Introduction to the Serve Progressions
Welcome to the serve progressions section of the website. In this section we’re going to teach you how to learn the serve using a series of steps – progressions – that will build your serve from scratch.
You’ll notice that the way we approach the serve in this section is very different from how we taught the serve in the serve fundamentals section of the website. In that section we talked about what every single good player does when they hit a serve. We went chronologically through the steps. For example, we started with the stance, then the toss, then the backswing, etc. However, knowing what good players do over the course of their motions doesn’t necessarily teach you how to do those things. What we’ve done in this section is present a series of steps – progressions – that will build you up to a fundamentally sound serve. In other words, you progress from one step to the next. For example, we start with how your arm and the racket move as you swing up at the tennis ball. That discussion didn’t take place until the end of the serve fundamentals section.
One final point is that we’ve left out some stuff in this section that you’ll find in the serve fundamentals section. For example, we don’t mention the knee bend because you can hit a fundamentally sound serve without bending your knees. Including it here could complicate things and divert your attention from more important aspects of serve technique.