OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Awesome!

I was getting chased by a bee the other day and I used exactly the same technique to fend it off.

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Do you know how you can improve what is happening in the video?

I'm going to make an ETTS about it.

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To snap the forearm, you need to contract the biceps.

I've thought about this topic a lot. How much biceps and arm/shoulder muscles should really be used when the body is mostly responsible for the arm movement. Can you add to the power of a shot by consciously bending the arm? Or is the arm bend just the result of the initial momentum?

I doubt I will ever tell anyone to bend their arm faster (snap the forearm). I get people to use their body to hopefully reduce the amount they use their biceps. I know for sure that you can't deliberately do something at the moment you hit the ball...I've talked about his before. But I can honestly say that I'm not sure if contracting the bicep adds power.

When I see a TT player with a relatively large right bicep, I know that their forehand is wrong.

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Thanks a lot for posting the video and your comments.

For me, the best part of the point was your serve. You understand how to serve better than 99% of club players. If you keep on the same track, your serve will eventually become better than 99% of club players.

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I don't think it adds power - maybe spin, maybe direction, but not power. I try to teach not bending (and sometimes not even straightening) the arm when I teach the loop these days - if the arm does so a little, great. But what I really meant by snap is that when you make contact with the ball, continue your motion largely in the direction you want the ball to go in.

I think one of my biggest pet peeves is warming up with people who have no clue how to aim the ball where they want it to go. Their strokes require such perfect timing to aim the ball that they usually spray the ball all over the place. My theory is that they never try to put their power towards where they want the ball to go.

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

Played a tournament on Sunday. This is my one good match.

I played some really bad matches too. I haven't decided whether to look at the video of the stinkers or not. Might be too painful.

https://youtu.be/g8lJsaltnkA

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I look forward to it. I am actually trying to use the arm much less and that might not be obvious. Trying to drive more of my strokes through body movement.

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

He has nasty serves - you returned most of them decently except his backhand side top. I would have used that serve far more often if I were him, though he tried to smash too hard behind it.

Your forehand never looks quite text book, but you almost always through your body weight behind it, which is a special gift, so it is always a quality shot, no matter how you play it. The upper arm usage is probably sometimes excessive, but we live with that as adult learners.

The backhand still needs some work but it is clearly body powered as well. The co-ordination isn't quite there to optimize the body movement and the stroke timing.

The balance issue is tied to how much fold you do over your right leg, I think, and footwork demands. You often loop without rotating which leads to shots that leave you off balance though you do jump and that leaves you probably awkward and not as up right as you could be without that jump. But I would try focusing on backswinging better and rotating the feet and folding the torso a little to play a forehand every time in every drill so that the shoulders are turned at least 45 degrees preferably 90 so you can hit the ball end up facing the table and in balance. But how much that would mess up your natural stroke I don't know. So it is probably better to ignore this and just work on your backhand.

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

Solid advice as always NL. You have been very generous to share your knowledge with me for years now, and almost every time I play I repeat something to myself that I learned from you. Thank you!

Right now I'm not working on anything, just playing 6 or 8 garbage matches a week at ZBTT. No training at all. But coming up in a month I have more than 100 hours of TT in 17 days. So I have been thinking a lot about what to ask the coaches to work on with me. I settled on perception and balance. My read of ball depth is horrible. When opponents can serve short and long with quality I have problems. And like in this match I do play people who can serve short.

As far as basic technique skills I want to work on my long push. I don't really know how to do a proper one and I think that is a massive hole in my game. The match situations are if I misread a short serve and am late, or when someone pushes my short serve back short and again I am late. Lateness is a recurring theme. So I have to compensate for it.

The other skill I want to work on is countering topspin close to the table. This is for people who flick all my serves, and when I have the quality long push and people make relatively weaker opens.

This is my third year at camp and I think dividing my goals into two very general and two very specific will help me get the most out of it. But it's a new experience every year and this is only an experiment. I have to be open-minded that it may fail.

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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

My two cents on depth perception - it is usually different depending on the opposing player as more spin can make a ball shorter or longer than it would be. I don't think your perception is as bad as you think it is, I think you probably assume that your mistakes are related to it in an above average fashion when they are not. I lose points assuming a ball will come long all the time. But in my biased estimation, I think the pressure the opponent faces from having serves looped or killed tends cause more errors. A lot also depends on whether the opponent gets an advantage when you open off those serves or not. I think a lot of your opponents serves were half long and attackable but it is more of a "I will loop it even if it is short over the table unless it presents itself as short heavy backspin" than a "I need to be sure the ball is long before I loop it". Usually short heavy backspin is the slower serve so there is time to adjust to it as well. And of course, mistakes need to be balanced with winners.

I think William Henzell (or maybe Brett) said decisions on how to return the ball are usually made before you really know where the ball or serve is going, especially when it comes to pushing short. That is the way I usually feel when it comes to looping serves. I have decided I am going to do it and it is usually when the serve is clearly short I bail out with a push. Pushing short usually requires you to get to the ball early, so you usually are obligated to decide that early and adjust as the point evolves. It is probably why long fast serves can be effective at higher levels. Of course better players can practice more and actually read the serve etc. But I don't think it doesn't mean they aren't getting a lot of these decisions wrong in the absolute sense as well. They just make a read and stick to it. Or decide what they are going to do and adjust the best they can as the point evolves.

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

Couple of weeks away from my next tourney, so time to overhaul my serves.

On a pendulum serve I noticed that if I make the ball toss go closer to the table and not too close to me then I was able to do a little fold. I think the most important discovery was that the ball not arcing away from the table allowed me pendulum serve to have a more complete stroke. I'm sure that the majority of my better serves were just randomly tossed in the right spot.

I tried lifting my left leg (im a rightie) on a backhand serve but that proved to be far too difficult initially. So I just put more weight on my right leg and focused on getting good whip. I can see the value of the left leg being free when doing the twist, but just barely right now. I was able to kind of do it with a long top spin serve.

As usual with me, baby steps.

For the record I don't care about my rating and demolition cannot be stopped by some rated event!

Anyone else have insights on ball toss or other little details that helped you when working on your serve?

You guys didn't change sides in the 5th game - was that deliberate?

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

I'm very stupid and superstitious about that. If I'm behind I will always change, if I'm winning I will let it go unless the other guy wants to. So yes, by me it was deliberate. I had a huge lead and didn't want to change sides.

Am I the only one who does magical thinking like that?

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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

No multiball partner so I had to teach someone to control topspin so I could practice a little. People need to pay me for all the free coaching...

Any tips to improve my backhand topspin?

https://youtu.be/RMjpW4wy-gA?t=230

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

Is this a joke? Who on here is going to be able to improve your bh?

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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