OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I've never seriously tried meditation but reading this I'm really eager trying it. Maybe it helps me releasing all the stress I have from the many daily numbers in the horse betting business.

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As an Australian horse betting nerd I fetch my daily horse betting tips from https://www.horsebetting.com/au/ if anyone is interested in it too.

I'm going to a TT camp from 13 - 31 July where I will train and play about 7 - 9 hours a day. I'll only have been back for 2.5 weeks post-pandemic before going and my level has dropped a ton, so I didn't know what to even work on to try to get back. I've found the answer in this old video.

https://youtu.be/381TWy89tBY

I am not joking at all. 100% serious I am going to invest several thousand dollars and +/- 150 hours of table time to this one skill. Imo it's the single most important fundamental thing I can do.

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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

Finding a good instructor is the hard part. But once you realize that meditation is just a way of training the things that the mind is capable of, including self hypnosis, it comes together and you stop taking it as purely a relaxing or stoic exercise (though it definitely is to the degree that you can see that a lot of things causing you stress are based on perspective driven narratives). Being able to switch to the frame you need at the time you are performing is the key. Doesn't make you invincible but even 10% or 5% can be better than nothing.

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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

Thanks NL & Brett, hadn't considered this take on it before - very insightful. Between points I don't think I think anything, I might just look frustrated if I made a bad mistake but I have zero focus on what I'm going to next.. time to consider this.

I was watching a few of Truls latest matches, it's quite amazing how distressed he gets and seems to have lost hope and still pulls off come back after come back.

Let's look at it another way - when your looped and the opponent countered your shot, and your confidence decreased, did your confidence decrease because the opponent countered your shot or did it decrease because of the perspective you have tied to the opponent countering your shot? Obviously, the opponent is ahead, but are you going to play better by realizing you are down and cowboying the eff-up? Maybe, maybe not. The key is always to be able to find the space and mindset (and it isn't always exactly the same for everyone) where you play your best table tennis. It might need you to discuss with someone else watching you who can tell you when they felt you were at your best - it isn't necessarily all about you, you can use other observers to get your best stories for you to use.

It's a fine line to tread when combining your mindset with objective results, but it is important that being able to enter that space where you can realize that you are still the one emotionally reacting to what is happening is key. Whether you can figure out how to take advantage of entering that space mindfully is up to you. So IMO, "training confidence" is still meditation. If you can ground it in tactics/technique/success/learning(all adjusted to difficulties), that can help your overall mindset. The main takeaway is that the stories you tell yourself are important - it doesn't mean the story that works for the next guy will work for you, but you need to find your own stories and experiences to bring to bear in times of trial. And practice doing this as well.

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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

This is still the base of much of my own technical progress.

If I had to add one thing to the Gold Point Method, I'd say keep your racket behind the ball for as long as possible before launching into the backswing on every shot. The elbow position part still stands.

Hope you enjoy the Camp Ben.

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I think now and ever since I've focused more on improving technique my confidence in matches decreases whenever I fail to execute the technique in the way I've been able to in training - which of course happens all the time. I don't think I'm that bothered if my opponent counterloops me, as long as I executed the shot as well as I could.

So in my example, if I fail to execute some shots like FH vs long push or against an easy ball my perspective tied to what I "should" be able to do most of the time in practice and can't in a match brings my confidence down.

Failing at serve receive also brings my confidence down, more so because I find it difficult to get lots of exposure to good servers, people are reluctant to serve their match serves in practice, so I keep dealing with them the same way and won't experiment with new ways of receiving. I recently played the guy I shared a match of here 2 years ago. Hadn't played against him in about a year and struggled just as much as back then against his BH serves and probably still will even with repeated practice against them which leads me to believe I need a new perspective of seeing or dealing with them.

Though if I do well and I manage to be very consistent, I don't usually experience some big confidence boost, I'm more indifferent and just think "well I did what I was supposed/expected to". So this makes me think I need to deal with the above situations differently and tell myself a new story, thanks NL.

