Top 10 Tennis Tips To Increase The Speed Of Your Serve
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After you have learned the basic tennis serve technique and have become quite consistent you feel the urge to really whack the ball and send a rocket towards your opponent. 
You try to hit the ball hard, use all the strength in your body and somehow the serve just doesn’t seem to respond to your efforts.
In fact, it seems that it’s going even slower now. ;(
Here are 10 tips to help you serve faster:
1. Loosen up! Don’t grip the racquet so tight, loosen your whole body and swing freely at the ball.
2. Think “fast” instead of “hard”. The tension of your body starts in your mind.
3. Exhale when you serve. That will help you release some of the tension.
4. Make a swooshing sound. Try a few serves without the ball and just listen to the sound. Remember the feel and hit the ball in the same way.
5. Don’t aim! When you are learning how to serve fast, you need to let go. Don’t try to serve fast and at the same time get every ball in.
6. Hit a few balls into the back fence across the whole court. There is an old program running on your brain that tells your arm how fast to move. When you change your target (dramatically), you can set yourself free from that program.
7. Throw the racquet. Take an old racquet, go to a nice lawn and throw the racquet as far as you can with a similar motion to serving or throwing a ball.
8. Rotate quickly with your body. The main energy source of your serve is body rotation. Try and consciously rotate your shoulders to increase the racquet head speed.
9. Drive with your legs. Legs add only about 10% of the racquet head speed, but that could mean more than 10 km/h if you take full advantage of the leg drive.
10. Keep a high racquet head speed even AFTER the contact. Don’t accelerate only to the ball, instead try and hit through the ball focusing on fast movement for a few inches after the contact.
Feel free to add your own tips for a faster tennis serve in the comments below!
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August 28th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
11. Watch Pete Sampras slow-mo videos and just try to imitate him
August 29th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Yes, Andre, that’s a great tip.
By watching top pros we learn and program our body subconsciously which works much better than thinking in words.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:27 am
In the words of Johan Kriek, speed is 50% of power…..emphasis speed.
March 22nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
i try to imitate roddick, i find when doing other serves the motion slows down and i loose momentum when going for it.
but roddicks serve is short, powerful and looks scary!
March 26th, 2008 at 7:38 am
tense whole body up and hold your breath while doing that for about 30 seconds.this will relax all the muscles in the body and allow you to serve with a much more free action,so adding fluidity and subsequent speed.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
My favourite is Feder, he is a tennis genious to me, i am trying to follow him, but doing a serv like him, its extremly difficult for me. After practice of few weeks, now i can do good Kick Serv, i can spin the ball really well, but i just cannot develop speed inKick Serv. My Kick Serv is very slow, but with good spin. Can someone refer me good tips how to develop really good speed for Kick Serv maintaining good spin as well. ????