Forehand Drive Technique Correction

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Hi all,

I recently joined a club and started seeing a coach about a month ago. Everyone at the club is pretty experienced and definitely at a much higher level than me.

Every time I do forehand to forehand drills with them they point out that the form for my forehand drive form is off. They say that I rotate my wrist and lift the ball too much when doing the stroke. Instead of my racket going up in a straight line, it tends to curve up. But when I try to keep my swing in a straight line, the ball tends to go right into the net. I've talked to my coach about it but he doesn't seem very concerned and says that fh-fh drills don't really impact game performance.

Is there any way to fix this?

Here's a video of a fh-fh drill with my technique (I'm probably doing a lot of things wrong so if you spot anything, please let me know!):
https://youtu.be/PtLhP6JRAn0

Thank you!
 
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1) Bend knees more, crouch a bit lower. You'll never get balls this high in 'real life'. Whenever you think you've crouched too much, imagine Fan Zhendong. Very difficult to crouch too much!

2) Push elbow further away from your body. Your arm should be about 45 degrees angle from your shoulder and your elbow STABLE. Not moving from that 45 degree angle. If you don't do this your balls will go all over the table without you knowing why, and your training partners will get pissed off.
In the clip it's noticeable that your balls are going all over the table.

3) Hit the ball when it's more in front of you, you're almost letting it go past you and hitting sideways (crouching more will correct that).

4) Hit much more weak. The important thing is the precise technique and the placement.
Your trainer is giving you very weak, very high balls. There's no point in hitting them hard. Put them on the right part of the table without force :) You're both making his life a misery AND not improving this way :p



Other than that, you're doing great. You've already avoided many of the possible pitfalls. You're hitting straight through the ball instead of topspinning it, which is great. Your foot position looks good (if too straight), and you're patient enough to wait for the ball to rise which is probably the most important thing :)
 
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Brs

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Brs

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Really that doesn't look bad at all. Maybe what people are seeing is that your bat is very closed (parallel with the floor) at the end of your backswing. Great for looping, but you can't hit like that, the ball would go into your side of the table. So you are rotating your wrist at contact to open the bat (make it perpendicular to the floor). The video shows it works, but that isn't a great way to hit flat. Try taking the bat back open and swing straight through the ball, and you won't need to change the angle during the stroke at all.

What Lightzy said about crouching down is super important. Not limited to this shot, everything in table tennis requires a low position. Try to get your butt down at or below table height.
 
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How long have you been playing? The fundamentals look realy amazing for someone who got coaching for a month.
 
For me the most important ia what Lightzy say in point 2: Push elbow further away from your body.
Locking the elbow to your waist hinders the right moves of all parts of the body.
The other thing is to keep your bat at a permanent angle, moving your arm straight folowing the angle of the forearm. The bat should draw a straigt line, not a hyperbolic as in your case.
Your coach is right that this excersice is not of great importance for the real game, but its good for gaining right habits and correcting wrong habits. You should forget this hyperbolic trajetcory of the bat, it will not help you in real game and with top spin technique.
 
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What club you at in this vid? The place has the look of a Korean club to me. Looks like a Pro9 table with a table skirt. The door and the blue plastic chair gives it away.

Koreans call the FH Drive a "Hwa"... for those TTD members who do not knw the Korean coach progression, the coach keeps the player hitting the FH Drive with little topspin close to the table and do not progress them until they can do hundreds in a row without missing. Their basic drill is to be close to the table, like almost right on it and go at it FH to FH, they place the ball right in the middle of the hitting zone. Korean coaches have their own coaching manual with indicators to move up a player in training.

Your technique in the vid shows a close to the table drive technique. You are NOT using much of the upper arm or extending it out... which is GREAT. This is a big issue for many players and they lose their power and control there. You are NOT over torqueing the body and shoulder/arm... GREAT. You finish right in front of your nose. GREAT.

When striking the ball, one doesn't think about how the wrist is working, you think of being loose and when to strike the ball given that you got into position. You might be thinking of delaying the hit and then "NOW". Thinking about the technical aspects of the stroke while doing it is a recipe for disaster.

If whatever adjustment you are doing is consistently putting the ball into the net, then just open up your blade angle and keep hitting forward. Don't worry about lifting too much... this is the situation of hitting vs an incoming light topspin ball like in the basic warmup drill.

I do not think you are hitting to deep in your strike zone. Kim Jung Hoon advocates control of the depth of the strike zone, often he corrects a bad shot or stroke by telling the player to wait for the ball more and get a feeling of "catching" the ball at impact. I have made gists of many of his vids on TTD - I use them as a reference often in my posts. Do a youtube search for Kim Jung Hoon One Point Lesson and you see his old vids from when he was sponsored by Stiga and Tibhar. He has a totally new series of vids when he was sponsored by Andro and yet a whole new series of vids from Joola sponsoring his club. Surprisingly, these latest vids are also very valuable to learn from. He has a good way to communicate the basic important information and the trouble spots.

Sure, you will be more mobile with a little more crouch. That will come later. The first few months, the coaches are looking for that perfection in FH "Hwa". You have the basic fundamentals of a sound FH "Hwa"

You can keep good consistency with your current elbow position tucked in, it is very good technique for close to the table for consistency. As you get even a little off the table, it wouldn't hurt for the elbow to away from the body a little more, so long as you do not use too much upper arm, which you are not with your form from the ten second clip.

I wouldn't worry about your FH Hwa being too fast for the other guy. In a Korean club, you have drills where you are hitting really weak, but mostly, you both start off weak and increase the pace to a sustainable one as fast as you can hit and still land it in the primary zone time after time... often, both of you are literally pounding the ball at that stage. What you worry about is PLACEMENT. you try to hit every ball right smack in the middle of the FH hitting zone. That is what makes it easier to keep consistency for both of you in the FH to FH drill.
 
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Thank you for the feedback and for the Kim Junghoon video tip I will check them out asap.

And yes your instincts were correct I go to a small club called sangrim tt club (상림마을 탁구장). Are you also in Korea?

I find that my control and placement are more consistent when the drill first starts and the ball is going a little slower. When my partner puts more force into the ball then I start to get very inconsistent. I figure this will all get better with more practice though.
 
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The most important point that I caught from video is you should touch the ball earlier, try to approach a little bit to the table and crouch your body position a little bit downward and ask your training partner to notice your racket angle when you touch the ball, it should be consistent the same angle in the whole FH drive drills
 
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