What's wrong with my loop?

[coolchap]

Hi Friends,

When I try to loop fast it does go to the table but only with 20-30% accuracy and rest outside. When I am spinning and hitting slow it does go 60-70% on the table but its a very weak return and can be hit hard easily.

Can you please comment what mistakes I am doing ?

Video

 

[ThePongCommenter]

Video private

 

[coolchap]

Please try now @ThePongCommenter

 

[longle]

it's the most common mistake for beginner: your arm and body don't sync, so you oftenly use your arm only. You have to use the arm for spin, and your body for power

 

[Gozo Zyreruna]

Watch the first 3 mins will do. Your problem is addressed therein.

 

[ThePongCommenter]

Hi Friends,

When I try to loop fast it does go to the table but only with 20-30% accuracy and rest outside. When I am spinning and hitting slow it does go 60-70% on the table but its a very weak return and can be hit hard easily.

Can you please comment what mistakes I am doing ?

Video

Please take the following to heart but not with offense, you will be much better off in the long run if you do: you are making the mistake a lot of beginners make which is that you are trying to loop before you've even learned how to do a basic forehand drive/hit/counter. You do not need to worry about looping fast much less looping at all yet probably. If you only are getting 60-70% on the table when hitting slow you need to drastically get those percentages up before worrying about hitting with spin or power.

You have issues with your stroke but rather than having too many people telling you that you need to do this or that with your arms, hips, whatever, you will be able to work most of it out yourself by practicing your basic forehand drive and getting the percentages up. The reason you miss your shots is because as soon as your racket gets to the ball your arm and wrist start moving in different directions because you haven't grooved the feeling of actually just hitting the ball solidly and getting it to move forward. Your paddle is moving upwards, sideways, downwards at the actual point of contact rather than steadily through the ball.

 

[blahness]

it's the most common mistake for beginner: your arm and body don't sync, so you oftenly use your arm only. You have to use the arm for spin, and your body for power

+1

 

[kindof99]

Many people here recommended to sync the body and hand for loop. I have different suggestion. It will take years to use body/leg movements to control your hand movement. If you want to learn spinning the ball, the key is you need to slow down and wait for the ball to come to you and then you just snap your elbow/wrist/finger to spin the ball. You probable need someone to instruct you how to do it correctly. But I think you can spin the ball decently within a month if you learn to use your wrist and fingers.

The problem you had in the video is that you do not have good timing. You moved your hand/arm too early before the ball even came to your side. Wait a little move and just use your wrist and fingers to spin it when the ball almost hit your paddle. You can have the feeling of spinning the ball in 10 minutes.

 

[dingyibvs]

Many people here recommended to sync the body and hand for loop. I have different suggestion. It will take years to use body/leg movements to control your hand movement. If you want to learn spinning the ball, the key is you need to slow down and wait for the ball to come to you and then you just snap your elbow/wrist/finger to spin the ball. You probable need someone to instruct you how to do it correctly. But I think you can spin the ball decently within a month if you learn to use your wrist and fingers.

The problem you had in the video is that you do not have good timing. You moved your hand/arm too early before the ball even came to your side. Wait a little move and just use your wrist and fingers to spin it when the ball almost hit your paddle. You can have the feeling of spinning the ball in 10 minutes.

I agree on the spin and timing issue. 90+% of the amateurs never learn how to use their body properly, so while nice to learn and should ideally be one of the early steps if you want to learn TT properly, it's not the reason you're missing. To brush the ball well you need to accelerate through the ball, but you're doing the opposite, swinging fast until your racket get close to the ball and then slowing down. You need to swing slowly until you're about to meet the ball and then snap your forearm to accelerate through contact.

I disagree about using wrist and fingers at this stage though, just learn how to accelerate using forearm snap first. Wrist and finger is more advanced stuff, it's easy for amateurs to overdo it and injury their wrists trying to use the wrist too much for spin generation.

