Serious question - about training and improving ones game

Hey

We would firstly need to know how many hours a week you already practice. Quality practice and table time is essiential to improving your game. A good way for us to help you would be to upload videos of you playing, perhaps on a monthly basis. From here we can analyse your game and help you.

Do u have a coach?

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Wow Homer, good thing to want, but we really don't know enough of your situation or TT assets to make very meaningful and constructive comments.

I have prolly improved a few hundred percent (moved up two levels) in 2 years here in Korea. Why not pop over here for a few years to teach English by day and play your heart out at TT by night?

The motivation, drive and committment is there which is a great start. First of all we kind of need a bit more background on how long you've been playing and how much you are currently training etc.

A great place to start is to clearly identify your strengths and weaknesses in your game, to start to develop you need to start anaylsing yourself performance-wise in all aspects of the game, asking yourself 'why' type questions like why did the ball go over the end?, why did the ball go in the net? what was it that made me lose a particular match, was there something my opponent took advantage of in my game? (a weakness area?) these are all basic places to start to make small adjustments both technically and tactically over time which you can then set training exercises around. You need to train towards mastering those basics to the point where you seldom miss the ball in basic training exercises across a wide range of technical strokes.

Just a start from me until you give more info.

You should spend time practicing your current weaknesses but also spend more time practicing your strengths. Short game and consistency are so important especially at higher level table tennis. The ability to receive a short ball as short as possible and low to the net is essential. A great way to start practicing getting in to the table early to get to that ball is to have a training partner feed short balls and you get in to the table and try and hit them before they bounce. This is a great way to hone your reflexes and get your in-out footwork up to speed. The short receive is all based around being fast and getting to the ball early in its bounce. Also important is not to hit the back of the ball, there should always be some side bat angle if only a little, if the bat is flat back of the ball on contact you are more likely to push the ball higher.

To combine strengths and weaknesses I would suggest receiving a serve short, having your partner push long anywhere and then playing a 3rd ball attack and finishing each point.

Remember multiball is a great way to improve consistency both technical consistency and quantity of balls on the table and having a coach to make sure the technical aspects are all correct or a knowledgeable team mate is always good to have.

By improving 100% I suspect you mean to increase your skill level by double. And because we don't know where you currently are at and how many resources you'd be willing to put to it there's not much we can say that will 100% get you where you want. There are some great strategies here to get there, but I suggest a more applicable approach.

No matter what your skill level is you should get a coach. That is unmistakably the most important thing you can do to get to where you'd like to be. You want a coach that teaches a more modern aspect of the sport. Whether it be footwork, looping technique, tactics, or whatever aspect you enjoy you need it to be up to date. The older forms of Table Tennis training take more hours and longer periods of time to master and improve upon. The newer forms still take as many hours per day, but typically for shorter periods of time. Usually training in 3-6 months spurts will on average double your skill set and ability level.

The next big thing is hours per week. If you cannot train double the amount of time or more you will not double your skill level as fast as you would like to. I would suggest if you play 3-4 days a week to move up to 5-6 days but with the same amount of hours per day. If you can reach 6 days that's fantastic, but I wouldn't go to 7 because you would not have any recovery time. There will be periods where you will have to switch around your recovery days because different aspects of your game are likely to take more energy out of you.

If you can't get practice partners to play with in your sessions I suggest investing in a Robot of some sort. The Newgy 2040/2050 series is a great digital series, but the 1040/1050 are equally as good, but it's the analog versions.

Lastly I suggest video recording ALL of your practices and matches from here on out. Table Tennis is just as much mental as it is physical. If you can not look at your videos and decipher where you are making mistakes or if you're timing is off we can really help with that. I suggest recording with a right sided angle if you're a righty and left sided if you're a lefty. If you record your matches in 720p HD that would be ideal, but whatever you can get your hands on will work as well. I'm sure we'd all be willing to put in our advice from watching your training sessions.

Hope this helps homer and good luck.

My fantasy would be to do 4 hour training sessions 6 days a week with a great coach. I can think of a few that I would love to work with.

Exactly 6 months has passed since I made my first table tennis journal.
I am extremely elated, grateful and in the same time extremely surprised by how much I have improved.

What makes it the most for me this 6 months is the time I spend everyday OFF the table to think about my game. I think about TT like mad, everywhere and anywhere. How I could patch my errors, which aspect I am lacking, etc etc. Even mostly I dwell without coach (This 6 months I only get training session no more than 10 times), I could ask in the forum, search in the internet, ask to club members, etc, DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN, THINK EVERYTHING YOU CAN.

Don't lose hope to a bad TT day, make it an encouragement for you to move on.
Give yourself a few months and you will be surprised at yourself being an almost completely different entity in table tennis.

Everything comes with time, make sure you have the perseverance and drive to keep moving on.

Oh and regarding to your equipment, is it a little to fast and hard? Imo its very hard to loop with your setup..

And don't consume too much donut and Duff beer

YosuaYosan said:

Exactly 6 months has passed since I made my first table tennis journal.
I am extremely elated, grateful and in the same time extremely surprised by how much I have improved.

What makes it the most for me this 6 months is the time I spend everyday OFF the table to think about my game. I think about TT like mad, everywhere and anywhere. How I could patch my errors, which aspect I am lacking, etc etc. Even mostly I dwell without coach (This 6 months I only get training session no more than 10 times), I could ask in the forum, search in the internet, ask to club members, etc, DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN, THINK EVERYTHING YOU CAN.

Don't lose hope to a bad TT day, make it an encouragement for you to move on.
Give yourself a few months and you will be surprised at yourself being an almost completely different entity in table tennis.

Everything comes with time, make sure you have the perseverance and drive to keep moving on.

Oh and regarding to your equipment, is it a little to fast and hard? Imo its very hard to loop with your setup..

And don't consume too much donut and Duff beer

Click to expand...

Aweaome post Yosua! Players can learn a lot from this! One of your best posts in a while ... I totally agree with you, i did the exact same thing and i improved immensly!

I did a topic in my sports class called refractice practioning. I learnt a lot from that.

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Wanting to improve 100%...hmmm don't we all want that. I always believe in quality training than quantity. High intensive training will only do yourself in if you're not getting enough quality rest. Another thing that most of us sometimes overlook is our diets. It does play such a crucial role on how much we can improve, and how much our body will be able to take the punishments of a training regime. Our mind and heart say yes, but our body sometimes say no.

Dude, if you keep up this level of commitment, the only way is up. Keep it up, wish I can have half of your enthusiasm buddy.

One thing that you are doing that is really good is you are doing training exercises without counting points. Match play is important but if you do too much match play and not enough training you get better at what you already do well and you also keep some old habits that get in your way. In training sessions you work on changing old habits so that you replace them with good, new habits. But it sounds like you are doing the right things.

Core is important. Stretching your shoulders, your hips, lateral stretches, twists that stretch your hips and the sides of your body, also help you improve. More strength without losing flexibility. Stretching after you play or work out is more important than before. Many people do not realize that. But you might not need to spend any more than about 10-15 minutes on this and it still helps a lot.

what is the bunngy looking card that table tennis player warm up with by pullin it an it springs back fast what is the real name for this equipment any ideas