Hit a Great Kick Serve With These Simple Steps

thanks for clicking on the video my name is Tom allsop and today I'm going to show you the steps that you have to go through to be able to hit a great kick serve now the first thing you'll need is a continental grip and probably not for the reason that you're thinking you're probably thinking that a continental grip will allow you to close the racket face a little bit easier to get spin whereas an Eastern grip is more about hitting the ball quite flat it's difficult to spin this is true but there's more to it than that we need a continental grip because at the point of contact to hit a kick serve or a topspin serve the racket needs to be to the inside the only way to do that is to have a true Continental grip where the arm is on top of the racket here it's in a straight line we're not at the side we're right on top now this grip the Continental grip that you need to get and a lot of people don't have it the grip the handle is sitting on the heel of my hand here sorry my grip is a little bit gross but you see how the heel is supporting the racket a lot of people sit in here sit it under the thumb right in the middle of the hand what I call the lifeline so we need this position because this position allows us to be here if you have a Eastern grip or a continental grip where the racket is sat in the lifeline it's not a true Continental we'll be in this position where the arm in the racket is in a straight line and you can forget about hitting the top spoon from there now the second thing you'll need before you start hitting a Top Spin or kick serve is the ability to hit slice you can't hit a Top Spin or kick serve if you're not able to just spin the ball with a slice that would be like me saying I want to be able to spin the ball back over the net come on please do it but I can't hit a slice yet you know what I'll be able to cut the ball so much that it spins back over the net oh but I can't actually hit a slice backhand yet because the Top's been serve and a kick serve is just slicing the ball upwards let me explain how the spin works whatever shot you're hitting in turn it's unless you're going to come up with something really funky the ball is coming across the racket this way top swing forehands slices low low slices it always comes across the racket this way so when you're hitting a slice serve you're just going to spin the ball coming across it this way all right and the ball is going to come across the frame this way so that's just a simple slice of now to hit a topspin serve or a kick serve we now have to just slice the ball upwards that's all it is it's called topspin because when you slice it upwards the ball is then going to start spinning forwards and you've got yourself Top Spin now to be able to spin the ball upwards we need to be in this position where the racket is tilted this way which is only really going to happen with a continental grip and we need to let the ball drop a little bit so the bolt throw will need to be slightly more over your head and it will need to drop a little bit because we need to contact the ball here and we need to brush up it so if we're fully stretched we can't get Top Spin if we throw it out to the side we can't get topspin throw it over your head let the ball drop make sure you have a continental grip and if you start slicing it upwards you're going to get topspin let's give it a Bash foreign now because that's a Top Spin serve and not a huge kick the ball was rotating in both directions there was side spin on it which meant the ball was slicing a little bit but it was rotating forward so we did get a little bit of Arc over the net now for me I use this serve a lot because I can hit it a little bit harder I'm not trying to hit just kick if I will get to the kick serve in a second but when I'm just hitting kick and I'm just rushing right at the back of the ball and all my momentum is going out this way and upwards it's usually going to go a little bit slower because I'm getting older it's just a bit too much effort to have the ball not really go that fast so for me I'm just trying to hit a little bit of slice a little bit of topspin and have that ball slightly Arc over the net and still have enough Pace that it's going to cause my opponent a few a few problems a kick serve where we're just trying to spin it up get that high bouncer is good if you want to get it higher to your opponent's backhand but you will lose a little bit of pace so a kick serve is just basically a topspin serve but just more of it you're trying to brush up the ball a little bit more catch it a little bit thinner because you do that you'll probably get a little bit more height over the net and if that balls fizzing a little bit more it'll it'll jump off the court it's like when I played a it's like I think it was number five in Australia table tennis and he would just go and when it hit my back it would just fly off in ridiculous directions all it was is how thin he was catching that ball so if you want crazy spin you just got to be brushing up and catch it quite thin the problem is it's going to end up going a little bit slower so for a lot of people it's really not worth it get your topspin because it arcs over the net you can still move it around a little bit it's safe enough because it is as I say arcing over the net and uh it's an effective serve but when it comes to the ball like kicking up if this ball hits the floor and jumps like three inches to the right everyone's