4 Key Factors for High Quality Long Fast Serves

The long fast serve can be a great asset in table tennis, for surprise factor, setting the pace of a rally, or forcing a passive reaction. Here are 4 things you need to ensure for high quality long, fast serves – and some activities to help develop them in practice.

1. Depth

A quality long serve has to be close to the end of the table, good depth on the serve is more likely to reduce reaction time, weight transfer and offensive shot quality from your opposition. A shallow serve gives the opponent time to accelerate into the ball, and so quickly turn into a mistake.Activity: Place a towel or line on the table and practice getting high % of serves over that line, the closer to the baseline the better. Experiment with your hand speed, leg weight transfer and waist rotation to get better depth.

2. Speed

A long fast serve must be just that. After working on improving the depth of your serve, you need to also ensure speed. A long slow serve is not very effective, unless it is planned for a set-play or strategy, so when planning to serve long and fast – you need to be able to execute. Contact speed is important here, and again waist movement acceleration.Activity: Here you can get a lightly weighted object like a cardboard box, place it on the table and serve into it. See how many balls it takes for you to knock the box back towards and over the edge. You can play contests with friends or just include it in your serve practice. When challenged you are more likely to actively problem solve to try and knock the box off faster.

3. Precision

The precision and accuracy of your serve is very important. You need to be able to target specific weak areas to exploit your opponent. One incorrect placement and you could be dealing with a very different outcome, and with long serves that can be dangerous.Activity: Use small targets like broken balls or even coins, to hone your accuracy. Your goal should be to be able to feel all of the mechanics together which help you set the exact direction of the ball. This also combines with depth practice too.

4. Deception

It is important that when we serve long that we don’t give away our element of surprise. For this reason it is vital that you have serve pairings, short serve actions which can be transformed into long serves without too much difference in appearance. You never want to give your opponent any hints about what is coming, so be sure to add long-fast variations to your usual short serve preparations.Activity: Practice a service action and switch actively between short and long serve variations. You can even pair this with the precision activity and try and hit a short and long target within a single pair of serves.There are some basic tips you can follow and areas of the utmost importance when preparing your long fast serves for matches. Be sure to check the video for more detail!

About Matt Hetherington

Matt Hetherington is a Content Specialist at JOOLA and an auto-immune athlete. Originally from New Zealand, Matt has represented his home-country in table tennis tournaments all over the world. He currently runs the popular coaching blog, MHTableTennis. Previously, he served as the Media and Communications Director for USA Table Tennis (USATT).