Advanced Table Tennis Serving Tips

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jared again on behalf of Expert Village and in this section I'm going to talk to you about some of the more advanced parts of serving, for more of the high level players. The first thing you're going to want to do is use more of your wrist when you're serving. So instead of coming in like this, using pure arm and elbow and hitting the ball, you will generate some spin. But you, instead you want to come in and flip your wrist like this. This will generate much higher level spin on the ball and will cause your opponent to do a lot of different things. So instead of like this you want to use your wrist as much as you can. The second thing, you want to do, and this is most important, is that you deceive your opponent with your serve by varying it in all different kinds of ways. So, there are lots of different serves you can do and I'm going to show you some of these. This first serve that I'm doing is a heavy under spin serve and this will cause the opponent to keep it short or hit it into the net. And this serve, it's going to be very similar, but I'm going to hit it this way, put a side spin to make them hit it this way. And this has a little more top spin to it. And the reason they're going to hit it these different ways is because I'm putting spin on the ball, making the ball spin a certain direction and when it hits their racket, the rubber on their racket is going to grip it and send it that direction. So, kind of a rule of thumb is, when my racket goes this way, they ball's going to go off their racket in that direction and same for this way. If my last swing is like this when I hit the ball, the ball's going to spin and when it hits their racket it's going to go this way. See, for top spin I'm hitting it up, and they're going to hit high. If I hit an under spin, they're going to hit down. And so, for this serve, its backhand and I'll be doing side spin so they'll hit the ball this way. This can be top spin or under spin depending on if I hit up with my racket or if I come under with my racket. And so, with these serves, you can add what I call flair to it. This is to catch the eye off your opponent and make him think different things. You can throw the ball really high, you can do arm flips. So this is kind of an arm serve that will make them think different things are going on. With that, they are going to be thinking all different kinds of things. And like I did before, this is swinging the racket back and forth so they have to see the point of contact. Because you'll notice after I struck the ball I send the racket this way, to make them think I put spin that direction. And like I mentioned before you can also do a really high serve. This will generate more spin because gravity is spinning the ball faster and faster down to your racket."