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 Post subject: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 01:18 
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Hi all,

I am a lower level league type player and I need some pointers on how to develop my loop. From the very basics up.. When I was a kid I read a number of table tennis books and they all made out the loop to be something special and wonderous. The mechanics seemed quite complex and the whole set-up fairly detailed using your 'whole body'.

On YT, a video that fits my image of what a loop should be would be something like this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSv6UK2CMI


The guy really extends his whole body, he has bent knees, his feet are pointing in, and the stroke is long amongst other things. The video is quite instructive to me..

I have looked at a few videos on this loop forum and I don't see much of this.. Guys are almost playing a topspin stroke with little bending of the knee or 'proper' positioning. The way they generate spin seems acceptable, though.

Is the modern loop more of a compact stroke than before? Can you change between the two types of looping? I see reference to people looping in a more compact way.. Would this still work against heavy chop?

Any info, suggestions or links much appreciated!

PS I would be interested in a few coaching sessions in London next summer if anyone has time.


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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 03:21 
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Most people do not loop like Brian because of the time and work training to do it. Yes, different loop strokes can work but when you play someone of Brians skill, you will realize the difference. He can loop balls where a shorter stroke will not work. It will seem as there is no safe return, he will loop it hard. Spin is partly determined by bat speed at contact. A longer stroke lets you obtain more speed but the timing is harder. You also have to be very quick to get the body in position. Think hundreds of hours of multiball with a good coach and more.
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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 17:27 
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Watching with interest.

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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 18:50 
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I think the idea is to get power from your whole body to generate the power for your shots. In Brian's it's very easy to see because he has such good form and it looks almost aggregated. With many other players it's much harder to see, even though they ARE still using their whole body to generate the pace. By watching these players one could easily be fooled into thinking that you don't need to use your whole body to generate power, yet once you do learn how to make your whole body work together, you'll appreciate how much less effort it takes.

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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 19:55 
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Haggisv is pretty much spot on, IMO. There are a few things about looping that you have to get right, especially the use of the arm to brush the ball to generate spin, but once you get that, how much of the body you use is all about power, health and consistency. The reason why power is helpful is because it lets you get more speed and spin on the ball, and at a certain point, developing the touch to control and anticipate very high speed and spin can be pretty difficult and requires you to practice a lot against it.

Most people who loop like Brian play a physical style, and it is almost necessary to play that way as a professional. That said, even lower rated players like myself who loop do some/many/most things like Brian, not just all of them and likely not as well, and we don't have the athletic talent and fitness level to use the loop as frequently or powerfully but that should not make you think that the only way to play at a high level is to have a great forehand loop - it just makes things easier. There are other critical skills. I will return to the issue, but I want to use the video below to put things in perspective before responding.

I think this video below is instructive. It shows Brian up against a pro player with a different style that most people should not emulate per se.

Answer the questions.

1) Who has the better forehand loop?
2) Who has the better backhand loop?
3) Who is the better player?


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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 20:57 
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To answer the OP question, Brian Pace has a modern loop. Old school loops are much larger and brushy and vertical and use far larger arm motions. This article explains the difference:

http://butterflyonline.com/modern-topspin-strokes/

The Han Xiao series is uniformly excellent.

The rest of what I post is my amateur adult experience with looping and teaching it to people. Pros or people who learned as kids will likely have different views.

If you start learning to loop when you are young and get taught by good players, as I am sure Brian was, you will mostly assimilate good habits and work on them over time with minor refinements.

Like myself, most adults are used to learning things by following detailed instructions. I have personally found that to learn looping or table tennis strokes in general, such stuff can be disastrous for efficient learning and it was how I tried to learn to do things in the beginning. Based on what worked for me as well as what I learned from the coaches who taught me best and easiest, I tell people I teach to simply try a natural motion that produces power and mimics the looping motion, whether it is throwing a discuss, swinging a golfclub (like Brett Clarke does in the video below) or punching the sky with a roundhouse punch. Sometimes, I tell them to straighten their right arm and swing forward and then bend every joint until there is a 90 degree angle at the armpit, the elbow and wrist and finish is on the same said of the body.



Once a player has a feel for what the arm should be doing, then they can figure out all kinds of things on their own later and get more power from the core/legs, make better and varied contact, use more efficient swings etc. There are a few illusions here and there that people need to be aware of but those would take forever to detail. In general, I just try to get people to do natural things and think less about detailed instructions. I worked extensively on fixing my own loop earlier this year and that was what I learned while doing it. I have bad knees so I loop mostly with my upper body. You can fast forward to 3 or 4 mins in to see my loop. I am using my whole body in my head but my form is mostly arm and upper body rotation. I try to minimize shoulder usage (unsucessfully).



I try not to focus too hard on the misses. The biggest mistake most people make IMO is that rather than focus on the stroke, they focus on whether they are getting the ball on the table in the beginning. This is what usually leads to people failing to loop or settling for inefficient strokes if they have good coaching - some lower level coaches also don't help by focusing on whether the ball is landing on the table too seriously. In my experience, it is best to focus on the form/feeling and then let a person miss repeatedly until they figure out how much they need to close their paddle or where they need to contact the ball to put a quality ball on the table. The brain learns from mistakes and successes in the calibration process if you are doing the right thing. So I encourage people to miss and tell them that they need to just do the stroke with minor adjustments and that if they don't, we will be always rebuilding their loop and there is no need to do that repeatedly if you mostly are doing good things - it will just be minor changes that build on each other as well as their improved experience. Obviously, you need multiball to do this or an extremely good blocker.

