OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Lately I've been getting a really heavy back/side spin ball from my backhand serve (tends to serve the same purpose as a backspin, bottom of the net!), but heavy pure backspin still eludes me. I can do a medium backspin that lands twice or even very short, but nothing heavy.

Yes, but part of getting better at receiving is understanding what the server is trying to do. That's why it's hard to become a better receiver without becoming a better server. IT's possible but hard. I still suck at serve return but I got better partly by watching my own serves on video and by getting a better idea of what the server was trying to do using Brett's tutorials. The gap for me now is developing good no-spin receive - I still don't have one despite having watched enough videos on the subject.

To answer your question to the best of my understanding, there are racket angles that seem not so open but whose tip gets pretty close to the bottom of the ball. Those racket angles can give the ball a pretty heavy backspin orientation with good racket head speed.

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Practice, timing, racket angles (contact point) and elbow strength. Slice the bottom or bottom front of the ball. It can be done.

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This is Jarryd here Student from ETTS13 I find that with the pendulum serve most people I coach don't bother to practice the ball toss before worrying about the swing and contact. The other problem is that some people are just content with having a mediocre serve and return game and believe it is not an important thing to practice.

Finally the 3rd thing I have seen is people will not want to try a new serve in a match as they are afraid to give away a fault, therefore they will just revert to the regular bad serve in most cases.

Brett is one of the people who inspired me to practice my serving as a junior as I use to see him practicing alot during my state training sessions. Taking his advice I can already see the benefits with using a larger snapback on the swing as it greatly increases the speed of the serve in particular. Why this is useful is because it gives the opponent less time to move into the net to make a short return.

Welcome Jarryd. It's great to have the players from Brett's video on rhe forum.

When you say practice the ball toss, you mean for consistent height and location? Do you just toss and catch the ball without a serve, or still meet the ball with the bat? Curious about best ways to practice the toss.

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Exactly the player doesn't realize that having an incorrect ball toss will result in the rest of the serve also being sub-optimal. The best way to practice it is to get into your stance position and just throw the ball up as straight as you can out of your palm without moving around too much until it becomes automatic.

Many players when I'm specifically instructing them on how to do a pendulum side-spin serve will not watch the ball the whole way through the toss which also results in the same problems as mentioned above.

Of course there are many other factors to master this serve which Brett has already covered extensively in his series, but I feel that people tend to ignore the toss and also the stance of this serve and it is super important to get it right before attempting the swing.

You've got to post video of your serve to get proper feedback. Just one minute with a cellphone is enough.

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Coach, in my experience, your standards for timing are pretty high. I was going to grab video of my old heavy backspin/pendulum circular tortoise serves but I didn't want anyone to die of laughter watching my form from 2014. Then again, no one will be able to prove I caused it so....

https://youtu.be/QTQ4jGDng98?list=PL1xH ... uNKP&t=491

For people who wonder how I learned to serve like that, this was the guy I used to copy from afar (he is the lefty):

https://youtu.be/L7gKi3VFNLk?t=90


Pardon me if you see no resemblance - I did the best I could at the time.

That said, the guy in the second video I listed in the original post (a section you didn't quote) also seems to straighten his arm when he starts. And the guy you said has no spin on his serve was 2400+ and one of the better players in the country for a while. He is now 2200+ even with his hip issues and advancing age.

That said, the closer I have gotten my serve to the higher elbow, no matter how imperfect or circular the timing, the more times I have had people push my backspin serve into the net, even long pips players, because they can't believe the amount of backspin you can create with such an relatively closed racket face. If I didn't see it myself, I wouldn't have believed it. Will have to tape my recent serve practice sometime.

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NextLevel, your serve from 2014 didn't pause at the end of the backswing and it maintained some momentum.

Table Tennis is very forgiving. You can have really poor mechanics and still get acceptable results. You can even become a world ranked player with sub-optimal mechanics. If you ask the Chinese about some of the top European and Japanese forehand techniques, I think they'd have a lot of negative things to say.

