My pendulum and reverse pendulum serve variations akin to Zhang jike!

[achalwins94]

I'm not sure if this is accurate, and i feel a bit torn over this.

Many coaches i know would recommend rather slow rubbers like the ones you've been recommending, but i just had a discussion with a friend of mine who owns the 'A-coach' license. That is the highest level license you can get in germany and gives you the license to coach players on national level.
Well he told me that going for classical rubbers in the beginning is completely bollocks. He recommended to start with more modern type rubbers asap to make them feel natural for you asap. Plus he mentioned that rubbers like the markV are a bit outdated and were actually designed for the ooooold 38mm ball.
Most old coaches recommend slowish classic rubbers but changing to modern rubbers when being used to classic rubbers would be a big step and would sort of feel like your blade's got an adrenaline rush.
In the end i guess it is just two different philosophies behind it and probably both will work, but a modern philosophy in a modern type of game seems to make more sense in my book.

Just my 2¢

Well, I heard this thing first time ! I know mark V was designed for 38 mm. But its a classic rubber. My friend, who used to play nationals, and has played a good deal, used to play with stiga allround classic and mark V on both sides. And he had classic feeling. Now he uses dhs tg7 al blade and joola rhyzm and genius rubbers, which he adjusted easily( as his shots were just invisble sometimes )Tensor may give power, but the ball science and feeling can be developed by slow rubbers.
I can't say any more,this is what I have experienced.

Sent from my XT1068 using Tapatalk

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Okay, there have been a lot of good comments. The most useful, I have to say, are from NextLevel and Suga D. But there have been many excellent comments.

So, first off, I want to start with the good stuff. I think you have very good ball feel and touch. I actually think the equipment may be fine, but new rubbers are always good to have. Playing on rubbers that are about a year old is usually not so good for improving your technique. As far as the Classic rubbers vs Older Generation New School rubbers (older tensor rubbers), I think it often actually depends on the person. From what I am looking at, since Siva S, has good touch and spins the ball well, he may be able to go either way. So I would go with something like an older generation ESN rubber: Barracuda, Vega Pro, Vega Europe, Aurus, Aurus Soft. But which rubbers he gets are much less of an issue in my opinion than TECHNIQUE.

So, on to that subject. As everyone has seen, the backhand seems decent enough not to worry about it or comment too much on it. It does demonstrate how good your feel for the ball can be on the few backhand shots in the video. The reason why so many people have commented on the forehand technique is because the technique is pretty bad. Sorry to say it that way. But I will explain why. With your forehand, you may need to rebuild it from scratch because, even though your touch is darn good, your stroke is fundamentally flawed and if you don't change that, it will seriously limit your potential to develop and improve. So, in my opinion, saying it straight, may be the best thing I can do for you. And you seem like you are good and taking constructive criticism and using it to learn and improve. Which is really a great talent. So I figured you can handle this.

In your forehand stroke the things that should be most worrisome to you are:

1) On almost every forehand, there is a point where your elbow ends up higher than your racket. That is actually not supposed to happen.
2) Your racket invariably crosses your midline and ends up across to the other side of your body. It should not pass the midline, or if it does, it should not go so far past.
3) I am not sure, maybe there is one or two forehands where this is not the case, but other than that, your racket never ends up going higher than the height of your shoulder, and by the end of your followthrough, your racket is not as high as the highest point in your stroke. The highest point in your stroke should be the end of the followthrough.
4) The blade face should travel in one plane and go from low to high as it goes forward. It should not start medium height, go up only to shoulder height and end up lower than its highest point.

In the video of Suga D's friend David, that forehand technique is excellent and you can see all the elements I talked about in that.

By the way, if you think you got your forehand technique from Ma Long, sorry but, his racket starts low and ends pretty near his head. Sometimes he does cross his body and end up with the racket on the far side of his head. But not below his shoulder.

Here is an instructional video for the forehand counterhit:

Looping vs Backspin:

Faster Topspin:

Hopefully that helps you see the form of the forehand stroke a little better.

Brett Clarke's videos are great too. They go into much more detail. But, I did not post them because these show the stroke very simply where you can see the start and end positions of the stroke.

After you get this idea, watch every Brett Clarke video you can find for helping you learn the mechanics.

Or, better yet, as NextLevel outlined, find a good coach who knows how to help adults improve.

