case for the slice. Now you can of course hit all three serves from the
12 o'clock position. Now the toss technique that I recommend is the
diagonal toss arm techniques. So you're going to go into your stance and your
front foot is gonna be diagonally pointing towards the side and now your
toss arm is going to go along your front foot and now you're gonna get a slight arc
in your toss. As you're throwing the ball up and the ball should land at 12
o'clock. Now while you're doing this I do want you to take your racket back as
your toss arm goes up just to make the toss practice more realistic.
In addition to the toss location you can also practice throwing the toss in front
of the baseline. So basically you can set up a trash can right in front of your
front foot and just basically take the ball and make it land inside the trash can.
And when you have a target like this it makes the toss practice a lot more fun and
I recommend that you do this until you get 20 balls into the trashcan. So that
was actually in but it bounced out. Okay another one. And let me try one more and
I got three out of three. You can get a lot of benefits on your serve by having
sufficient height on your toss. So a good way to practice is getting a ladder
placing the trash can on the ladder and you get nice and close to the ladder and
simply execute your toss and try to get it into the trashcan.
And once you master these drills you can proceed to a full body motion and
sometimes when we involve the whole body and we go through our rhythm that can
throw the toss off quite a bit because we're transferring the weight and it
does influence the toss in different ways. So what I recommend is without
actually hitting the ball you go through your whole service rhythm. So whatever
the rhythm may be you just replicate your serve and you just don't hit it. You stop
right at the moment of contact and you kind of freeze the motion. So this will
replicate the body actions that sometimes can throw the toss off quite a
bit. It does feel a little bit awkward stopping and not hitting the ball but it
does help the toss because it's in the most realistic context of the service
motion. Let me try one more. I'm going to go through my entire rhythm but I'm just
gonna stop right before the contact.
Guys if you do these drills 10 to 15 minutes every day once you get back on
the court there's a good chance that you're going to be tossing the ball a
lot more consistently.