Table Tennis equipment assists a lot as the rubber is fast with amazing grip. Even if you totally mess up the mechanics, you can still get okay spin on your serve, backhand loop or whatever. This equipment and the nature of our sport (light oncoming ball) help to mask what optimal technique actually looks like. Mechanics and results/ratings are somewhat related, but there are an infinite number of variables that combine to make up a player's level.

If you are trying to skim a pebble/stone/rock across a lake, you'd better have the right technique as your mechanics generate near 100% of the force. There is no assistance from equipment or the existing speed of the oncoming ball. Those pebble skimming mechanics are actually very close to what you need for serving in TT.

Take a look at the video below. This is an exercise NextLevel uses to demonstrate spinning the ball. In example "A" I use one type of stroke and in example "B" I use another type. They both seem to have spin, right? One of the strokes is terrible, although I have enough experience to make it work, to a point. Many people use this same action to serve and wonder why they can't continue to improve their spin.

Which one is better, A or B?

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Hi there,

A: The whole arm has forward motion, wrist is locked, bat is horizontal and skims the ball correctly.
B: Only the forearm moves, elbow stays close to the body, wrist does a fast wiping motion, bat is angled upwards so that the faster contact doesn't propel the ball further away.

So B results in a faster contact, i.e. has more spin. Looks a lot like a Samsonov serve to me by the way. I don't see that many other servers having their elbow glued to their body while they are serving. I'm not saying a fast forearm and wrist action is bad, and I'm sure all the good players use them, but can't arm speed, and even torso rotation speed provide even more speed, and therefore spin, when added up and executed correctly? I guess the more parts move, the harder the whole thing is to control and replicate, which is probably also why many players use your "A" technique for their serves, even though it's less efficient.

Ciao,

Nice response post jean-balthazar.

There are a lot of ways you could hypothetically get more speed, however most of them would cost a lot of accuracy. An extreme example would be running towards the table like a javelin thrower.

The serve action needs to be short-and-sharp enough for the serve to bounce twice on the opponent's side. I know you understand all this based on your post, but thought I'd mention it here regardless. I've seen people get carried away, trying to prove that using the entire arm would get more speed/spin. If I had to backspin smash the ball 50 feet and make it spin back, I'd use the entire arm. The serve only goes a few feet and needs to be surprisingly accurate. The wrist and forearm are the only players as accuracy is more important than spin when it comes to high level serving, although it's nice to have both.

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Option A is the way I see most players at club level try to serve. I've also had people try to tell me it is correct to use more upper arm on all shots especially serving as that is the way they were taught years ago.
The game has changed substantially now than 20 years ago and I still find it difficult to get this across to people in regards to using the wrist and forearm to produce spin.
I also have found that players don't focus on the contact point on bat either and they will continue to get no spin because they aren't brushing on the edge of the rubber.

Also as the receiver, I find it harder to judge the amount of spin correctly when the action is short and fast, leading to more return errors. With a large movement the clues to estimate the spin are more visible, and they come earlier, giving the receiver more time to adjust.

The_JC_Train has a good point too with the contact point. With a forearm and wrist wiping action, you will achieve lost of spin if the ball hits the bat near the top edge. But if you hit it close to the handle, you'll get almost nothing (which can be good to do on purpose by the way). Also, if you aim at the top edge of the bat and you're not that good at it, you can miss the ball altogether. With the whole arm swing and locked wrist, you'll get some spin regardless of the contact point, which is probably another reason why it is safer / easier to most players.

But what about disguising short and fast long serves? With a standard action that uses a large arm movement, it's relatively easy to switch from short to long and fast, just by flattening the contact. With a short swing though, that type of variation seems harder to achieve to me. Any words on this?

Thanks.

Here is my video with the contact points you described. Also, if you want to serve long on the table, just aim for a spot long on the table and let your brain work out the calculations. There is no need to consciously change the technique.

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So I filmed some video of my new pendulum serve just to show people how much side backspin you can get with a relatively open racket. Yeah, the serve trajectories are poor and I haven't reviewed the video yet. But I hope it helps some people see that once the elbow is up high, you can literally get a serve that 90%+ of TT players will push into the net if they don't treat it like heavy backspin.

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