Serve Rhythm In Tennis And How To Find It

What is the rhythm of the serve in tennis, and why is it so important?

You may have heard a tennis commentator on TV state that “Roger has found his rhythm on the serve and now his first serve percentage is way above 60%.”

So, if even pros have to find that right rhythm to serve well, then it must be one of the key concepts on the serve that you must understand and know how to master.

The easiest way to describe the rhythm when serving is using the concept of rhythm in music – rhythm consists of beats and time between them.

That’s the foundation in tennis, too, but instead of beats we have movements.

The extra addition in tennis is that we need to perform those movements with different speeds.

When you’re serving, you’re performing a series of movements that need to move at certain speeds and there must be the right time delay or smooth transition between them.

Why Is Rhythm Important?

There are two main reasons we need to pay special attention to a proper rhythm:

1. It prevents tension from creeping in to your motion and therefore allows you to create a whip effect on your serve.

One of the most common mistakes when it comes to the rhythm on the serve is initiating the service motion too quickly.

By initiating the serve very quickly, we automatically become tense and lose that relaxed feeling that we need in order to accelerate the racquet very efficiently.

2. It enables you to serve at a very high consistency level.

Good servers take almost exactly the same amount of time from the moment they initiate the service motion to the moment of contact with the ball.

If you time the duration of their serve up until the contact, you’ll see that it differs very little throughout the match.

If their typical time of the serve motion is 1.8 seconds, you’ll rarely measure them serving at 1.7 or 1.9 seconds, and they will almost never make a difference of 0.2 seconds or longer.

Because of that exact timing of their service motion, they are able to replicate the serve that hits the service box accurately many times.

Even these precise servers sometimes lose that small, imperceptible, split-second timing in the serve and find it difficult then to hit first serves with high percentage.

The pros know they need to keep FEELING the rhythm of the serve and look for that FAMILIAR feeling when everything flows in harmony without any adjustments in the service motion. It’s that feeling of proper rhythm that gives them such high consistency.

The most common situation when we lose the rhythm is when we face a pressure situation.

Our instinctive response to pressure is to get away from it or to make it end quickly as it’s uncomfortable.

That instinct will also affect you when you’re serving on a big point, and it will very likely make you rush your service motion.

When you do that, you’ll basically serve at a different rhythm than you have been practicing for years ‒ and that’s why you’ll very likely miss the serve.

It’s critical to focus on your established rhythm when serving on key points and not allow that feeling of rushing or anxiety to dictate your serve rhythm.

Ways Of Finding Serve Rhythm

There are different schools of thought out there teaching you how to time your service motion.

a) Start very slow and then accelerate

While my take – which you’ll find below – is similar to this one, I don’t really recommend starting the service motion very slow.

That’s because you’ll have trouble tossing the ball high enough. If your tossing arm doesn’t move fast enough, the ball won’t have enough thrust to fly high enough.

So, I often see toss problems and arm coordination problems with players who were taught to start their service motion very slow.

b) The 2-1-3 rhythm

The usual approach to rhythm is to describe the speeds of three key parts of the serve as 2-1-3.

You can imagine these speeds as the gears in a car.

So, speed 2 is medium speed, 1 is slow and 3 is fast.

Speed 2 corresponds to the backswing, 1 to the trophy position and transitioning to the drop, and 3 to the upward acceleration towards the ball.

This is a good fundamental of the serve rhythm with one caveat: this approach has three parts that you need to focus on, and you may be “doing” too deliberately part 1 in the middle.

If you keep “doing” something, you’ll never really relax and loosen up your arm, will you?

The only danger I see with this approach is that you never completely loosen up during the serve, which is what you need to hit effortless serves.

c) The 2 – let go – 3

This is how I feel the rhythm in my serve.

Instead of “doing” the middle part where the racquet transitions from the trophy position to a drop, I “let that happen” by itself – because of the existing momentum that the racquet still has and because of gravity pulling the racquet down.

By letting it happen, I can create a very loose arm which I can then use like a whip to accelerate it fast and effortlessly into the ball.

The main reason I prefer this approach is that it’s the most natural and it is the same as if you’re throwing a ball.

If you hold a ball in your hand and decide to throw it far, you’ll very likely feel this same rhythm: namely doing a backswing, then having a little time delay in that transition behind you from which you’ll now accelerate forward.

You will very likely feel just two parts with one time delay in between them.

We don’t actually “do” the time delay there. We let it happen because it feels very comfortable and it allows us to smoothly transition to the acceleration phase, which is the key to creating a lot of speed for that final moment when the ball is released.

The wise Eckhart Tolle suggests that we not only pay attention to words that are being spoken but we also listen to the silence between them.

That takes our mind to new levels of awareness.

You may use this analogy also with the serve rhythm: instead of “telling” yourself what to do at every single moment of the service motion, perform the backswing first and then pay attention to doing nothing for a split moment before gently and smoothly transitioning to the acceleration phase.

Let that middle phase happen by itself without your constantly being in control.

That will take your perception of the service motion to new levels of awareness and therefore to higher levels of serving.