If someone counters my loop, I then imagine myself playing the same loop with more spin and them missing it.

If you are reading this post, you can probably loop with enough spin to make me miss the counter the majority of the time. You probably won't do a loop with enough spin because you are scared of playing me. Your arm will lock up and slow down before impact. Your timing won't be optimal and there will be another thousands micro problems that we will never understand. This all makes me your resistance. Resistance is what you don't feel against a robot. Without resistance, my serve is almost unplayable, even for players slightly above my level. With heavy resistance, like playing Ma Lin or other world top 20 players, my serve never had spin.

I'll give you a place to start. Before serving, think deeply about the position of the serve and the stupid error you'd like your opponent to make. Then serve aggressively and try to complete the picture. I have just given you a job to do before points so you don't have time to get all negative about life. Don't forget about the stupid error because that will break some of the resistance.

Is the above considered mediation NextLevel? I'm enjoying your input, btw. I'm thinking about adding Yoga Nidra to my off-table sessions, based on your input. It means I'd do Yoga Nidra before imagining myself beat the hell out of my opponents. Here is a sample of Yoga Nindra for those who are curious

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This is why professionals Cho. They only did what they are supposed to do. They have done it literally a million times in the training hall. And still they praise themselves for doing it in a match. Over and over and over. Why don't we do 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

Very interesting post! The key takeaway for me is the part quoted above.

I'll share some of my experiences in that context.

2 years ago I started practicing with my friend E. on a regular basis. We had roughly the same level and practice matches were split 50-50. I've been practicing 3 times per week whereas E. practiced once per week. As a result, my level gradually improved and I would win around 70% of the matches. In December 2020 we had our last training session for the year and E. suggested playing a match.

You can imagine what happened. I cared about winning too much that I played awfully. It was choking at its finest. I don't remember exactly, but I probably had thoughts like this: "It's the last match of the year. I don't want to lose this one." imo, the main culprits were my thoughts/expectations which led to self-inflicted pressure.

I was so pissed off that I vowed to play more aggressively against him going forward (win or lose), e.g. attack his long serves instead of pushing them. The good news is that I managed to play decent/very good practice matches this year by just making this one commitment.

Unfortunately, I still care too much about my rating and winning in tournaments. But my goal is to adopt Brett's mindset: "Try to play the TT I want to play whether I win or lose."

Brett achieved this by training confidence. I have some experience with meditation, but I am not an expert. There are some meditation techniques that involve visualization. I don't know if visualization started in meditation or if meditation practitioners borrowed visualization from another field. In any event, I agree with Nextlevel that training confidence can be interpreted as a form of meditation. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the technique is called as long as it works. I guess the key is that we are able to concentrate properly in matches (get into the zone) and manage to block out detrimental thoughts (stay in the zone).

Brett's technique is visualization, which instills confidence and keeps his mind so busy/focused that it doesn't wander. BRS mentioned that some pros are chooing and imo it's their technique (maybe combined with visualization).

Interesting thought Ben. You are thinking that the "Cho" might be a trigger word for better performance. This type of programming could be known as NLP. I have a few trigger words to try to make me relax and play better. I have tried to link some words in this way.

"Choing" is highly contextual. For example, it's not okay to walk around Times Square Choing aggressively. In the same way, it's not okay to be Choing in an international table tennis training hall. Apparently though, it's socially acceptable to Cho at the top of one's lungs in a real tt match. The human is a strange creature.

So Harimoto isn't Choing in the training hall. Other players/coaches would think that he's lost his marbles if he started Choing aggressively in the training hall at the Asian Championship or something. There is way too much grunting in these halls, but never Choing. Choing only happens in matches that count. I think you'd quickly be told to shut up if you started Choing in a training hall after every good shot. You'd be breaking the concentration of the other players who are trying to train themselves.

