OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Thanks Brett. I love this post. There have been countless times I've felt frustrated losing to someone who I felt like I should have won. In reality, of course, I shouldn't have won because I wasn't the better player. Most the time that feeling is because I feel like I've got much better (or at least more standard) technique. The difference in skill nearly always comes from the difference in experience. A great post and something that's important to remember in those situations!!

EDIT:
Thanks NextLevel, Brett and wilkinru for the comments! I actually forgot about LTT116 during that session. Thanks for the reminder Before free play, we were doing backhand to backhand rallies, and during that time I was focusing on the bowing movement. I think that also helped. The arm and body coordination could definitely still use more work. For me, just getting the timing right to hit the ball like that is a big win. It's taken a lot of practice to not reach for the ball like what Brett showed as a common mistake in LTT116. Looking forward to learning and improving more through TTEdge and with you guys here!

Dude, don't be a quibbler. Look at the ball react off the total fail of a block.

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I think mickd's shot was a great example of the one from LTT101 (the part where Brett talks about rotating into the ball on the side of one's body). The ball was perfectly on the side, and he could massively turn into it.

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Tactics Enthusiast

Yes the ball was on his right hip so he used more torso twist than bow though he did both. Ultimately I still think of LTT116 as play a proper backhand after a proper forehand don't just wave tour had at the ball. A proper backhand will involve some kind of two step process but the details may change depending on the ball and your technique.

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Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

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

Remember you are in Sweden which is the most advanced TT in Europe along with Germany and France. To get the quality of opponents in the UK you are facing regularly you'd be talking about only a handful of local leagues in the whole country, more commonly it would be at regional tournaments and things. Most local leagues would have one or two players at those sort of levels in the whole league at the most, many of the smaller ones would have none.

Forget about the results. It's about the process. Especially when we are talking practice matches. I'd be more keeping score of how often I did things I was working on correctly than the actual score. Stuff will suddenly "click" down the line and you will find you do things subconsciously again and you go up a level.

I had to watch it 6 times at .25 and I did see some body coordination.

Thanks for bringing that up! I just watched it for the first time and learned a lot from it.



I think for both forehands, I was out of position so my body coordination was probably affected by that. Footwork and anticipation to blame. The last ball came into my strike zone, giving me more leeway to use my body!

My partner wouldn't be rated very high, but he's good at blocking spinny balls, especially with his backhand. I think the quality of the forehands I hit were still decent, though there's always room for improvement and I always strive for it!

So during yesterday's practice, I hit one really fast ball during the drive against block time. It felt like I had no arm, yet magically the ball just blasted back at lightning speed. I finally experienced solely using the body to hit the ball. I asked my partner if he would mind me trying to replicate it. He was happy to help so there began like 10 minutes of "powerful forehands".

Unfortunately, I wasn't recording it. It stayed on my mind, so before we started free play I asked if he would mind doing it again, but this time I'd record it. Of course, he said yes.

I didn't get the exact feeling, but I got pretty close. It felt like I had no arms. I just rotated my body and pushed my waist forward, and magically the ball somehow hit my racket and blasted back at my partner.

He had a lot of trouble blocking it even once the first 10 minutes, but during the second session when I took the camera out, he got better at it (though the quality of ball I was hitting felt a little lower than the first 10 minutes).

Control/placement was an issue, but the quality of the forehand felt extremely high. There was a good amount of spin too.

When I got home I had a look at the videos and to my surprise, I actually thought I looked a little stiff. It didn't feel that way at all. It just felt like I was rotating my body into the ball.

Here's a short clip of some of them. Some of the rallies went to like 3-4 balls but not all of those had that feeling. Usually the first ball I hit did, and some of the rally balls did.

What do you guys see?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pVYDeu93_U

It also reminded me of the WorldRubberMarket video I subtitled a few months ago about Yassun's powerful forehand, which for the people who haven't seen it, is here (https://youtu.be/oX31FTT_dPc, turn on English subtitles).

Thanks for this Fruitloop, you're completely right.



I think it looks good, especially the first one.. you loaded your left thigh with your body weight and rotated your hips forwarded perfectly. I think this is where the emphasis should be. Perhaps the first one is going better for you because you have more time to load your left thigh making the timing easier for you, then when you're about to hit the next FH you have less time so your body automatically follows function and doesn't load the thigh as much making it more difficult to explode your hip into the ball.

I did FH all over the table the other day and compared it to Lin Gaoyuan here https://youtu.be/lbDZH53LbsM?t=374. What struck me was how much weight he had put on his left thigh compared to me, it's like an L. I tried it in practice and got tired very quickly. But being able to do that and to do the hip clap which Brett mentions in LTT108 seems to be the key. Doing that hip rotation/clap quickly with good timing should lead to a lot of power. If the timing is a little off you can get mixed results like one ball suddenly becoming very spinny but having little power etc. but it doesn't mean the technique is wrong, right?

