Which physical exercises are the best for table tennis improvement?

[Scott Yu]

"Just shut up and squat"

 

[Archosaurus]

I really do have to advocate weighted squats myself as well. It's not the first time I do either.

Just casually doing sets with 60 - 70kg (Around my own bodyweight) and the usual drills has strengthened my legs over the few years I've been playing. If I took it seriously and aimed for at the very least 100kg sets, then I think there would be very drastic improvement.

60 - 70kg doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not, but I'm a pretty small guy and I squat all the way down properly, so doing a few sets of a moderate amount of reps is pretty good for up-keeping and slowly improving your condition. I can remember a year ago how difficult it was to bend down with my legs, but now it's become easier.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Thanks. Didn't mean to play the necromancer, but i just bumped into that vid yesterday.
[Emoji2]

There are times when the art of necromancy can be quite useful. From my perspective, this was a useful thread to use for fine tuning that art. [emoji2] And this is a different version of Necromancy than the art that Sauron or some of the other TTDaily trolls have practiced. So, I am appreciative of the way in which you chose to wake the dead.

I'm not sure if there is any "THE BEST" footwork drill. Some are better some less, but each posted drill helps to reach certain goals, and I would say it depends on what one is working on.

But you're right. The random Multiball helps to work on quickness and decrease reaction time which is pretty helpful in tabletennis in general.

Well said.

I am reminded of a passage from the concluding chapter of a physical therapy manual that explains how exercises are meant to be adapted to circumstances based on the individual's needs to help move towards a desired outcome. Wish I had the patience to look for it and type it out. But, being honest, I have no intention of even trying. So, instead I'll write my own manifesto about how different exercises apply to different aspects of developing skills in table tennis:

What follows is only for the brave at heart. [emoji2]

====

In/out drills that are designed to help you develop the skill of moving in over the table for a short ball and then back out for an opening loop will not help you with the kind of footwork you need for adjusting to two balls that are close to the same place where you should move your feet a few inches to take your stroke from an optimal position.

And a drill that helps you move to those balls where you only need to move an inch or two will not help you move in a two point drill where the two points are 1.5-2 feet apart.

A two point drill won't help you transition wide BH to wide FH. Wide BH/Wide FH won't help you to turn to a FH after a BH where the two balls are hit to the same spot. You could call that a step around.

The Falkenberg may not have much direct translation into random match play. HOWEVER, there is a real reason it is worth working on many of these traditional footwork fundamental drills unless you have knee and hip problems and then they may not make sense.

The key word I just used is FUNDAMENTAL. Learning all those fundamental footwork drills like the one-step in either direction, a 2 point drill, 2-2, 1-2, 2-1 (BH/FH) BH-Middle-BH-Wide, 3-2-1-2-3 (all FH), 3-2-1-3-2-1, (really it is just 3-2-1, but I am emphasizing that you go to 3 from 1), 1-2-3-1-2-3 (really: 1-2-3), should I go on?

All these drills I just mentioned are working on slightly different skills. They don't have a direct correlation to match play scenarios. However, somewhere down the road the skill it takes to be able to perform these drills with consistency, at pace, will start having hard to explain correlations to match play as you as your level increases. They are the fundamentals because, when you work with all of them, and there are so many, they help you develop the skills and muscle memory so that your body knows what movements to make as different combinations randomly pop up at higher level match play.

Exercises like the simple shadow stroke+footwork drills that I posted are actually a great shortcut to get you able to do these better because, to do all of the drills well takes a complex coordination-independence between upper and lower body since below your waist you are doing something completely different from what you are doing above the waist. And the interaction of upper and lower body, sometimes is working together and sometimes upper and lower body are counterbalancing each other.

While helping you improve the upper/lower body independent coordination in those shadow footwork drills, you are also able to work on the strength, endurance, agility and speed you would need for the real thing without having to focus on the process of contacting the ball. If you do them in front of a mirror the way I like to, you can also fine tune the form of your basic stroke pretty easily.

Exercises like the ones in some of the videos Suga D posted, will help you develop some of the strength needed for the explosiveness of certain power shots and and some are good for endurance of some of the longer rallies. The last video Suga D posted has this amazing drill where the feet make tiny steps laterally super fast and then a low squat which combines the strength and the speed into two parts of one exercise.

Those core exercises--Ilia posted some of the better ones--particularly the ones that get you to work the sides of the body, are really good for helping you strengthen areas of the body that need to be strong for actions like looping.

The ladder footwork drills give your feet some training in speed, coordination and lateral movement, while also getting your body to work on that upper body/lower body interdependent coordination since in so many of those movements the upper body needs to compensate for the movement of the lower body.

