Having a big first serve is really important to your tennis game, because as the element of having surprise and being able to get some free points off your serve. So in this video, I'm going to talk about how to be more consistent with your flat serve. 

The reason, again, why this is so important is because having an attacking first serve can really benefit you from winning free points off of your opponent because they're not ready for it now. Warning by going for a first serve, especially a more aggressive first serve, you're going to probably have a lower service percentage. 

So to counter this, but you want to do is mix in first serves not go for first serves all the time. You want to use it sparingly to surprise your opponent and mix it up with other types of serves. This is how you make the serve so much more effective. So let's get into the lesson about how we're going to have a more consistent flat serve. 

The number one concept we want to understand is the grip. The grip is huge because the grip allows you to have the right racket face of contact. What is the grip? Is the continental grip. So many players make the mistake of starting with, let's say, a frying pan grip where they're going up towards the ball like this. The problem with this grip is as you start swinging faster, the racket face is still open, and one of the keys to this is that the ball is only going to go where the racket face tells it.

So as you swing up, the racket face is going up, meaning that as you swing up with more pace, the balls is going to go more long and more long. So you don't want that. And so by having the right grip, which is a continental grip, you can actually send the edge of the racket up this way. 

Making sure that when you go up to hit the ball, the racket strings are looking into the court at your target without having to protect your swing by slowing it down by having the strings facing up. This is why the continental grip is so important, so a great way of finding the continental grip is imagining you're holding a hammer. How would you hold it? pretty much in this fashion right here going down. 

Now one of the mistakes even sometimes players make when they're holding the racquet in a hammer type grip as they come off to the side. And you can kind of see how my wrist is awkward here. And this makes some really for an awkward type situation. We want to make sure that this pad right here is on top and it's able to push down. This pad right here leverages your hand so you can really push down and get that acceleration going up towards the ball.

And this is why the continental grip is so importan.Now,are there slight variations where some players have it a little bit more round and a little bit more round. Either way, yes. But when you get to the variation of where that pad is on the side of the racquet, you lose the benefits of having the continental grip.

 The next concept we're going to talk about is the racquet face and racket path. The racquet face, like we've already said, dictates where the ball is going to go at contact. So if you know, by serving, we don't want the ball to go up.

 We need the ball to come down the court, which means we need a vertical to maybe even slightly close racquet face. But here's the thing the next part of this is the path, and this is what's really important. Now I know the word is flat serve, but guess what? Even a flat serve has a little bit of spin, and that's how you can maintain some sort of consistency. If you're just thinking that it's a complete flat hit ball, then what's going to happen is you're going to have a very, very low percentage of hitting first serves in.

 That means you're going to be hitting a lot of second serves where your opponent knows that you're just going to be getting the ball in the court, which means they have an advantage of moving up into the court because they know you have to make sure you make the ball.

You don't have the advantage of surprise that you might be able to get that ball in with a big serve, which means they cannot rely on you having to get the ball in. So this is why it's still important to have a little bit of spin where you're hitting a flat serve. 

Now, the path for serve to create some spin is come generally coming up from left to right, and you'll see this for like a slice serve and even a kick serve with the flat serve. You're not coming as drastically left or right, you're coming up just a tiny bit, and that adds just a little bit of spin to make sure you have that safety that as you're accelerating your racket through the ball, the ball is going to come down onto the court.

 And that's the way you can hit a really big serve with a tiny bit of spin to add some margin and safety, meaning that you can have a higher percentage of first serves in the court, making your opponent more scared of your first serve. And because of that, if you mix it up with other types of serves, it makes it even more powerful because they never know what you're going to be hitting.

And that's the difference between a really good server and kind of an amateur server. They think maybe I'm just going to blast cannons at my opponent and win all these free points. It never happens.

 Even with the best servers, they learn to adjust and move their servers around to make sure their opponent never feels settled. And that's the thing you have to think about when you think about the flat serve it's best used with other servers because all your opponents are going to generally do. If you hit a lot of flat servers in is, they're just going to scoot back deeper behind the baseline and your pace is no longer effective.

 And if that's the case, you've done all this for nothing. Now it's really important that you understand the racket face and the racket path. Let's talk a little bit about what's the racket motion supposed to look like because this is really important. Now there's a bunch of different ways how you can get your racket into the right position, but pretty much does it generally understood phase of getting into what we call a trophy position. 

This is what you see on tennis trophies, where the racket is up and the hand is up at some point in time, they get to this. Trophy pose position, so this is what I want you to focus on, regardless of how you might start your serve, making sure that that motion gets you to that trophy pose position.

From here, the rack is going to drop and come back around, and this is where that continental grip comes into play. When you're in this position, you're going to have your racket drop and lead with the edge of the racquet.

 But this can only be done if you have the continental grip. Most players get into what we call a frying pan situation where it drops and the strings are going forward compared to the edge going up. And if you're worried about the drop, it's really simple.

 Once you get here, all you want to focus on is taking the butt of the racket and turning it towards the target of the toss. By just turning it, it's going to drop your racket automatically and it's really sets you up for now, turning and then leading with the edge of your racket up to the ball. Now, when we're talking about leading to the edge of the racket up to the ball, the path is the next part that we want to start thinking about.

 For the path, for the flat serve will have you lining up your target, which is in front of you or behind me and the racket, so they'll go more towards each other compared to a slice serve where it might be coming across and even a kick serve where it goes up.

