OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Working that out was one of the first things I had to do. Mine goes above my forearm as well. But if you place the grip on your fingers like he does, there is no reason it shouldn't. The thing is that the pendulum tolerates more diverse grip options than the reverse in terms of a whippy swing. With thr reverse the fingers have to do more work stabilizing the blade.

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I didn't have a stroke or heart attack last night, so you are probably doing the right thing.

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Very interesting advice on the grip. Most people say to change the grip for the serve by squeezing the blade between thumb and forefinger, I pretty much just loosen up my shakehands grip. I'll have to try this and see how it works.

Iskandar

wilkinru, I'd also like some footage, at least from a bit closer. I think NextLevel is right that you have to take the racket further back to generate backspin. Below are my suggestions:

1) It is hard to see, but maybe you contact the ball a bit too far from the body. It is hard to brush underneath on the reverse if the ball is too close to the racket.
2) What helped me a lot is moving the contact point of the serve closer to the table itself. I fix it by placing my left knee right under the table. Again, it is hard to see where is yours, but just in case
3) Your toss is too complex: first, you bend your arm with the ball in your hand and then toss the ball from the moving hand. I know you are practicing, but it is better to have the legal and correct toss from the start. It is also easier to control the toss if it starts from a stationary position
4) Controversial thing: do the serve along with the recovery for the third ball. Why: if your legs are stationary during the serve (and yours are), it will limit the body rotation, and this serve is impossible without the correct rotation done in full. So if your rotate your legs during the forward swing, it will turn your body and move into the recovery position at the same time. The only way to brush under the ball properly is rotation of the body: you racket must move towards the intended direction of the flight path. If you racket moves perpendicularly of the intended direction, you will generate some weird side/corkscrew or whatever spin, but never backspin. It also means that at the end the tip of your racket should point more towards the wall in front of you, not at the wall to the side.
6) Try the visualization process I posted recently

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Russ,

Fastmover made some great recommendations. The one I especially liked was the difference between coming across the ball and getting deviation or corkscrew spin and coming underneath the ball and towards the table and getting backspin. It was one of those things that Brett pointed out to me when I was learning this in 2014/2015 but which is not easy to appreciate until you get a hang of it. Your racket is moving sideways parallel to the table, as most people who don't serve the reverse think a reverse serve should but it really should come towards the table with an angle more like a pendulum serve usually does. That was why I said you could make it backspin by changing your body orientation. As he pointed out, it is hard to make the racket come towards the table without turning your upper body towards the table during the swing. This is if you want to serve the true backspin of course.

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"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

My shoulder is locked in a rolled-forward position and I can't serve a reverse to save my life, so this is just an idle question.

If you watch a slow-mo of ZJK or similar serving reverse backspin the bat travels sideways across the back of the ball. So it must be side-backspin. But if you see the receive there is definitely also backspin because of the bat angle used to receive it. It doesn't look like they ever serve reverse straight backspin by coming under the ball.

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What Zhang Jike does is not quite what Brett teaches but I once wanted to use that technique and what I see is not quite what you describe. The contact in Zhang Jike's motion when he serves backspin is much earlier than you think it is and the sideways motion is mostly a follow through forced by the racket head speed. If you look at the whole serve, he is coming forward at contact and the sideways motion is just the end of the racket travel path. You can think of his full racket motion as coming forward and finishing to the side and if he contacts the ball early he gets more backspin and if he does it late he gets more side or side top. It was one or those things I tried for a while and might go back to since I am not sure I am getting the same deception with Brett's technique for subtle topspin. I think big d does something similar to ZJK for his reverse, letting the spin be determined by where in the contact. The difference is that big d gets topspin with early contact and backspin with are contact as he opens the racket during his swing while ZJK closes his racket during the swing.

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"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

https://youtu.be/4gEqzNHukOw

As you can see he is contacting the side bottom of the ball and coming forward when it is still under his body well before the racket finishes to the side.