I believe that Choing is totally about putting one's opponent off their game, though no one will directly admit this. I have found that people only start Choing against me when they are in the match and feel like they might be able to gain an edge. If I'm killing someone, they don't Cho anymore. I personally don't Cho against anyone. When asked why I don't Cho, I say that I'm not good enough at tt to be screaming out strange sounds.

One of my favorite players of all time in Lin Yun Ju. I've coached against him and he's by far the toughest opponent I've tried to coach against. I'd rather coach against CNT any day. At least those guys look a little nervous and make mistakes. Lin Yun Ju doesn't look nervous and he doesn't say a word for the whole match. He just demolishes most opponents whilst playing in the zone. If you put his playing brain under an MRI, you'd see perfection.

If you are reading this post and enjoy Choing then please don't let this post put you off your Cho. I'm sure it makes the game more fun for some people.

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I played league on Thursday night and I guess I played relatively bad. I have a few excuses if you'd like to hear them?

Despite playing below average, I didn't feel pain after I lost one match. I tried to program myself before each point and that was my only job. My opponent played better and my programming didn't always work out as intended. Of course I'd prefer if my brain had switched on and I had won, but it didn't happen very well and it was totally okay. I stayed busy during the match and I was more focused than in my previous junk matches.

My goal now is to try my absolute best and not care if I win or lose. For the future of Australian tt, I hope that my best results happened 20 years ago, so I guess I really have nothing to lose.

My point is that good positive programming is my only real goal now. I get excited when it works and I do win a few more matches. I want to break down the resistance from my opponents and serve like a boss.

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I am going to take a page from your approach, so I am looking forward to the new videos about positive programming.

Yesterday, I played in a tournament. Since I read Brett's post 5 days before the tournament I tried to apply the visualization techniques recommended. For good measure, I added a mantra: "May I play with ease." However, this was not a good idea imo (more about that later).

I watched my highlights video a few times a day and tried to visualize some of the points from those highlights for a couple of minutes a day. As you can see I am in the early stages of training confidence and I didn't sacrifice my sleeping habits. On the train, I did some visualizations while closing my eyes repeating the mantra. So far so good. However, some practical problems emerged during the first match. It was different visualizing with my eyes open. Should I look at the floor, at my racquet, or at something else? In addition, I visualized before some points and just said the mantra before other points, i.e. I didn't have a clear plan/script on how to implement the visualization during the match. Needless to say, I played a poor match.

For some reason, I decided not to do any visualizations/mantras for the remaining matches. Instead, I tried to play more aggressively than usual in tournaments, which seemed to work reasonably well. I played at a decent level in matches 2-4 and felt good for the most part. Hopefully, I will be able to feel and play better in tournaments once I learn to combine the positive programming techniques with the mindset of trying my best.

Here's a recording of match 2. I mostly played FH topspins when the opponent served long (much more than usual in tournaments). No BH dive topspins yet, but I hit a few decent dive counterhits.

https://youtu.be/l1jiUYJqv20

Well you know about international TT and I don't, so take this fwiw.

Choing has become associated in everyone's mind with Harimoto, as if he's the only one who does it, and screaming is the only way to Cho. I observe many CNT choing after every point they win. Ex: FZD (yes, I watched one MS match), CM, SYS, WMY, basically all of them. They aren't Harimoto-loud chos, they just say cho to themselves, often making a quick fist. This cannot be meant to put the opponent off her game, because the opponent is often busy walking back to pick up the ball. It seems to me like a means of balancing out their mental ledger, like richfs said. They get discouraged by a bad play, emotions -1. If they don't acknowledge good play those negatives keep adding up and they would go -2, -5, -10, etc. So they do a little cho, +1.

I'm sure what you observe in your own matches is true. But if your opponents stop choing when you are killing them then they are doing it wrong. That's when their confidence would be lowest and they need a cho the most. I doubt context-dependent chos would work. You make a good play, you cho (politely), reflex.

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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

Yes please, what are your excuses? Are they like, better and more exotic excuses than ours, because you are a better player?

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

Yoko Ono