Tennis Serve - 3 Drills To Improve Power and Consistency

Tennis Serve - 3 Drills To Improve Power and Consistency.
The serve in tennis is the most complex shot as there are so many moving parts. There are so many elements of the tennis serve that need to be mastered in order for someone to have a reliable weapon. Too often, tennis players hit serves with no goals in mind, or even worse they neglect to work on their serve.
Using drills to practice your tennis serve will help you improve certain aspects of the shot and if done regularly it will help you improve your tennis serve faster than other players.
In this free tennis lesson, Top Tennis Training coach Simon Konov will show you three different tennis drills that will help you improve your tennis serve.

Drill One
Serve motion drill. In this drill, your focus is on improving supination and pronation on your tennis serve. Prior to contact, the edge of the tennis racket should be leading the way towards the ball, just before the contact point the strings start to open towards the target and the racket will be flat towards the ball at contact. After contact, the racket will continue to turn outwards, this motion is called pronation.
Many tennis players around the world really struggle with this action, yet once mastered it will help you direct your serve and get more power. Start off facing the net, with your body front on. Hold a ball in your hand with your palm facing the side of your head. From this position, simply turn the forearm and upper arm and release the ball as a throw using mainly the forearm pronation for power. To start off you can throw the balls from the service line so you don't start cheating and using the rest of your body. Once you get the motion right, slowly work your way back to the baseline.

Drill Two
Serve power drill. Building a powerful serve comes down to using your major muscle groups in sync to generate maximum power. The legs are at the top of this list. To get the most power out of your legs, you want to feel that you go down and up in a continuous, explosive motion, similar to jumping as high as you can.
To work on this motion on the serve, place a few cones just inside the baseline and to begin with shadow your service motion whilst jumping over the cones. Once you get the motion, add the ball and see if you can do the same explosive motion with your real serve.
Focus on tossing the ball inside the court, if you toss the ball behind you or in line with the baseline, your energy will be going upwards only or backwards.

Drill Three
Serve consistency drill. It's great if you have a powerful serve, but if you can't get the serve in consistently, then your weapon is not effective for matches. In this drill, serve to one service box only (one target for more advanced players) and start on the number ten. Every serve you get in, go up one number until you reach twenty. Every serve you miss, go down one number.
The goal is to go from ten to twenty in as few serves as possible.
Once you get better at this drill, hopefully you'll be able to finish the drill in 10-12 balls.