We're going to line all three up now. This makes a straight line that when I'm coming up on edge, the racket is going to come and be pretty much right behind the ball. Now we talked about adding a little bit of spin. So what's going to happen is as my racket comes up, it's going to brush a little bit to the right, making sure I get a little bit of spin, not a lot.

 The more to the right, you're going to have more spin, so you're going to have to kind of feel it out. How much spin do you want on your flat serve? Obviously, if you put a lot of spin on it, it's not a flat serve anymore, so you only need a little bit. So the variation of where the ball is versus the racket is a little bit over. 

So you're going to start a little bit to the left of the ball if you're right handed player and come to the right of the ball, just a little bit to add that spin, that safety, that margin that you're going to need on the ball to bring it down to the court and the final phase to having a great flat serve is making sure you're generating that acceleration, that power and that's going to come from your body. And what part of your body is it going to come from? It's going to come from separating your hips and shoulders.

So if I was going through my motion right here, as I take my racket up, you're going to notice how I'm turning my shoulders against my hips. A lot of players might turn their whole body, yes, but it's not separating the hips and shoulders. 

So in a second, we're going to do a drill just to help you separate your hips and shoulders and add more power. And this is so, so crucial. It's going to feel like you don't have to do so much work with your arm or your legs just because you're separating your racquet and then allowing that rotation to unwind into the ball.

And that's how you create power and acceleration on your serve. Using that separation, storing that energy from twisting your body or coiling your body, then uncoiling it and using that swing to accelerate up on the ball, making sure your rack is going slightly left or right and going through the ball towards the target.

 Now, as long as your racquet face is facing the direction you want, you should have more consistency on your flat surface. Now it's time to take some action and learn how to create that pop on your first serve. The first element that we want to really focus on is creating separation, and when you create separation, it allows you to coil and then uncoil too many players when they're trying to serve.

It's just all from their arm, and they're not using the bigger parts of their body to create the separation and racket and acceleration. So really simple drill is just sit on the baseline, having your toes pointing forward from here. 

Take your racquet out in front of you and just rotate and feel the separation from my shoulders facing this way and my hips still facing forward. This separation is exactly what you want. Now you may feel like, Hey, I can't get a ton of separation if I can get a little bit. That's great. If you can get lots, that's even better.

 That's just the energy you're going to use in the beginning to really get your racquet accelerate. Now what we're going to do is take that same example of acceleration and line up like we're on the baseline getting ready to serve just like normal.

 From here, I want you to go through your motion but create the separation so you can see my shoulders when I go through. My motion is facing back in the corner while my hips are still facing slightly to the side, so I'll go through this a couple of times, just getting my racket up. Just like this. And then I'm going to start uncoiling. So what's going to happen is I have the separation and I'm going to release the separation.

You'll hear the racket going by you and this kind of wind speed of the racket going through the air and seeing if you can really create some separation and relaxing while you're doing this. You can notice how I'm not really straining to do this because when I coil, I have this energy built up that I can release from here. 

We're going to take the next step is just us the ball. Now, I'm not concerned about making the ball at this moment. I'm just getting used to this new element in my serve. So what I want you to do is just go up to the line and just rotate and just whack the ball.

 Don't even care if it hits the baseline rotate. And I'm just making sure that as I'm rotating and separating, I'm just hitting the ball really hard to get the racket of speed. The next phase of this is now trying to get the ball in play.

 Now it comes back to what we talked about in the first part of this video, which is the racket face and the racket path. Obviously, we don't want to put a lot of spin on the ball, but we need a little bit of spin to control it. And we want to make sure that when we're going up and rotating, we're rotating all the way through the ball with a little bit of spin.

So that'll look like this. So adjust my racquet face. And this is the steps you want to take to create the serve you're looking for when you add a little bit of spin. You have the separation and the rotation into the court.

 You're going to experience so much more pop. Yet you're going to still have control over where you can make this count. You're not just hitting a bunch of big servers that never go in. You have a high percentage big serve that you're going to hurt your opponent, but also mix up when the time's right now, in summary. 

Number one, you got to have the right grip if you don't have the right grip. Basically, you're setting yourself up for hitting a lot of balls long with the continental grip, you're going to be able to hit more of a flat surface with a tiny bit of spin, just a tiny bit to add more margin. If you don't have this continental grip, start working on it. Because even if you do hit one or two flat serves in, it's pretty lucky. And what you'll notice that you'll still be lacking an extra bit of power that you get if you have the continental grip.

 Number two, you got to understand the racket face and the racket path. The racket face is going to send the ball in the direction where you want it to go, while the racket path is going to create a little bit of spin or flatness, depending if the racket path is straight through, the ball is going to be completely flat.

If it comes slightly left to right and straight through the ball, you add a little bit of spin for safety and margin. And this is really important because if you add a little bit of spin for safety and margin, then you're going to be able to mix it up going really big sometimes.

 And when you're a little off adding a little bit more spin, there is no harm by adding a little spin to your flat serve to make sure it goes in because it doesn't really matter if you have a big flat serve that never goes in the court, you're just hitting big shots that aren't going to really win you points with your opponent.

 Number three, you got to use your body to coil and uncoil, and this coil and uncoil happens by separating your hips and shoulders. The more you coil than uncoil, the more acceleration you're going to have with your swing to unleash into the ball. And if you practice these three elements, you're going to really be able to take your flat serve to the next level. And that's what you want to be able to win points using your flat serve and surprise your opponent so they don't know what's coming.