Now you can work on all of these things and work on drills with different levels of random element too. Because, YOU DO NEED TO WORK ON THE RANDOM ELEMENT. And you can work on developing your skill in random placement drills side by side with learning fundamental techniques.

But as Baal aptly said: "you have to learn to walk before you can run"....well, unless you are Ironic Side from Get Smart! [emoji2] (let's see if anyone knows that reference! [emoji2])

But it is import to know, there is no SILVER BULLET for magically developing skills you didn't work on. There is no one exercise that is "BEST" as though the exercise could fit all needs at once, or cause you to learn all the skills in just one exercise.

But the random exercise that Yogi Berra, I mean Yogi Bear, indicated is an excellent drill too.

If you slow it down and perform the drill, and slowly speed it up until you can perform the drill at speed, or faster, IT WILL NOT necessarily DEVELOP the skills that the fundamental footwork drills are meant to help you develop. But it will help you start to develop the skill of adjusting to random placement which is a skill that should be worked on side by side with those fundamental footwork skills.

And if those fundamental footwork skills are ALL well integrated into muscle memory, then the ability to perform the random placement skills WILL SIGNIFICANTLY increase because your muscle memory will APPROPRIATELY apply fragments from the fundamental skill sets to the actual circumstances of the random drills.

And without training the fundamentals, and trying to JUST use random training to get at all of those footwork patterns, it is much more likely that, unconsciously, you will choose inefficient foot movement patterns and cement suboptimal footwork into muscle memory.

The actions and coordination of high level table tennis are complex enough that an approach to improvement, for someone who is serious about getting to a decently high level, would need to be multidimensional.

Or, again, as Baal said it, you have to learn walk before you can run. [emoji2]


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[Suga D]

Man, Carl, this time you've really outdone yourself.
This must be the best explanation i've heard or read.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate so detailed.
Who couldn't be convinced now? As you've probably seen from the vid of me in the CC thread why i need it so necessarily.
[Emoji2]

 

[Baal]

I liked that post a lot also. Each of those tbings is a different move ent that you kind of have to learn seperately.

 

[yogi_bear]

that is one good post carl

 

[ttmonster]

copyright to OSHP : Dayuummm !

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Man, Carl, this time you've really outdone yourself.
This must be the best explanation i've heard or read.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate so detailed.
Who couldn't be convinced now? As you've probably seen from the vid of me in the CC thread why i need it so necessarily.
[Emoji2]

Actually, Suga D, you should know, you look pretty darn good in that video. One thing to understand is, that ball coming from the robot is not a realistic ball. Your friend looks like he has just faced the robot more than you. But that ball is wacky. And when you are lined up with it, your technique is very solid, you are definitely putting very nice spin on the ball. The body and racket move together. But on many of them you are off balance because of how weird that ball coming from the robot is.

And someone who is really used to that ball from the robot may not do very well against a real human because that is really not at all like what a real human would produce.

So don't judge yourself by the off balance shots or the miscues. One of the problems with a robot is that the ball does not actually go to the same place over and over and the only cue for spin, speed and direction are an aperture where the ball exits.

With a real person you see the stroke, the body mechanics, the racket angle, the amount of brush they put on the ball. In that video, in effect, you are managing as well as you can without any of those cues.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

But the truth is, most of us need a decent amount of most of those remedial exercises. Most of us are either players who played as kids and tried to come back after a decade or two, or players who started trying to learn good technique from scratch as an adult.

If you watch a kid 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 get trained, one thing that is pretty evident almost immediately, the move an inch or two when the ball is an inch or two away, because THEY HAVE TO. They are small enough that they have to move to pretty much every ball even when the coach is trying to put it in the same spot. So, at 8 years old that habit is naturally trained into them as what you have to do.

Most adults just reach farther or jam themselves when the ball is a few inches in either direction and this leads to not adjusting to precise locations of ball placement. Note, the way I said it means, we are likely not accurate in our adjustment to balls that are close to the same place but we are also likely not so accurate in adjusting to balls that we need to move farther for either. We judge that we can reach the rest of the way.

Without question I have realized that if I wanted to get as good as I would like to be, I would need to have a pretty decent coach feeding me multiball drill upon drill upon drill for 3-4 hours a day, 6 days a week, for a few years to really develop the fundamentals. We would have to start slow, we would have to start with walking to get the right foot patterns and good spacing. The drills would need to include standardized drills and randomized drills. And my training would need to include 1-2 hours of a combination of match play and match simulation drills as well. So 4-6 hours a day, 6 days a week for several years. And that still might not fix all the flaws.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

By the way, every so often, okay, fairly regularly, NextLevel uses a term: specificity; the principle of specificity; specificity of training.

