Copying service motion of pros- is it ok?

nothing wrong with that, but for people who watch lots of tt matches, they'd probably know the general spin of the pro's serve, and consequently if you serve the same thing, ur opponent may know how to deal with it

I dont completely agree with copying style of service motion of the pro. I copied waldner for a year now, and recently I have began to understand that the whole motion- preparation, serving, coming back to ready position; was difficult to follow. You have to consider all the 3 while coping. Now I find with a simpler motion I can impert better spin and placement and recovery.

You have to know the general principals of the serve itself and then vary it or tweak it a bit to make it your own.

Lets look at the basic pendulum serve, boring. But did you know that by snapping your wrist back before contact you can vastly increase the amount of spin you can produce? Using this method you can forego using your waist at all, and by not using the snap produce less spin all with the same motion and contact point. (See Ma Lin, Timo Boll and Hao Shuai for top level exponents of this service style.)

A plus in copying pro's serves is that the pros have serves that are highly effective under pressure, so you will be probably be copying fairly good technique. Nothing wrong with a few personal tweaks though.

On the downside, the serves the pros use are linked to various follow up strokes and patterns - so if you don't have the ability to do the follow up, the serve won't help you.

 

yeh thx for that cole_ely. u make a good point. Its true all i do is bh serve, but plz tell me this guys, how do u do no spin on the bh serve, that looks like normal serve?

ok i know this is a little off topic, but im practicing my serve on the floor. This may be a newb question, but how do i recognise that the ball has no spin. I did draw a line around the ball to indicate if its spinning or not, but when i do backspin, it doesnt spin that much,plz help
im kinda confused if my serve is back or no spin.

To do a true no-spin serve you have to impart extremely light backspin so that the bounce doesn't cause the ball to topspin instead. Since spin lessens with each bounce you will have a true no-spin serve once the opponent gets to receive it.

You can practice on the carpet to see how much backspin you produce. The ball should always return back to you no matter how far you hit the ball. You shouldn't have to reach forward to grab the ball. Just pick it up at your feet. Also, heavy backspin should come back to you very fast.    

the way i see it is this:

copying the service of a pro is perfectly ok, provided you can actually do it.

that's not as easy as you might think.  firstly, it's extremely difficult to get a clear view of a pro's service motion(s) from every angle.  it's also difficult to get a clear, multi-angled view of a pro's service stance and their positioning with reference to the table.

when people are thinking about the serve, they frequently are just looking at the motion, but actually the stance and the table positioning are just as important.  if you don't get that right, the ball will never land where you want and, also, you won't be in the right place for the next ball.

finally, and probably most importantly, you need to know the motivation for doing the serve.  no pro has only one serve.  they have many serves that they do depending on the play they want to execute.

a lot of that depends on where the opponent is standing, what their stance is, how and where they hold the racket on the receive and, also, what the pro anticipates the receiver can and will do on the return.

it is quite complicated and if somehow you can figure it out without the actual pro (or someone else who, for whatever reason, knows how to do it) personally training you, then more power to you!!

Personally, I think there is not a problem copying pros' serves. Lets face it, some of our original serves really suck. Where are we suppose to get the idea of a service? No matter how you create an original serve, its probably already taken. Better to copy a pro then some random person.

Furthermore, when we watch a pro serve we memorized in our mind what its suppose to look like. Which means if someone tried to serve like a pro and there is a slight detail that was missing we automatically think its original. I copy people's serves all the time but no one notices it. Its because I dont do literally everything a pro does and even if I tried, it doesnt look identical, so technically you are not doing everything they are doing. Which means once you get to a certain level there is no disadvantage to copying pros.

Theman, I think at your level you should concentrate on a consistent serve with a fair amount of spin first. Maybe once you have accomplished that and get to a higher level you can start to copy them. I agree with cole ely as long as you dont get too far ahead of yourself.

one thing...  don't take my post as discouragement.  i think you actually HAVE to find a pro (or pros--it doesn't have to be just one, and, actually, it probably shouldn't be) to model your game after.  i'm just trying to tell you what to look for when you actually do look at a video.

all i'm saying is when you're look at somebody's serve, don't just look at the arm motion, cuz that doesn't even tell you half the story...

good luck!!!

I personally have many original serves and many that I have copied from pros.

As for our copying not being the same as the pros, well I will bring up something that was written by a famous cricketer( yes I know, most of you don't have any clue about cricket. So I will simplify it for you. ).

He said " When I was growing up I thought I looked like ( two famous cricketers) but I actually didn't. But what mattered was that I thought I did. Not copying them exactly. "

He then went on to say that copying somebody exactly was too time consuming and, for the most part, too hard. What I think he was saying was that it you are trying to copy somebody exactly you are endlessly going over the way it looks trying to look exactly like the pro, not focusing on the result. I know about this, my brother was trying to copy one pros loop and he spent a lot of time trying to get the look right. This is pointless, because you have different equipment and a different environment. So it is a waste of time trying to get the same look.

Just try to copy as best you can and try to get the same result.

It is good to try and copy the shots of pros but don't try to be perfectly the same, just try to get the same result. If you accidentally do something completely different and it works well then don't get rid of it just because it looks different. If the shot isn't working, then try to make it look more like the original.

As for having to copy a pro, I don't think that it is really necessary. It isn't very good for people trying to play a game that isn't popular, either.

If you want to fool people with no spin you need to have a heavy spin serve that makes them worried.

Here's a good article on how to produce heavy underspin serves: http://www.rmcafee.com/Articles/2005/producingSpinServes.htm

-- Andrew

Yes, try it if you stroke hard enough you can actually tip your racket away from vertical. It's good to get you out of the habit of stroking down, but instead stroking horizontally.

As Sean O'Neill, multiple time National U.S. champion says, "serve ONTO the table, not INTO the table." He described McAfee's article as "the correct way to serve heavy underspin."

-- Andrew

Yeah, you have to work on contacting the ball lower to keep it low and short.

I think it's more important to get the spin down and then work on those things rather than letting up on the spin to accomplish a low, short serve.

-- Andrew