How to hit harder?

A lot of people ask me, how can you serve faster? Of course, the speed depends on certain genetic factors, but you can optimize your service hardness with the following 5 factors:

1. Leg muscles

The foundation of the serve comes from the legs. The hips in particular play a crucial role in the speed of the serve. Before you strike, you load your legs by bending them, followed by tightening your body. The hip is activated during screwing. The tennis player now catapults himself upwards towards the ball and concentrates the force he has built up into the impact point. Top speeds when serving always create chains of muscle groups, movements and their harmony. If you strengthen each one of them and also optimize the technology, then you can serve over 200 or even over 220 km/h.

The maximum strength of the legs can be effectively increased as follows:

• Squats

• Bulgarian split squats

• Romanian Deadlifts

• Calf raises

2. Core muscles

In order to optimally transfer the power from the legs to the upper body, you need a strong core. Stable core muscles are also particularly important to prevent injuries.

Here are a few exercises for a strong core:

• Plank

• Hanging leg raise

• Russian Twists

3. Explosive power

Muscle strength alone is not enough to accelerate the legs as best as possible. In order to exploit the full potential of the muscles, exercises for explosive strength must be carried out. In practice these are various jumps and medicine ball throws.

Personally, I like to incorporate the following exercises into my training:

• Med ball slams

• Seated box jumps

• Jump rope

4. Shoulder stability

Only a stable shoulder is a strong shoulder. The impact movement demands a lot from an athlete's arm. Almost every tennis player has had sore muscles in their shoulder and then skipped their serves in training. To strengthen and stabilize the shoulder area, I do the following exercises:

• Push-up Shelf

• Band pull aparts

• Mobilization of the thoracic spine

5. Throwing technique

Many serve experts agree that the serve is similar to a throw! When I hit my hardest serves, I often feel like I'm throwing the racket with full force. But without letting go of the racket and without cramping up. I let my arm fly, like throwing balls. As already described in the article “Throwing more balls for a faster serve”, training to throw football or baseball is extremely helpful in acquiring better serving technique. When I trained with Alexander Bublik (top 50 singles player) at the ATP tournament in Montpellier, he regularly tried to throw a tennis ball tightly but relaxed between his serves.

In order to specifically increase the explosive power, I wrote the Super Server e-book for you, you can do that download here for free.

Enjoy the training! With sporty greetings,

Hendrik