like it kicked it kicked yeah it's kind of exciting but if you slice the ball or put a little topspin on as well we'll head up on this and put a bit of Slice on it you can make this ball move a lot more that ball moved like this far so hitting a kick serve I don't know it's not really that exciting it's not as exciting as everyone seems to think it is so we're going to try it though anyway I'm gonna make sure I spin up the up the back of it as thin as I can and a lot of energy is going to be going upwards and out to the right I'm kind of throwing my racket out at a 45 degree angle and let's see if we can get a high bounce and a little kick on it oh there you go that'll cause a few problems the best part of the kick surf for me is being able to get the angle I can land this ball sort of halfway up the the service box I'll probably get it outside the alley if I hit it well especially if I play doubles I can really get that ball a little bit wider I'm trying to aim this ball these next three balls halfway up the service box close to the sideline and see if I can have my target as crossing the ball over the alley and over the double sideline nice down a little bit wider just to get a little cheeky angle and for this I'm going to have to really hit up so the second it comes off my racket I want it to go up and then it's going to have chance to dip down in the Box uh pretty average oh there she is now because I have a continental grip where the heel is supporting the racket here I really can't go much further than this all right because the heel's in the way if I if I use this grip I can I can wave the racket around all over the place so as I come in here and I my my wrist is releasing to a point because there's a lot of energy there's a lot of momentum going this way as I get to this point all I do is rotate my arm around it just like I would if I was hitting a first serve so I am rotating my arm around just like a throw motion it's supination pronation so even though I'm swinging in a different direction I'm swinging sort of at a 45 degree angle throwing my racket up a little bit more I'm still rotating my arm around so I end up finishing in front of me here because the swing path is this way sometimes on a slice I'll swing around my body a little bit more maybe if I'm this side and I hit a slice I'm going to swing around my body a little bit more but my point is that I keep the throw motion I keep the rotation of the arm there's a lot of people who do this motion here when they serve they start using a lot of rest and then they cup it here there's some good players who do that if you feel comfortable doing that I guess that's fine but but for me my advice is always to try to just pronate the arm as much as you can it's a very user-friendly kind of motion you're not going to get injured that much and at the end of the day it's just a throw in motion this is how I would throw my arm would rotate and that's how I treat every serve whether it's a first serve rotating my shoulders and pronating through the the serve this way or if it's swinging across and pronating here I try to keep the same motion just connecting with the ball at different angles an error that a lot of beginner and intermediate players make is they have a chop in motion so because they're cutting across the ball here they tend to continue this motion and they don't rotate the armor door so I was talking about some people use a little bit of wrist here I personally pronate the arm what we don't want to be doing is chopping here whether it's down this side of the body or even around this side of the body because this won't give you that much power you certainly won't get any racket speed everything's moving together here we want to feel like this racket head can can move so I'll give you an example of the chop you can get some spin like that but you'll always lose power because you can't get the racket head moving so you can feel like you're in a position to chop this here but rotate the arm through it after contact now every time I make a kick serve video I do it from the add side because this is where I use kick mainly if I'm playing someone right-handed it's going to get high to their backhand because I'm swinging across the ball it's it's just easier to get it wide and to jump when I come over to this side if I kick it up the T it's not quite as exciting I've also got a little less Court to work with so from this side I always feel like I have a Top Spin serve rather than trying to go for a massive kick so I'm going to demonstrate two serves here we'll see how they go but my goal from this side of the court is I want to see how fast I can hit it and get it in the box so it needs Pace it needs dip and if I can have the ball moving a little bit well that's going to be hard for my opponent to time the shot so it's not going to be kicked because that's going to lose power and it's going to have a little bit of Top Spin it might kick though I'm just not going to go for a massive kick so it did jump back a little bit but it was it was a lot lower over the net had a bit more topspin and it resulted in a little bit more pace so that would be usually how I would hit a serve from this side whereas this side I feel like I can throw it up a little bit more and get a little bit more angle a little bit more bounce

Channel: TPA tennis

Views: 59,037

Keywords: kick serve, tennis serve, tennis, topspin serve

Id: A-2Os_Phz6E

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023