Most tennis players would probably love to speed up their first serve. However, consistency and placement are far more important than the speed of your serve.
If you can't get the serve in and within a reasonable distance in where you aimed, then the speed of the serve is "almost" worthless.
More: 2 Ways to Improve Your Second Serve
The speed of the serve does account for something and can sometimes win you some easy points. However, you need consistency with your first serve before you start adding speed to your serve. A good percentage for first serves is anything above 70 percent.
4 Ways to Speed up Your Serve
Tossing out Front. Tossing the ball out in front of your body helps you to move into the court when hitting the serve.
By moving into the court when you serve you're bringing your body weight into the serve. If you're moving forward when hitting the serve this will increase the speed of your serve.
Hit Less Spin. Hitting the ball flat creates more pace because you're hitting it more solid. Hitting with spin puts more friction on the ball and doesn't allow you to swing straight through with all your power.
Racquet Adjustments.
1. Get a longer racquet. Look what it did for Michael Chang! The longer the racquet the more power you will get out of your shots.
2. String your racquet with less tension which will give you more power.
More: No. 1 Enemy of Tennis String
3. Adding weight to your racquet head helps to produce more force when hitting. It's like driving a bike and hitting a wall, or driving a semi-truck and hitting a wall. The semi truck definitely has more momentum and more force to hit with because it is heavier.
The difference won't be that great of a change, but it will increase the speed of your serve, and other strokes for that matter.
You can add weight to your racquet by simply applying sticker like lead strips to the head of your racquet. Make sure you do this evenly on both side of the racquet. Not many of these strips are needed to notice a difference in weight of your racquet, so do not over do it. Just try a little at a time to see if it works for your game.
4. You can also get a heavier racquet. Both again, both of these options have downsides. Heavier racquets could hurt your arm and they are also harder to generate spin with since your racquet head speed will probably slightly slow down.
More: 3 Steps to a Flawless Tennis Serve Toss
All four of the racquet adjustments come with downsides. Usually when you do something to your racquet to add more power you are decreasing the amount of control the racquet will give you. Adding weight can hurt your arm or shoulder and should be considered before making adjustments.
Quick Tip: Hitting the serve down the "T" (the down the middle of the court) will create a faster serve for two reasons.
One reason is that it has less distance to travel and therefore encounters less air resistance to slow the ball down. The other reason is that the net is low, so it gives you more room for error to hit the big flat serve.
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