 

[Suga D]

Well, I heard this thing first time ! I know mark V was designed for 38 mm. But its a classic rubber. My friend, who used to play nationals, and has played a good deal, used to play with stiga allround classic and mark V on both sides. And he had classic feeling. Now he uses dhs tg7 al blade and joola rhyzm and genius rubbers, which he adjusted easily( as his shots were just invisble sometimes )Tensor may give power, but the ball science and feeling can be developed by slow rubbers.
I can't say any more,this is what I have experienced.

Sent from my XT1068 using Tapatalk

Firstly: i didn't say you're totally wrong, so please don't feel offended. What i actually said is that there are different ways of seeing things.

Next: i think there is a general misunderstanding. You seem to relate only fast and bouncy rubbers with the word 'tensor'
Tensor actually is a patented production method of rubbers held by the ESN company.

http://www.esn-tt.de/index.html
http://www.tensor.de/

They produce fast rubbers, slow rubbers, bouncy rubbers, not-so-bouncy rubbers and so on.
They even produce so called classical rubbers like the R-Classic without any speedglue effect and no factory tuning. They also make SP rubbers.

So that is why i think there might be a general misunderstanding of 'Tensor' rubbers.

But as carl pointed out beautifully:
I also don't think equipment is the real issue. Siva needs good coaching. Nothing more nothing less.

 

[Suga D]

Okay, there have been a lot of good comments. The most useful, I have to say, are from NextLevel and Suga D. But there have been many excellent comments.

So, first off, I want to start with the good stuff. I think you have very good ball feel and touch. I actually think the equipment may be fine, but new rubbers are always good to have. Playing on rubbers that are about a year old is usually not so good for improving your technique. As far as the Classic rubbers vs Older Generation New School rubbers (older tensor rubbers), I think it often actually depends on the person. From what I am looking at, since Siva S, has good touch and spins the ball well, he may be able to go either way. So I would go with something like an older generation ESN rubber: Barracuda, Vega Pro, Vega Europe, Aurus, Aurus Soft. But which rubbers he gets are much less of an issue in my opinion than TECHNIQUE.

So, on to that subject. As everyone has seen, the backhand seems decent enough not to worry about it or comment too much on it. It does demonstrate how good your feel for the ball can be on the few backhand shots in the video. The reason why so many people have commented on the forehand technique is because the technique is pretty bad. Sorry to say it that way. But I will explain why. With your forehand, you may need to rebuild it from scratch because, even though your touch is darn good, your stroke is fundamentally flawed and if you don't change that, it will seriously limit your potential to develop and improve. So, in my opinion, saying it straight, may be the best thing I can do for you. And you seem like you are good and taking constructive criticism and using it to learn and improve. Which is really a great talent. So I figured you can handle this.

In your forehand stroke the things that should be most worrisome to you are:

1) On almost every forehand, there is a point where your elbow ends up higher than your racket. That is actually not supposed to happen.
2) Your racket invariably crosses your midline and ends up across to the other side of your body. It should not pass the midline, or if it does, it should not go so far past.
3) I am not sure, maybe there is one or two forehands where this is not the case, but other than that, your racket never ends up going higher than the height of your shoulder, and by the end of your followthrough, your racket is not as high as the highest point in your stroke. The highest point in your stroke should be the end of the followthrough.
4) The blade face should travel in one plane and go from low to high as it goes forward. It should not start medium height, go up only to shoulder height and end up lower than its highest point.

In the video of Suga D's friend David, that forehand technique is excellent and you can see all the elements I talked about in that.

By the way, if you think you got your forehand technique from Ma Long, sorry but, his racket starts low and ends pretty near his head. Sometimes he does cross his body and end up with the racket on the far side of his head. But not below his shoulder.

Here is an instructional video for the forehand counterhit:

Looping vs Backspin:

Faster Topspin:

Hopefully that helps you see the form of the forehand stroke a little better.

Brett Clarke's videos are great too. They go into much more detail. But, I did not post them because these show the stroke very simply where you can see the start and end positions of the stroke.

After you get this idea, watch every Brett Clarke video you can find for helping you learn the mechanics.

Or, better yet, as NextLevel outlined, find a good coach who knows how to help adults improve.

1nce again: great post, Carl.
EDIT: i think we might need more like buttons for posts like these to be able to double-, triple- or quadruple-like posts.

