Serve practice is my favorite practice. You want to know why? Because I know most of my opponents don’t practice their serves as much as I do (or used to, anyway), and so I will always have an edge on them!

The most important aspects of serve practice is to develop high-level serves that match your game, or the game that you want to play. (Note the difference there.)

Imagine your game, either as it is now or as you want it to be. What serves would you want to develop for that game? If you are a standard attacker, then you want serves that set up your attack. Some want opponents to push their serves back long so they can loop (forehand or backhand), and so do a lot of backspin serves, with other spins mixed in. (Mixing up short and very low backspin and no-spin serves are especially effective.) Others might want soft topspin returns, and so may serve more sidespin or side-top, and may also focus on half-long serves, where the second bounce, given a chance, would be right at the opponent’s end-line. Or you might want to focus on deep serves, such as big breaking sidespin serves. (This doesn’t work as well at the higher levels where they are usually attacked, but are effective as a variation.)

Besides your standard serves that set you up, what surprise serves should you develop that will both give you perhaps a few free points as well as make the opponent guard against those serves, thereby making your other serves more effective?

Perhaps have a coach or high-level player take a look at your serves, or show you his. Then practice and develop your serves to the highest level you can. Here’s a hint – you may never move or stroke at the pace and consistency of a world-class player, but there’s NOTHING that keeps you from developing world-class serves.

Here’s my tip, Practicing Serves the Productive Way.

Before any practice session, you should ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish.

1. What weaknesses are you trying to overcome?
2. What average shots are you trying to turn into strengths?
3. What strengths are you trying to turn into overpowering ones?

You should, of course, start with a warmup. (If you are practicing with a coach or strong player, you may save yourself some practice time by warming up with someone else first, so your practice time can be 100% devoted to improvement.) Get into the serious training as quickly as possible.

The biggest problems I’ve seen with most practice sessions are:

1. Players practicing the same things they’ve always practiced, and so re-enforcing the strengths those drills develop while ignoring everything else, including weaknesses.
2. Generalized drills that don’t focus on the specific area you need to work on. For example, if you have a good counterloop but have difficulty counterlooping an opponent’s first loop against backspin, then incorporate that into your drill. If you just serve topspin and go straight to counterlooping, you won’t be addressing the actual problem. (An opening loop against backspin is different than a loop against topspin – it has more spin and a shorter arc.)
3. It’s not just about improving weaknesses – you also need to make your strengths overpowering! Do game-type drills that allow you to do this. This includes focusing on developing serves, receives, strokes, and footwork that set up those overpowering strengths.
4. Practicing shots at a pace where you aren’t consistent. If you do that, you are just practicing being erratic. Focus on consistency and good technique, and build up the pace as you improve.

Here’s my tip, Killer Practice Sessions. Make sure to adjust to what you are trying to develop in your game.

Training doesn’t take place only at the table. There’s also shadow-practice, which you can do anywhere. (There’s also physical training, but that’s another issue.) It’s very difficult to change or develop a new stroke, and learn the timing at the same time (i.e. while hitting at a table). It’s much easier to change or develop a stroke separately with shadow practice, and then learn the timing. For example, when I decided earlier this year that I needed to learn to change my grip for my backhands, I spent way too much time shadow-practicing it until it became automatic to change the grip when I moved to hit a backhand. When I finally tried it at at the table in random drills, the change was automatic and reflexive.

While away from the table is also when you should be thinking about how you can improve. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your game? How can you turn the strengths into overpowering ones (both the shot itself and ways to get it into play) and remove weaknesses? How do you see your game in the future? What drills should you be doing to reach that? Perhaps discuss it with a coach, top player, or your playing partners - they very likely know your game and may have a good perspective on what you should be working on.

Here are two tips:

• Shadow Practice for Strokes and Footwork.
• Shadow Practice for Fitness and Improvement

It's a two-step process. Focus on both steps, and it'll happen.

First, think about the game a lot. There are really three realms here – technique, tactics, and sports psychology. The more you think about them the better your understanding will be. Think about every aspect. If you have questions, ask someone experienced and knowledgeable. (Or buy a good table tennis book that will make you think about the sport!) A true student of the game learns all he can, and this makes him both a better player and a better coach. Note that this thinking should take place primarily away from the table. Once you are at the table, you have to let your training take over, where you limit your thinking to between points, focusing on simple tactics. Too much thinking there just freezes you up, whether it's in a match or training.

Second, talk to smart table tennis people. You will be amazed at how much you can learn by listening. There are weak players who are smart players - and you can learn from them. There are also strong players who really aren't smart table tennis people, but they know their game, and you can learn from that. (Long ago I learned that you can divide top players into those two categories – table tennis experts, and experts only on their game.) You can also learn a lot by talking to average players who are not necessarily smart table tennis players. Unless you literally think you know more about every aspect of table tennis than they do, you can learn something from them. Plus, you learn how other players think, which helps in developing your own tactics. (For example, I’ve sometimes fallen into the trap of thinking opponents think too much, where I’ll think, “This is what I should do, but he’s expecting that, so I better do something else.” I’ve learned that the large majority of the time, opponents aren’t expecting the obvious, or at least aren’t ready for it.)

Tactics can be complicated because there are so many possibilities and so many styles to take into account. They are simple because it usually comes down to finding one or two simple tactics that work. Remember my mantra, "Tactics isn't about finding complex strategies to defeat an opponent. Tactics is about sifting through all the zillions of possible tactics and finding a few simple ones that work."

But with all those zillions of possibilities, how can you simplify things so as to find a few simple ones that work? I've written a number of tips on how to do so, but here's a simple one anyone can follow, and you only have to think about two things.

First, what do you do that threatens your opponent? Once you decide that, what can you do to get that into play?

Second, what does your opponent do that threatens you? Once you decide that, what can you do to keep that from coming into play?

See how simple that was?