In reading through this, to me it seems, NextLevel has presented the most relevant information on the OP's questions.
To me that makes sense since, he is someone who learned as an adult and also has some limiting factors on the physical side with mobility issues from a degenerative joint condition. To get as good as he has with the factors that have made that harder for him, he has had to do the work. And he has found out that he also needed help from people who understood the game and were willing to give him the kind of help he needed.
I also had help from a lot of people who knew what they were doing and man I sucked for quite a while before I started getting help. I am one of those players who look good in practice but isn't great in game skills. My serves are good. Against certain things I am good at 3rd ball, against other things I can be pretty terrible. My serve receive is far south of terrible. I remember one time Michael Landers laughing and telling me how good I do some things and how bad I am at others.
For me, I was okay with that because I was more interested in the cool looking shots that just don't usually come up in match scenarios. But, doing a lot more work on 3rd ball and return of serve, for me, would have been an intelligent use of time.
If you want to up your win percentage, you need to work on game skills. The things that happen in the first three balls: serve, receive, 3rd ball, and the random nature of play that happens after the 3rd ball as well.
For me, I don't think it was a waste of time to work on shots like the slow crazy spinny loops that look cool going around the net. But they are not things that would actually cause my level to increase unless I worked on serve, return of serve and 3rd, 4th and 5th ball (technique and strategy) A LOT MORE.
Der_Echte also being someone who learned as an adult, his information is worth looking at as well.
One thing to consider though, I was in my late 30s and early 40s when I started actually trying to learn to play TT. I think Der was a little younger and so was NL. The difference between 30 and 40 is not so much. The difference between 30 or 40 and 60 is big. Why can I say this? I am just short of 60 and man.....things are different than when I was 40.
One last note: another guy who gave me a lot of help is a guy names Matthew Khan. He is a guy who (I think still) lives in NYC. He is originally from Guyana and he is a TT coach. He is great with adults. He is better at coaching adults than most because of how he approaches it. There was this guy he was coaching who was, (this is maybe 8 years ago) about 800 (USATT) and in his late 60s (close to 70). He was really driven and did a lot of work on his game. Some of what MKhan did while coaching him was film him and show him the footage and give analysis....consistently....over and over....to show the guy that what he thought he as doing and what he was doing were not the same and why some of his attempts to try too hard were counter-productive.
Now this guy had enough money to do 4 hour lessons more than once a week and to do a lot of play working on stuff from the lessons when not taking a lesson. So, he was not everyone. But he went from 800 to at lest 1400 in about a year. And he may have been better than that the last few times I saw him.
He was a really nice guy and MKhan would sometimes have me play matches with him as part of his lessons. He would also have us do things like matches where I had certain things I could or couldn't do or matches where the student served the whole time or received the whole time to work on certain things for the guy. There were also times, in these matches, Matt would tell me exactly what to serve so the guy could work on returning those specific serves.
So Matt came up with creative approaches to help this guy improve and a lot of it was not technique but toning down strokes to get more balls on the table. It is important to understand this....sometimes, when we are trying to get better, we try too hard and that interferes with reading what is going on and effective responses.
I guess it is not a bad place to list guys who helped me since there were really a lot of them:
1) Paul David
2) Edmund Suen
3) Mark Croitoroo
4) Michael Landers
5) Matthew Khan
6) Matthew Suchy
7) Damien Provost
8) William Goon
9) Robert Chen
10) Paul Misir
11) NextLevel
12) Der_Echte
There are more. Really a lot more. Each helped me out in different ways. There are enough more that I can't list them all or even remember them all.
But part if the idea is, if you are in your 60s and trying to improve, however you do it, you will likely need to be creative.
Good luck.
