very basic serve. If you have never played Table Tennis before and you are wondering

how do you serve, let me show you some basics. The first thing is that when you serve in

Table Tennis you have to hit the ball so it bounces on your side of the table and the

other persons side.

You can't just hit the ball straight over to the other side of the table you have to

hit it down into your side first. That is the only time in the game where you do hit

the ball onto your own side.

You might be finding the basic serve fairly complicated to start with if you are here's

a really simple tip. Start with your bat and ball really close together and then all you

need to do is to do the hit. So you are doing the hit and the ball will bounce on your side

of the table and then your partner's side of the table. So it is hit, bounce, bounce.

Really important to just keep practicing this to start off with just the hit, bounce, bounce.

Once you are feeling fairly comfortable with that you can move on to the next level of serving.

So the next level of serving is to make sure that the ball is behind the end line of the

table when you are throwing it up and hitting it. So you are not allowed to hit the ball

from over here for the serve, it has to be behind the end line. So let's have a look

at that. So now we are going to do the hit, bounce, bounce from behind the end line.

Let's progress a little bit further. The next thing we are going to do is to get this serve

legally correct. You need to have the ball on the flat palm of your hand. It has to be

on the palm, it's not allowed to be on your fingers or thumb and your hand has to fairly

flat. You can get away with having your hand a little bit cupped like that but it needs

to be basically flat with the ball on the palm of your hand.

The next thing is that you need to throw the ball up at least the height of the net off

your hand. So around that high off your hand before you hit it on to your side. This is

what a serve looks like. The ball on the flat hand, throw it up and then we do our

hit bounce bounce.

Now that you have got our basics right you are holding the ball correctly behind the

line now we are going to try and make the ball travel a little bit faster and to

a better position. To get the ball faster we need to get the ball lower over the net.

We also need to make sure that we are hitting the ball forward. If you hit the ball on it's

head the ball is going to bounce high. You want to hit the ball on it's back to get the

ball moving faster.

When you hit the ball, the ball also needs to be fairly low. If you throw the ball up

and try to hit the ball from here it has to bounce high over the net. So make sure

after you throw the ball up the ball comes down back to your bat level and your

bat moves forward. A common error I see is that when people throw the ball up they

also lift their bat up and so then they are going to hit the ball from too high. When

you throw the ball up keep your bat steady and then it just comes forward to get a nice

low fast serve.

I hope now you have got the basics of the serve. Make sure that you progress to

a level where you are able to hold the ball on the plan of your hand and you throwing

the ball up to the correct height from behind the end line of the table and getting that serve

nice and low.

If you have found this lesson useful and have learnt how to serve correctly go to PingSkills.com

and learn a whole lot more about Table Tennis.