I'm a beginning player, I've been playing seriously and taking lessons with a coach for about a year. My coach only "allowed" me recently to work on the pendulum serve, saying I wasn't ready and limiting me to the backhand serve.
So I've been practicing the pendulum for a few weeks now, and now have a fairly decent serve for my level - a fair amount of sidespin, and I can vary topspin and backspin. But I just re-watched Brett Clark's videos on the pendulum serve here:
http://www.ttedge.com/video-sections/pendulum-serve
And I'm seeing a major difference between how I've been doing it and Brett's way. Brett has you toss the ball up, and then wait until the ball is falling to take a rapid backswing and hit into the ball - saying that the whiplike rebound of the forward swing from the backswing is critical in getting maximum speed and spin. Conversely, I've been taking the paddle back just as I toss the ball up, pausing in my backswing, and then whipping the paddle through to hit the ball. Brett's way does seem to let you put more spin on it, and you can have a tighter and probably less readable. But I'm finding the timing of taking the paddle back and through during the decent of the ball very tough to do. I can do it reasonably well in practice, but when I play I really struggle.
So my question is - should I try to do it Brett's way, or the way I've been doing it (pause at end of backswing)? My coach does it more like I've been doing it and says I should just do it that way. He says lots of top pros pause in their backswing. I'm not sure one way or the other. I did look at a video of Timo Boll doing the pendulum, and he seems to do it similar to Brett.
I'm willing to put in a lot of practice on this, but I don't want to spend time trying to perfect something that will take years before I'm willing to do it in a match. Sometimes easier is better, and I don't want to make it harder than I need to.
Thoughts?
Thanks.
- Dave
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