How to Add Power to Your Serve (in No Time At All)

Why is it Important to Learn How to Add Power to Your Serve?

Having a consistent serve is important, as it is the only shot we actually control on the tennis court! However, adding power to your serve not only improves its effectiveness by taking time away from your opponent but adding racket head speed can also make you even more consistent too believe it or not! 

There is a lot to be said for great servers in the professional tennis world. Some of the best players of all time, like Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, and Venus Williams all had unbelievable serves in their own right!  

Some of the biggest servers of all time like Andy Roddick, Milos Raonic, Nick Kyrgios, and John Isner all use a few common traits to make their serves both consistent and insanely powerful. You too can tap into these techniques later on in this article. 

There are actually a few hidden benefits to having a powerful serve above what you may think. Of course, being able to bomb down huge serves keeps your opponent on their toes and these are naturally difficult to return. 

But, when you have a powerful serve, the court opens up to you in ways that it simply can’t for a player with a slower serve. 

For starters, most players will decide to return from a much deeper position in the court when they have a very powerful serve. They do this to give themselves more time to react. However, this means you have a lot more court to play into and it also opens up the angles of the court to a much greater degree. This means you have more court to hit your next shot, perhaps an aggressive forehand or delicate drop shot into. 

This serve plus one tactic is used by many of the world’s best players to get their opponent on the back foot as soon as the point starts. 

Big servers also have the luxury of more time to get into the net and more court to hit into if they decide to serve and volley. The likes of Pete Sampras, Goran Ivanisevic, and Pat Rafter all utilized this tactic and were able to close the net and volley into the open court to put their opponents under constant pressure. 

Having a big serve also opens up the possibility of using the underarm serve like the flamboyant Nick Kyrgios. We don’t recommend this for everyone, but it goes to show that with such a powerful serve, the Aussie has a lot of options to choose from when his opponent is already on the defensive before the point even starts.

How to Hit the Perfect Fast Serve in Tennis

As you might expect, adding more power to your serve won’t happen overnight. But, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen quickly if you follow a few simple steps and execute them correctly on the court! 

Step 1: Look at TheTennisBros.com’s Secrets of the Serve Course

First things first, it is important to take your learning into your own hands when you are trying to add a new skill to your tennis game. Whether that be learning a new technique, footwork pattern, or power move, it is important to have a clear game plan before you start practicing on the court. 

Therefore, the most proactive thing you can do to add more power to your serve is check out our Secrets of the Serve course! We’ll walk you through the fundamentals and help you master them to improve both your power AND consistency. 

Our resident ex-ATP professional and long-time master performance coach Dave Ireland has a wealth of knowledge and experience to share. Dave will walk you through the biomechanics of the serve, how to position yourself correctly and how to get one up on your opponent from a tactical perspective too! 

So, if you want to get the most out of your service motion, add more power and dominate on the court, take a look at our Secrets of the Serve course today!

Step 2: Turn Your Shoulders

The next step to adding more power to your serve and sending down bombs is to use your shoulder turn more effectively. This is something that professional players manage to do so well, and you can learn how to implement this in your own game too! 

The unit turn in general is a very important technique in tennis. This rotational move helps us use our body to create power, so we don’t have to rely just on our arm. Doing this adds more power and consistency to all of our shots, but this is particularly true on the serve. 

Turning your shoulders so you are more or less facing the back fence before you serve will help you uncoil much more and add even more power to your serve. Doing this will also help you get your body under the ball, allowing you to drive up into the shot and hit from a higher contact point, again adding more power.

Step 3: Use Your Legs for Weight Transfer

Next up, it’s time to use the legs! The legs are the strongest muscle group in the body so it only makes sense to use them as much as we can in the serve. 

Ideally, we want to bend the knees so the legs can be used to drive up and contact the ball at a higher point. This effectively means we can hit more down on the ball, giving us more power. The legs are also used for weight transfer, to ensure our momentum is moving forward through the serve rather than backward. 

Start with your weight on your back foot as you start your service motion, and then as you toss the ball in the air, transfer your weight onto your front foot so you can feel yourself learning forward before contact. Also, use your legs to push up off the ground into the serve for additional contact height and power.

Step 4: Stay Relaxed

Another key component to adding more power to the serve is to stay relaxed. It can be very tempting to ‘muscle’ the ball and tense up when we are trying to hit the ball with more power. But, this actually does more harm than good because we are putting more effort into the shot and actually slowing the racket down in the process. 

In order to generate a lot of racket head speed, we want our motion to be like a whip rather than a sledgehammer. Focus on your breathing, repeatable routines, and serving to targets rather than forcing the ball to go quickly! 

Step 5: Ball Toss In Front

Finally, an important but often overlooked component of adding power to the serve is actually tossing the ball slightly in front of you. Most players are taught to have a high ball toss that is in line with their body and the baseline. 

However, if you want to add more power to your serve, you actually need to throw the ball further in front to ensure your body weight and momentum are moving forward. This is essential and will improve your balance after the serve as well. If you throw the ball too far behind you, you’ll end up off balance and falling back after contact, which will lose you precious MPHs on the serve.

Once You’ve Mastered the First Serve It’s Time to Improve the Forehand

Once you have taken care of your booming serve, the next thing to improve is your forehand, so you can dominate on the court.

The best way to back up a big serve is to use a huge forehand to keep your opponent on the back foot and capitalize on short, mid-court returns. We love using the serve plus one tactic so much that we put together a course to help you improve your forehand to do the same! 

Our Forehand Domination course will help you add more power, spin and consistency to your forehand, which is the perfect dance partner to your new, improved, powerful serve!

Simple Guide to Add More Power to Your Serve In Tennis

Overall, adding more power to your serve is not a straightforward thing to do. There is no magic formula to adding tons of power to your serve. It will take purposeful practice and consistent effort to increase the MPHs on your serve. 

However, if you follow the guide laid out above, you will definitely get there! It is important to add power and racket head speed to your serve, so it can become a dominant weapon on the court and have better consistency too. 

If you want a detailed, step-by-step course that maps out all of the fundamentals of great serving to help you reinforce good habits on the court rather than bad ones, our Secrets of the Serve course is just what you need!