What Makes a Truly Great Table Tennis Serve?
This is a brand-new, technique-focused column in Q&A format. The mystery respondents are two former national team members — now seasoned coaches — who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.
Q: Is practicing lobs actually useful? Can it build mental toughness — or does it just come down to quick footwork?
Q: Ding Ning always seems to retrieve the ball farther away than anyone else. Is her footwork just faster?
Playing a lob in a match is a last resort. But deliberately practicing lobs has two purposes: one is to train your mindset — nail the lob and your mental state will naturally improve; the other is to develop touch.
Ding Ning is actually not fast — she’s “resilient,” similar to Zhang Yining. Excellent consistency and tactical patterns. “Resilient” means that even when pushed into a passive position, she clings on and keeps getting the ball over the net. Her height and long legs are an advantage, and her mental fortitude is never in question.
Q: How do I simplify my serve? I have too many variations and decent deception, but the results always feel underwhelming. What makes a truly great serve?
A great serve isn’t about speed, shortness, or any single physical property.
A great serve is one where the motion looks almost identical every time but the spin variation is enormous — making it nearly impossible to read.
First, relax. Use your arm and fingers to sense the weight of the ball at the exact moment of contact and the precise spot on the rubber. Practice developing that “feel.” Once your sensitivity sharpens, accelerate with your fingers.
Once that’s solid, practice “wrist-driven finger acceleration.”
Once that’s dialed in, practice “using your body weight to drive the wrist and fingers.”
Step by step, no rush. Eventually your whole body controls the ball’s placement.
You need to learn how to graze the ball with your fingers and paddle. After the ball leaves, about one centimeter off the blade, your fingers accelerate instantly — that’s the fake-motion graze. Combine fake-motion grazes with genuine heavy spin, and the difference becomes enormous, impossible to read.
(Editor’s note: I’m editing this and thinking — this section is really only for players rated 2000 or above.)
A great serve has two qualities. First, the acceleration at the moment of contact is extremely brief. Second, you change spin rate by contacting different parts of the rubber surface.
Third, serves always exploit angular velocity — either the wrist’s angular velocity or the torso’s angular velocity. The difference between them is massive.
Think about Ma Lin: rally ability, swing speed, consistency, raw power, outright speed — he wasn’t top-tier in any category, and many provincial-team players outperformed him in several. Yet he won Olympic gold. How? Three things: brain, serve, and variation.
Q: For a five- or six-year-old, is one month enough to lock in a movement framework — if they practice every day?
For kids that young, locking in a technical framework isn’t actually the priority. What matters: let them feel the ball through their body weight.
Just practice finding center of gravity and bouncing the ball on the paddle each day. Keep the feet grounded — that’s step one. Then find center of gravity. Kids this age don’t need to rush to the table.
Whether a shot is clean, stable, or explosive — consistency, spin, angle, and rhythm all depend on center of gravity. That’s the absolute foundation. No matter how ugly or unorthodox the movement, as long as you find center of gravity, over time that player’s game will never be truly bad.