 

[anchorschmidt]

Haha, I commented on your videos on Reddit as well I see a lot of myself in you, except I was not really that talented in serving. I have also been playing for 1 and a half years.
In the beginning I was doing a lot of serving practice on my bed and that really helped me develop my touch. My serves were never as good as yours but I could serve a lot of people off the table who had a similar level to mine. I was probably just serving 6 hours a week on the bed at this time.

The problem began with people who were as good as me. I was not that good at receiving and I was not able to use my service advantage by playing a good 3rd or fifth ball. The amount of spin on my serves came back to bite me if a better player would do a good return.

Everything started to come together once I asked a very good player (TTR 1700+) to give me tips on my technique. It could be just a 10 minute session of hitting forehands but then I could make quick progress by shadow practicing my strokes at home. I also used online resources like Youtube to get the fundamentals as well as thoughtsontabletennis.wordpress.com. Shadow practice is so important, especially if you are doing the right motion without the ball. Also important are the different footwork exercises, like Falkenberg or Diagonal/Horizontal. Moving to the best possible spot in the time you have is one of the key things about table tennis.

The touch that I developed from serving really helped me. This helped me generate a lot of spin on my forehand and backhand open ups.

What also helped is that I wasn't reluctant to change things in the beginning even if it made my overall game worse. This is really paying off right now. For example, changing my grip and also developing the ability to change my grip between Backhand and Forehand was amazingly tricky and was a major reason for unforced errors for at least 8 months but it feels very natural now and has helped my game. Nowadays, I don't do a lot of service practice because my service is still beyond the rest of my game. Sometimes I even end up just varying no spin and backspin because it makes the follow up better.

 

[Siva Schopenhauer]

Hey upsidedown, Wow, that was a thorough and detailed analysis. You have brokedown the forehand motion, devoured it and enlightened me with your findings.

As you said, I am always open to direct and constructive critisicms like this. As suggested by you, I am looking back at my recording and started to study the fundamental flaws in it. I think I knew most of the points suggested by you, when I was playing in club. Again, it was more than 6 or 7 months ago and I am completely out of any practice since then except for the serve training. Now again, this is no excuse because I have never recorded my play prior to this recording and there is high chance that I have always played like this despite some good coaching tips from the coach in the club.

l am in total agreement with all those points, except for the point 2. I have closely observed Ma long's play and I just checked once again to sure regarding this idea for the forehand. I also believe Jeff plumb is wrong about the time taken for retracting the hand back to the start.

This is what I observed, If Ma long drives with his Forehand, the perfect drive should cut your vision till it reaches past the left eye for right handers. The problem with cutting in the midline is with repeated forehand drives, the hand will start moving upwards rather than forward, say in 5 or 6 strokes. This will affect the stability of the player. Alois rosario's forehand drive crosses the midline in the third video

I have seen this problem happening to Quadri Aruna and Sharath Kamal. Their forehand drives are inferior to the elite, in my humble opinion. One striking exception is someone like Jun Mizutani, I am completely unsure how to classify his drives far from the table.

I also have another question where you could shed some light, somepeople are using their wrists(Mizutani) to exert power rather than forearm. How does it work?

The perfect way to summarise my schizophrenic behavior of imitating Ma long had result in a bunch of forehand drives which are best footage for a failed compilation. Still, thats the way it is in the moment.

You made me cognizant of those critical points and I ll start working with points 1 3 and 4 and share with you the progress.

Thanks for making such a detailed commentary. It helped me a lot and I hope other beginners in our community could benefit from the post

 

[Siva Schopenhauer]

Hey you are that guy And you have got a very good memory to discover me within this abyssmal internet!

Yes, I simply serve againt the wall, this increase the feel and touch while serving. When you don't have table, only way to play table tennis is to consider wall as your partner and through some magic into it.

from your post, I think we share a similar story? How old are you BTW. May this is the story of many adult beginners

What also helped is that I wasn't reluctant to change things in the beginning even if it made my overall game worse. This is really paying off right now. For example, changing my grip and also developing the ability to change my grip between Backhand and Forehand was amazingly tricky and was a major reason for unforced errors for at least 8 months

This is the hard and bitter story everyone should face to be successful in table tennis. I am happy that you are seeing benefits because I have also gone through a similar experience with the ability to produce spin with the racket. For about a month there was no life in my play and I kept losing and crying like a baby, LOL. Then like a fledgling some progress happens from those artifically develped new motions. Then, once you get hold of it, there is no turning back.

I ll try shadow training sessions with Forehand and Backhand, lets see how this fares, BTW, where are you located and training?