It's good mickd. Continue to load that left leg and push the hip around.

Teach your partner how to use his body to block. Tell him to stabilize his arm and rotate his torso to make the fh block.

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Brian Pace gave me this advice six years ago and mentally I just lacked the discipline to do it until recently, and still sometines not. I can't overstate how inportant this is. Nobody cares how many practice matches you win.

Brian was training in europe and he was supposed to be working on his bh bc his fh was way stronger. But he was losing a practice match playing bhs, so he started with all fhs. He won and came off the table all happy, and the coach tore him to shreds for not working what he was supposed to.

I still tell myself that when I'm playing stupidly trying to let someone lose to me instead of trying to win it myself. Nobody cares how many practice matches you win.

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Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

The reason why you don't think you are using your arm is that you are barely using your upper arm. In fact, it is quite possible to loop if you mostly spin your torso with your hips and have the right degree of fold. Because most of us tried to swing at the ball.with our arms while learning and ingrained upper arm habits, we still have them. But the backswing and forward swing is almost entirely activated by torso and hip rotation when you are playing powerful shots. The arm usage can ad a little extra leverage and spin but if you feel you are taking your arm back rather than rotating your torso, you likely aren't playing your optimal forehand topspin power wise (though that other shot may have its place for other things).

I have been trying to work really hard on it while maintaining a spin oriented focus. Gotta have patience...

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Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

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

Haven't checked in on this thread for an astonishingly long time - wow it's huge. Just reading the most recent stuff, has the ttedge teaching around FH evolved since the earliest days of whip mechanics, or is this now just a deeper and more holistic understanding of what that meant?

I'm still a paying ttedge subscriber, but now there are literally hundreds of videos - it would take me a year to watch them... where do you point new people, or people interested in catching up?

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Check out my blog - LordCope's Latest Learning Log - 10+ years of accumulate mistakes!

Allow me to introduce myself...by saying I will soon be asking advice and I dare say my circumstances will be outside the norm of what you usually see and comment upon.

I first learned to hold a paddle as a youth and chose Chinese penhold because it was different. Never really played beyond infrequent basement stuff and some sandpaper in the college rec hall around 1970. Not a misprint. I am 68 yrs old. I live in a portion of USA with little to no organized TT. However, fast forward to my early 60's and retirement from gainful employment and I was introduced to more focused table tennis. I began playing weekly, then biweekly and now 7 or 8 years later 6 or 7 times a week. I also had a new build on my property with a good sized dedicated TT room, with competition grade table, lighting and heat and decent floor and even bought a robot for whatever value that can add.

I began reading the three main table tennis forums in about 2012, including OOAK. Unless traveling, I look in each day. I can assure you I have read ALL pages of this thread, "TTEdge Executing Table Tennis Shots Series." Due to NextLevel's posts here and other forums I became interested in TTEdge and started following every reference and trying to apply concepts to my game. Finally last year I decided to get more committed and became a paying premium member...but have not yet posted any video for personal feedback. My reasoning for that is somewhat weak, as I am not well versed in the technical side of working up a video, editing it to manageable size and uploading. I am here vowing to rectify that in the next month.

TTEdge (and time on the table) has made a significant improvement in my game. From stumbling beginner, I now can manage to assert myself well for my area. I have only played one USATT rated tournament (6 hour drive from here) in my life, a couple of years ago. It felt abysmal in that I was wooden and clutzy. I came out with a rating of a bit under 1300. A more recent, non USATT event gave me a Ratings Central of 1127±76. Those numbers feel somewhat meaningless in terms of my skill levels because I know I swing wildly in play level from outing to outing and sometimes within the same day... The mental game? Consistency is one of my goals! Against better players in my area I sometimes take games or matches off 1750 to 1850 level players and they suggest that my normal "decent" days may be in the 1600 range. All that is to give you an idea of where my struggles lie. I first settled in as a close to table blocker and hitter and am gradually adding new elements to my strokes. Sometimes I move...too often I don't. From all TPB I now use some RPB on receive and a few random change ups. I am introducing more and more topspin to my strokes, at least part of the time. Adding "whip" and "bow" and "hip" have become wonderful things to work on!

If you have read this far, thanks for you attention. I will be attending a non-rated event mid-June and will report results, good or bad, maybe with video. I will be traveling to Philadelphia in early/mid July and with luck might make it to NextLevels club to see some play above the 1800ish ceiling in my area! To be updated...

I am always jealous of people who have retired and can just play TT.

Please do let me know if or when you show up at Trolley. Happy to have you here.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

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