Sometimes, it is good to teach something like the forehand counterhit where the basics of table tennis forehand form are evident (stance, trunk rotation) and build on that. But I know players with decent loops who have nothing approaching a decent counterhit and players who loop who I have never seen counterhit in proper form. And I know some players who developed good counterhit form after developing better looping form as trunk rotation is more crucial to get the power for spinning than it is for hitting.



In any case, the reason why most people have different loops is that not everything about the loop is equally important. Even on the CNT, while there are common themes, Zhang Jike and Ma Long have different techniques. And of course, everyone says every year that the World Champion has the best looping technique :lol: .

So to summarize:

1. Get proper table tennis stance and form.
2. Find a natural motion that is used to loop.
3. Use it to loop until you get the right kind of contact. Start slowly.
4. After you get the general idea, then you can try other things to make it better.

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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 21:05 
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That first game was terrible with not much happening and no real rhythm or consistency from either player.

If you look at the forehand loop mechanics of Brian's opponent they are very similar to what Brian was demonstrating in the first video. I paused it at 7:09. The guy has his arm straight down, bent knees, and feet pointing in just like in Brian's video. He just seems more crouched over compared to Brian. I don't think there is much of a difference although Brian wasn't playing well in those games.

Brian's opponent has a better backhand.

I don't see much of a difference in overall ability or technique between them.

In Brian's video he says that the forehand loop is 75% tension (I think that was the term he used) and 25% power.


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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 21:25 
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I just looked at the Butterflyonline videos.. To be honest, I see a lot of topspin strokes rather than loops. Mizutani is playing a topspin stroke, and even Boll is practising against a block rather than chop (surely, the stroke changes when playing against heavy chop?).

The whole body angle and level of the bat of Brian's opponent at 7:09 that I mentioned before resembles the Hungarians more than those other players. The bat is well under the table and almost touching the ground!


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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 21:29 
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simonsays wrote:
That first game was terrible with not much happening and no real rhythm or consistency from either player.

If you look at the forehand loop mechanics of Brian's opponent they are very similar to what Brian was demonstrating in the first video. I paused it at 7:09. The guy has his arm straight down, bent knees, and feet pointing in just like in Brian's video. He just seems more crouched over compared to Brian. I don't think there is much of a difference although Brian wasn't playing well in those games.

Brian's opponent has a better backhand.

I don't see much of a difference in overall ability or technique between them.

In Brian's video he says that the forehand loop is 75% tension (I think that was the term he used) and 25% power.


There is a huge difference in overall ability and technique, though I would argue that Brian likely has the better forehand technique even if he can't use it at Crisan's level - the opponent (Crisan) was once ranked in the top 10 in the world in the mid 2000s and is still in the top 100. At the time of the match, he was WR #21.

The word Brian used was "friction" - he means that one should emphasize brushing the ball.

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Last edited by NextLevel on 21 Dec 2015, 21:35, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 21:34 
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simonsays wrote:
I just looked at the Butterflyonline videos.. To be honest, I see a lot of topspin strokes rather than loops. Mizutani is playing a topspin stroke, and even Boll is practising against a block rather than chop (surely, the stroke changes when playing against heavy chop?).

The whole body angle and level of the bat of Brian's opponent at 7:09 that I mentioned before resembles the Hungarians more than those other players. The bat is well under the table and almost touching the ground!


In modern table tennis, the forehand topspin and the forehand loop are interchangeable terms. Some people may use the term "loop" to refer to more spin than speed, but even a topspin vs. topspin is called a loop (or a counterloop).

It seems you are more focused on learning how to topspin backspin or how to loop backspin/chop. Is that correct?

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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 22:58 
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NextLevel wrote:
It seems you are more focused on learning how to topspin backspin or how to loop backspin/chop. Is that correct?


Yes, exactly.

One of the guys I practice with has a very natural topspin stroke. When he plays a chopper he just rolls the ball over the table without too much effort. Good to watch. However, he takes the ball fairly late (often the ball has fallen quite a way down) and this often places the ball up in a lofted way. He is not looping the ball as I understand a loop to be (you hit the ball on or just after the peak of bounce and get a more aggressive bounce on the table). So, although I appreciate his ease and style of shot I want to produce something a bit more dynamic.


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 Post subject: Re: Basic Loop Mechanics
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 23:45 
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simonsays wrote:
NextLevel wrote:
It seems you are more focused on learning how to topspin backspin or how to loop backspin/chop. Is that correct?


Yes, exactly.

One of the guys I practice with has a very natural topspin stroke. When he plays a chopper he just rolls the ball over the table without too much effort. Good to watch. However, he takes the ball fairly late (often the ball has fallen quite a way down) and this often places the ball up in a lofted way. He is not looping the ball as I understand a loop to be (you hit the ball on or just after the peak of bounce and get a more aggressive bounce on the table). So, although I appreciate his ease and style of shot I want to produce something a bit more dynamic.


If the ball is low and has heavy chop, you need to use knees and get some upward motion. The truth is that you can't avoid that for heavy chop and if you can't get good racket head speed, you are going to struggle. It is good to start slow and careful like your friend and then try more dangerous things later.

This is the best and most dynamic looper of heavy chop in the world so you can copy his technique - he loops more around the side of the ball with a straight arm motion and a large backswing and finishes forward and with elbow snap at the ball. The large backswing is possible because of how slow chop is relatively and his shoulders are perpendicular to the net at the end of his backswing. His weight is on his racket hand foot to start and gets rebalanced as he finishes his stroke. As a penholder, he uses his wrist to get good acceleration on contact with the ball, but you can do this with shakehand as well. If I had good knees, he is the one I would copy the most.



Here is a similar technique.



Some players do it with a bent arm as this is their table tennis training.

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