In last week’s Top Tuesday post, I shared a tip on how to improve service in general in table tennis.

After releasing that post, I received a message on Social Media asking me for tips on how to increase spin on a specific serve: the Reverse Pendulum.

The reverse pendulum service is quite a tricky serve to pull off, and as there are many tips one can offer to improve this service, it’s a hard task to only be able to give one single piece of advice.

Because of this though, I thought I would share an important one for this week’s Top Tip, that might take your reverse pendulum to the next level!

Top Tip: Use your whole arm, not just your wrist when performing the serve!

One common mistake when doing the reverse pendulum serve is to only use the wrist at the point of contact with the ball.
This is sadly not good technique, as one should try to use their entire arm (wrist, forearm etc) when performing this serve. In fact, by limiting yourself to your wrist for the reverse pendulum serve, your control over the ball as well as the amount of spin you can create will suffer as consequence.

One of the reasons for this, is that you are actually limiting the amount of acceleration you can produce ‘into’ the ball when purely using your wrist. This means that the maximum potential amount of spin you can create is far less than when using your whole arm.

Source – ittfworld

So when you next practice your reverse pendulum serves, try to remember to use your entire arm at the point of contact with the ball (and not solely your wrist) as this will allow you to create more spin, as well as improve your control for this serve.

I hope you found this week’s Top Tip to be of some use! If you have any recommendations for further Top Tips in the future, please do let me know in the comments below!