My partner in the training video has superior drive techniques, but her only problem is she doesn't have good serves, 3rd ball and 5th ball knowledge. I know how frustrated and doubtful she is about her capacity. This experience taught about develping a game plan, based on one's strength and avoiding the areas of weakness cropping up in a game.

I think serves is not the most important fact, but having a good understanding one's capablilty and using a strategy to compliment the strengths. Your last lines shows your analysis and ability to back up with game plan

 

[NextLevel]

Hey upsidedown, Wow, that was a thorough and detailed analysis. You have brokedown the forehand motion, devoured it and enlightened me with your findings.

As you said, I am always open to direct and constructive critisicms like this. As suggested by you, I am looking back at my recording and started to study the fundamental flaws in it. I think I knew most of the points suggested by you, when I was playing in club. Again, it was more than 6 or 7 months ago and I am completely out of any practice since then except for the serve training. Now again, this is no excuse because I have never recorded my play prior to this recording and there is high chance that I have always played like this despite some good coaching tips from the coach in the club.

l am in total agreement with all those points, except for the point 2. I have closely observed Ma long's play and I just checked once again to sure regarding this idea for the forehand. I also believe Jeff plumb is wrong about the time taken for retracting the hand back to the start.

This is what I observed, If Ma long drives with his Forehand, the perfect drive should cut your vision till it reaches past the left eye for right handers. The problem with cutting in the midline is with repeated forehand drives, the hand will start moving upwards rather than forward, say in 5 or 6 strokes. This will affect the stability of the player. Alois rosario's forehand drive crosses the midline in the third video

I have seen this problem happening to Quadri Aruna and Sharath Kamal. Their forehand drives are inferior to the elite, in my humble opinion. One striking exception is someone like Jun Mizutani, I am completely unsure how to classify his drives far from the table.

I also have another question where you could shed some light, somepeople are using their wrists(Mizutani) to exert power rather than forearm. How does it work?

The perfect way to summarise my schizophrenic behavior of imitating Ma long had result in a bunch of forehand drives which are best footage for a failed compilation. Still, thats the way it is in the moment.

You made me cognizant of those critical points and I ll start working with points 1 3 and 4 and share with you the progress.

Thanks for making such a detailed commentary. It helped me a lot and I hope other beginners in our community could benefit from the post

It seems that Carl and you are speaking past each other. The reason why you finish on the same side of your body for the most part is to hold the line of sight with the ball for as long as possible. When you finish across your body, there are minimum height requirements (somewhere above the eyebrows) for practice topspins in order to focus on generating topspin and to keep a long line of sight with the ball before deviation. Players who flout this rule consistently are either low level players or have heavy practice schedules to support higher level play. Coaches will try to fix their technique unless they have high consistency.


Many of your strokes are being swung across the body below neck height and this is much worse than finishing on the same side of the body with a controlled stroke or a closed paddle. IT looks good now, but when you start facing higher level topspins, the stroke will fall apart as the short line of sight with the incoming ball makes timing difficult.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Half the time, on his forehand, his racket finishes at the height of his left elbow and in line with his left elbow with his right elbow higher than the racket.

 

[anchorschmidt]

Hey you are that guy And you have got a very good memory to discover me within this abyssmal internet!

Yes, I simply serve againt the wall, this increase the feel and touch while serving. When you don't have table, only way to play table tennis is to consider wall as your partner and through some magic into it.

from your post, I think we share a similar story? How old are you BTW. May this is the story of many adult beginners

This is the hard and bitter story everyone should face to be successful in table tennis. I am happy that you are seeing benefits because I have also gone through a similar experience with the ability to produce spin with the racket. For about a month there was no life in my play and I kept losing and crying like a baby, LOL. Then like a fledgling some progress happens from those artifically develped new motions. Then, once you get hold of it, there is no turning back.

I ll try shadow training sessions with Forehand and Backhand, lets see how this fares, BTW, where are you located and training?

My partner in the training video has superior drive techniques, but her only problem is she doesn't have good serves, 3rd ball and 5th ball knowledge. I know how frustrated and doubtful she is about her capacity. This experience taught about develping a game plan, based on one's strength and avoiding the areas of weakness cropping up in a game.

I think serves is not the most important fact, but having a good understanding one's capablilty and using a strategy to compliment the strengths. Your last lines shows your analysis and ability to back up with game plan

You have a PM

 

[Siva Schopenhauer]

you too