You can look it up. It really means what my long drawn out post explains.

But TT is really more complex than most sports because of how many separate skills your body needs to master. From brain processing to fine motor skills, to reading and adjusting to spin, speed and placement, to tracking and intercepting the ball, it is really so many skills that need to gel together.

The type and massive number of different skills that are being combined in a drill like the one that follows is really, actually, quite staggering:

From my experience, a person who has experience in a related sport like tennis has some advantages in learning. But there are still many skills in TT that don't cross over from tennis like those micro-movements/adjustments or the short stroke with the fast reset. And therefore, you often find guys who are trying to cross tennis skills to TT skills end up being easy to force back from the table where they are hoping they have more time to adjust. It works up to a certain level. And after that, they would need to do lots of those same drills that develop some of the fundamental skills they might still be missing.


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[OldschoolPenholder]

copyright to oshp : Dayuummm !

lolol!!!!!

 

[Suga D]

Actually, Suga D, you should know, you look pretty darn good in that video. One thing to understand is, that ball coming from the robot is not a realistic ball. Your friend looks like he has just faced the robot more than you. But that ball is wacky. And when you are lined up with it, your technique is very solid, you are definitely putting very nice spin on the ball. The body and racket move together. But on many of them you are off balance because of how weird that ball coming from the robot is.

And someone who is really used to that ball from the robot may not do very well against a real human because that is really not at all like what a real human would produce.

So don't judge yourself by the off balance shots or the miscues. One of the problems with a robot is that the ball does not actually go to the same place over and over and the only cue for spin, speed and direction are an aperture where the ball exits.

With a real person you see the stroke, the body mechanics, the racket angle, the amount of brush they put on the ball. In that video, in effect, you are managing as well as you can without any of those cues.

Thanks a lot. From now on we all should call you Dr. Pong
[Emoji2]
I think your analysis is totally on point. Another reason why i need these footwork drills so bad. The good thing about the robot is that there is this randomize button which varies the placement a bit, so one is forced to do these little footwork adjustments. Maybe i should practice a little more often with it to be more used to it. It´s fun practicing with it. You can get almost realistic balls and practice quite seriously but also very unrealistic ones and just joke around.

 

[TT_Rogue]

Squats, Deadlifts, Bench press, military press, pull ups. and a bit of fitting cardio

 

[Ilia Minkin]

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Bump.


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[Der_Echte]

But the truth is, most of us need a decent amount of most of those remedial exercises. Most of us are either players who played as kids and tried to come back after a decade or two, or players who started trying to learn good technique from scratch as an adult.

If you watch a kid 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 get trained, one thing that is pretty evident almost immediately, the move an inch or two when the ball is an inch or two away, because THEY HAVE TO. They are small enough that they have to move to pretty much every ball even when the coach is trying to put it in the same spot. So, at 8 years old that habit is naturally trained into them as what you have to do.

Most adults just reach farther or jam themselves when the ball is a few inches in either direction and this leads to not adjusting to precise locations of ball placement. Note, the way I said it means, we are likely not accurate in our adjustment to balls that are close to the same place but we are also likely not so accurate in adjusting to balls that we need to move farther for either. We judge that we can reach the rest of the way.

Without question I have realized that if I wanted to get as good as I would like to be, I would need to have a pretty decent coach feeding me multiball drill upon drill upon drill for 3-4 hours a day, 6 days a week, for a few years to really develop the fundamentals. We would have to start slow, we would have to start with walking to get the right foot patterns and good spacing. The drills would need to include standardized drills and randomized drills. And my training would need to include 1-2 hours of a combination of match play and match simulation drills as well. So 4-6 hours a day, 6 days a week for several years. And that still might not fix all the flaws.

Carl, you hang around NL or me for a few months every day a few hrs, you will be pushing 2000, you have the stuff in you.

 

[Gourav Acharya]

This is so deep I don't get the point. Well done.

I think the point is the more you practice, you get into your own style and habit. That style and habit shouldn't​ be such that it hinders with your game.

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[NextLevel]

I think the point is the more you practice, you get into your own style and habit. That style and habit shouldn't​ be such that it hinders with your game.

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And who are you telling this? A 4 year old? I was being sarcastic, and everyone realized it then.

 

[Gourav Acharya]

And who are you telling this? A 4 year old? I was being sarcastic, and everyone realized it then.

Sorry :') sir if I offended you in anyway. It's hard to understand sarcasm over text. Plus it's not that I know you and how you talk.

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[UpSideDownCarl]

On bumping this thread.

Now I am the one bumping this thread because I think it is way more productive than the thread on "body building" what it has been trolled into.


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