I also agree with @ThePongCommenter regarding learning the basic FH drive first. That's how you can develop this acceleration. Develop a feel for hitting the ball properly with good timing and acceleration, then gradually add spin and speed.

 

[Tyce]

First thing I see, and a habit you want to change quickly and is useful for drives, too:

Your bat closes up through the swing, and your stroke goes from upwards to forward like you're swinging over an imaginary large ball.

What you want is the opposite, your swing starts forward and lightly upwards. For a drive, that is the whole swing and for a loop, you curve it upwards around the time of contact.

The next bit is feeling the contact and judging your success at executing it from the way it feels, sounds and how it lands.

 

[lightspin]

You will not like this comment, but you just need to play A LOT MORE. If you play for hours and hours, you will eventually figure out ways for your body to apply power to the ball and your hand feeling and instinct will allow you to make the shot more often.

However, that is not what you want to hear, so here is something you can do to immediately improve: look at your left foot. It goes off the ground then you stand on your right foot one legged, make contact with the ball then a bit of weight goes onto the left leg but not much. Your weight does need to go to the right foot when you start, but some of the weight needs to stay on the left foot to remain balanced. You need to press up with your right foot and your weight goes up then over to the left foot. When looping a topspin ball, the "up" part of going from the right foot to the left foot is minimized and you really drive through the ball more.

The guy in the video below is one of the greatest players of all time. if not the greatest Watch his feet. Watch your feet. Watch the center of his body. Watch the center of your body. Try to make some small changes so your lower body and feet to look more like his. Miracles don't happen overnight though, you just need to practice a lot more.

 

[kindof99]

You will not like this comment, but you just need to play A LOT MORE. If you play for hours and hours, you will eventually figure out ways for your body to apply power to the ball and your hand feeling and instinct will allow you to make the shot more often.

However, that is not what you want to hear, so here is something you can do to immediately improve: look at your left foot. It goes off the ground then you stand on your right foot one legged, make contact with the ball then a bit of weight goes onto the left leg but not much. Your weight does need to go to the right foot when you start, but some of the weight needs to stay on the left foot to remain balanced. You need to press up with your right foot and your weight goes up then over to the left foot. When looping a topspin ball, the "up" part of going from the right foot to the left foot is minimized and you really drive through the ball more.

The guy in the video below is one of the greatest players of all time. if not the greatest Watch his feet. Watch your feet. Watch the center of his body. Watch the center of your body. Try to make some small changes so your lower body and feet to look more like his. Miracles don't happen overnight though, you just need to practice a lot more.

Practice generally makes perfect, but sadly, it is not the case for table tennis. Playing more can't really help an adult amateur much if he/she does not understand the fundamentals at all.

 

[kindof99]

Hi Friends,

When I try to loop fast it does go to the table but only with 20-30% accuracy and rest outside. When I am spinning and hitting slow it does go 60-70% on the table but its a very weak return and can be hit hard easily.

Can you please comment what mistakes I am doing ?

Video

I can see that you actually probably have played table tennis for a while, not really a rookie. Try not to backswing too early (wait until the ball bouncing from your side of table), and reduce your forward swing motion (maybe just 1/3 of current?). Focus on contacting the ball at the moment that you can use power and snap. And I still suggest you to learn using wrist and finger. Just a tiny motion of wrist and fingers and it will help you accelerate more and focus on getting the time right. There are a lot of videos on that and it is really not hard to learn.

 

[blahness]

@coolchap i have a feeling that this will benefit you a lot. What I noticed is that you are forced to brush/hit very hard in order to get the ball above the net which makes your margin of error quite low and it is hard to use such a stroke in game. Much better to start slow so that when you face heavy backspin you can choose how soft or hard you want to loop.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Agree with

Please take the following to heart but not with offense, you will be much better off in the long run if you do: you are making the mistake a lot of beginners make which is that you are trying to loop before you've even learned how to do a basic forehand drive/hit/counter. You do not need to worry about looping fast much less looping at all yet probably. If you only are getting 60-70% on the table when hitting slow you need to drastically get those percentages up before worrying about hitting with spin or power.