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"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

Yes, ZJK brushes underneath the ball. Here is a picture. The leftmost one shows that to generate backspin, you have brush under the ball with your racket contacting the ball when it is tangential to the direction of the serve; dashed line shows trajectory of the racket. Unfortunately, it is too awkward to do it with the body being parallel to the table. So people end up brushing across the ball generating corkscrewspin, as in the central picture. To align the trajectory with the direction of travel you turn the body to the left after the toss. As an added bonus, you also get extra speed which you can convert into the whip motion of the wrist.

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On a subject of deceptive serves, contact point etc. (now with english subs):

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I was thinking a couple of weeks ago to give the reverse another try. I watched Bretts videos on YT of it years ago but never quite figured out how to get good spin on the backspin or side backspin variation compared to my normal pendulum.

Is it usually the case that there's less spin in the reverse backside than the normal pendulum backside spin?

Unrelated but Brett said a couple of pages ago - "If an opponent has really spinny serves and you are struggling to return them, there's a 90% chance that they are all long. It's extremely difficult to have brilliant short serves."

So shorter serves usually have less spin than longer serves, or rather it's more difficult to get lots of spin and keep the serve short?

I think sometimes I try to get a lot of spin on the serve because I think that's better but then there's a higher risk they drift long. So I can be content with having a shorter serve with a bit less spin because it's unrealistic to have a loaded short serve?

Rich,

When people talk about spin (and forgive me if this is too basic), they really usually mean the spin to speed ratio, not the absolute spin in revolutions per second. They sometimes also mean the impact on the racket, but that can be a function of materials etc. The spin to speed ration on faster serves tends to be lower all things being equal. But everyone is different. Some people get more quality swings on longer serves. But some also do on shorter serves all things being equal.

To cut a long story short , the amount of spin on your serve is relative to how much rotational energy you get vs forward motion given the same racket head speed. Most people can get faster racket head speed with the pemdulum swing and that means more room for total power and with better touch, more room for spin. But absolute spin isn't everything and sometimes some people do not find the contact point on the ball that let's them swing hard while keeping the serve low and short. It takes a lot of experimentation and practice and you want to push your thought process to extremes.

If you see how fastmover and I obsessively approached the reverse to the point that we have the same thoughts on the subject, you can see the amount of experimentation and reorientation it takes. You have more raw feel and talent that I do so I don't expect it to take you as long as long as you experiment with more and more extreme contact points and continue to use the results as feedback.

So yes, the reverse tends to have less spin because of biomechanics vs the pendulum. But the reverse can still have extremely powerful spin to speed ratios and with practice you can get to functional equivalence in spin to speed with both serves if the serve fits your overall game. Look at Lin Gaoyuan or Zhang Jike or even Ma Long or Fan Zhendong. Lin has possibly the largest windup though Ma Long is not that far behind. But I think functionally, their serves work well, it comes down to choice. You see Ma Long's reverse much more when he plays choppers.

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"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

This may vary by level, but I feel like the most important quality in a serve is for it to be low. Sometimes I try to load up a serve with lots of spin and it bounces four inches above the net. I end up eating most of those, no matter how much spin was on it.

I would put depth second, being able to serve short when your opponent proves you have to. Spin variation is third in my mind. Short, low, no-spin is a very effecttive serve, even if you don't have a heavy backspin variation.

I don't want to overstate the case, I'm playing at a pretty low level, and I still try to make a lot of spin. But I do believe the other qualities are more important.

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I agree that serve height is the most important factor by far as it makes the bounce hard to read. Also makes it more difficult to judge how to take the ball late. It is why I hate it when people serve without tossing the ball as the serve trajectories are much harder to track as they are much lower and straighter.

I would say that low serves are actually better when they are shorter. And slower. This forces a slower return. That said, I find it easier to serve low heavy backspin legally than any other kind of serve. But that might just be me. All my other short serves are higher and go longer.

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"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

This is in part my problem also. I actually feel a stretch just putting my right arm behind my back. I guess I haven't been arrested in a while. I'll need to do some shoulder stretches before I try again today. Getting old and falling apart.