Eratic serve fixing itself

[zaph]

My league results have collapse because I have had the service yips and couldn't toss the ball to save my life. Left/right, into the fence, all over the place.

So I wasn't looking forward to playing doubles today, the only consolation is I wouldn't have to serve that much in doubles, unlike singles. First service game had the yips and then they suddenly went away. Three sets and it didn't happen once and I served better than I ever had. Single figures for double faults, lots of unreturned serves and even a few aces with the second serve.

I should be happy but it is so frustrating that the problem magically fixed itself in a meaningless match and I don't know why the problem went away. Why couldn't the serve have started working in the league when I need it?

 

[eah123]

I don’t think you should feel satisfied that the problem “fixed itself”.
If you really want to improve, I would ask the question, do you really know how to toss correctly? Or are you depending on muscle memory to “find” your toss? What can you do to improve your toss consistency? When you get the yips, what exactly are you doing wrong in your toss? If it happens again, how can you fix it?

 

[zaph]

I don’t think you should feel satisfied that the problem “fixed itself”.
If you really want to improve, I would ask the question, do you really know how to toss correctly? Or are you depending on muscle memory to “find” your toss? What can you do to improve your toss consistency? When you get the yips, what exactly are you doing wrong in your toss? If it happens again, how can you fix it?

That is the thing about the yips, is it is caused by over thinking, you can't analyse your way out of it. It stopped precisely because I stopped worrying about it and let muscle memory take over.

The moment I start thinking about it again, it will go haywire.

 

[Chas Tennis]

Take a high speed video of your new technique.

If you have a video of your old serve, see if you can identify what has changed.

 

[PKorda]

Sounds like the difference was you weren't playing in a league match. My guess is the bad tosses are because you have a lot of tension in your arm. As tosses go awry the tension gets even worse. So try to toss with less tension, know sometimes easier said than done. One thing that helped me is slowing the beginning of my service motion down, slow takeback and then raise toss arm in a relatively slow, constant motion.

 

[Steady Eddy]

Glad to hear it got better. Sometimes my tossing arm gets a mind of its own. For the the toss is the hardest part of tennis.