You have issues with your stroke but rather than having too many people telling you that you need to do this or that with your arms, hips, whatever, you will be able to work most of it out yourself by practicing your basic forehand drive and getting the percentages up. The reason you miss your shots is because as soon as your racket gets to the ball your arm and wrist start moving in different directions because you haven't grooved the feeling of actually just hitting the ball solidly and getting it to move forward. Your paddle is moving upwards, sideways, downwards at the actual point of contact rather than steadily through the ball.

I agree with this. I also think, a lot of what you need is practice and confidence. Every stroke you take, you are doing something different at the contact of the ball. It might be worthwhile finding a robot you can use and doing thousands upon thousands of simple counterhit and drive shots. A lot of what is going wrong is that you don't have strokes that have been grooved into muscle memory so, after every mistake, you are overadjusting based on the last miss rather than adjusting to the incoming ball.

The biggest issue is the amount of time grooving the basic shots so you have a solid stroke in muscle memory. Rather than making weird adjustments to something when what you thought happened and what happened are not the same thing.

Each screenshot is from one stroke except one.



Please note how different your finishing position is on the first and second shots:



And again for the third shot:




The next two photos are from the same shot:

What happened that your racket is facing up?



And the last one.



A note, if you wanted to see what you were doing, filming from behind you totally blocks the stroke and the contact.

But you can see that you are doing funny things with your wrist and forearm in the middle of the stroke, directly on contact as ThePongCommenter alluded to.

This is because you need to do thousands of the same stroke to groove it into muscle memory in order to get consistent and solid. Those weird spasms (adjustments) to your arm as you are about to contact the ball are simply a sign that you need to repeat a good basic counterhit stroke and a drive stroke for 100s of 1000s of times before you are solid.

So, the end result, it is simply that you need to do the repetitions. No single thing you are doing in your stroke is the issue. It is the confidence in contacting the ball and having a solid stroke already under your belt. Those last moment adjustments that are causing you to do strange things with your racket are simply from you needing the repetitions.

I don't like robots for many things. But here, a decent robot might be useful to give you the repetitions. I don't think either you or your training partner are solid enough to give you thousands of quality balls in a row to get you to feel the contact more solidly. But it is not that you are doing anything wrong. It is that your reflexes are forcing you to change things because you don't have the repetitions under your belt yet.

So, practice, practice, practice.

And props for posting footage. It is good to post footage on the forum. Thank you. And don't worry about the issues. They will go away if you do the repetitions.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Without a robot, one way to get some of the repetitions would be self hitting. Like in this video:

Please note:

1) I am all the way on the BH side of the table and my body is not fully behind the end line, my left foot is on the side of the table. If you tried this from the middle of the table, fully behind the end line, you could not have the bounce be on the table.

2) I let the ball bounce 2x so I have time and so I can time it. This makes it much more like contacting a ball that was hit to you.

3) I do not let the ball bounce very high so I have to spin the ball over the net.

4) The ball is bouncing towards the end line.

The self hitting exercise shouldn't be over done. It is just to get the feel of the mechanics of the stroke and the feel of spin contact. But it might help with some of those reactions you are having on contact.

 

[Colestt]

For a more realistic ball to open, I see more people starting with the focus player serving and their partner pushing the return. Then they loop the 3rd ball

 

[ThePongCommenter]

For a more realistic ball to open, I see more people starting with the focus player serving and their partner pushing the return. Then they loop the 3rd ball

Coolchap needs to learn the basic forehand drive against topspin before worrying about how to loop underspin.

 

[mocker88]

I was about to write what @Colestt just wrote It's much easier. More similar to a normal game play, and you're already in motion for the third ball.

 

[ThePongCommenter]

you're already in motion for the third ball.

Which is exactly why this is making something that someone already struggles with even more complicated. Why would being in motion from a serve be a good thing to add as another variable, when a player already cannot properly do something from a stable and fixed starting point?