Finding Rhythm In Your Tennis Serve

In today’s article, I am going to talk about the rhythm in the tennis serve. Once you get the idea of having good rhythm in your tennis serve, you are going to dramatically improve your tennis serve on court. Having good rhythm is essential in attaining synchronization of your movements and the timing to contact the ball. Keep in mind that good rhythm equals good timing and we all know that timing is everything in sports.

Find your rhythm with this simple drill : The Travelling Serve

There is one drill that I would like to share with you to help you find rhythm in your tennis serve. I call it “The Traveling Serve”. It is simple to execute and definitely effective to help you improve your serve. So here we go.

The first step toward finding the best rhythm in your tennis serve is to start with your feet. Keep in mind that tennis, like all other games involving movement like basketball, baseball and soccer, is a game of movement where natural bipedal rhythm rules, so to speak. In these sports, a minimum of 2 steps is taken before execution is performed, which can be anything from shooting the ball in basketball to hitting the ball in tennis.

This is true regardless of the number of steps taken during the approach – your feet will perform a final 1-2 step before you hit the ball. Such natural movement is attributed to the fact that your two feet complement each other whether you are walking, running or jumping.

So what you need to do is stand around three feet behind the baseline, step forward until your front foot (left foot for righties, right foot for lefties) plants. This is where you are going to hit the serve. You can choose to go back and try again or continue all the way to the net.

The key here is to establish rhythm with your arms as you are moving with your legs. There are many recreational players who do not know how to establish rhythm when they are preparing to serve at the baseline. By adding some walking to the serve certainly can help to find the rhythm in the your tennis serve.

Bonus Tips

To help you further to execute “The Traveling Serve”, you can count the rhythm as you walk and serve. For the righties, each time you step forward with your right leg, you count 1. When you follow up with your left leg, that is 2. Once you say 2, that is where you hit the serve. So the whole rhythm should be 1, 2, serve, 1, 2, serve and so on.

Go ahead and try this new drill and find your good rhythm in your tennis serve. Drop me any comments or feedback below this article. I look forward to hear from you.

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