Why amateur players should avoid fast gear and where power really comes from in table tennis.

[NextLevel]

Now stop being a tease and just tell us the result!

With my technique I got lower trajectory balls with Szocs but I got more spin with the Harimoto SZLC.

 

[NextLevel]

As the game has changed with the current ball, I see over the last 5 years that professional coaching is moving away from the all body strokes you mention and more towards fast and compact strokes with an emphasis on speed and recovery, as the game has moved that way as well. This is also why equipment choices have trended towards faster over the past few years, at all levels.

Of course for amateurs who are not shooting to become high level players any style can work and if larger strokes is how they want to play, there is benefit to higher dwell time and less reactive equipment.

I used to play like that so I know what Netprohet means. And my attempt to change my game a bit is what led to exactly what you are saying - using less slow stuff to improve the ability to block and play off the table.

 

[Oliverpool]

With my technique I got lower trajectory balls with Szocs but I got more spin with the Harimoto SZLC.

That’s actually a surprising result. We always hear that wood blades get more
Dwell and slower speed resulting in higher arc. More spin with the szlc could partly be explained that more speed may result in more spin. But the question I personally have is can you get better spin then a wood blade on the zyre 03 on slower or no spin balls? Those are the ones I struggle with on the zyre 03.

 

[Dr Evil]

I agree it probably is impossible to change your stroke base on this dwell or contact time as it happens.

But I think it might be another factor that it helps with. Let’s say you are playing with a blade and or rubber that is too fast for your swing and acceleration or skill level. What you feel and your brain will likely be telling you is you are not able to grip or engage the ball enough to spin it well and the ball catapults out before you know it. Your brain then tell you to swing faster or harder to try to get more dwell or grip and your whole stoke falls apart as you just do not have the ability
To swing any faster at your current level. You probably have less whip in your stroke and maybe even slow down at contact or not complete the stroke as you are just trying hard to speed up your contact and muscle it which we all know results in even slower speed.

The opposite happens when you use a blade and or
Rubber more
Suited to you stoke speed
And acceleration. U feel a nice dwell and grip on the ball and complete your swing completely and freely. The next ball comes and you are in your zone relaxed and swinging smoothly with a wicked whip. Your topspin and loops have both speed and spin. You are enjoying your game because you are relaxed and are not forcing your swing.

This could be the reason why some people say they can “adjust” their stroke on slower or suitable equipment in “real” time. It could just be this effect and they are adjusting their stroke after the first swing.

That's probably the explanation for some players. No question feeling serves as feedback for future adjustments, not for the shot in flight.

Contact lasts on the order of 1 millisecond. Initial conscious awareness of contact happens no faster than 80-100 milliseconds after contact (20-30 ms for peripheral transmission, 60-120 ms for cortical processing and awareness, with full conscious integration of the event taking as much as 500 ms, though the brain “backdates” the sensation so you perceive it as happening earlier). By the time your brain first registers the sensation, the ball has traveled several meters away from you. What you actually feel is a memory of an event that’s already happened, so you’re effectively playing in the past. However, the better you get, the more you can rely on unconscious processing and predictive motor loops (i.e., muscle memory), with reaction times on the order of 150-200 ms, letting you react significantly faster than you can consciously process what’s happening. But still not remotely fast enough to consciously adjust your contact in real time.

 

[staysmart]

That's probably the explanation for some players. No question feeling serves as feedback for future adjustments, not for the shot in flight.

Contact lasts on the order of 1 millisecond. Initial conscious awareness of contact happens no faster than 80-100 milliseconds after contact (20-30 ms for peripheral transmission, 60-120 ms for cortical processing and awareness, with full conscious integration of the event taking as much as 500 ms, though the brain “backdates” the sensation so you perceive it as happening earlier). By the time your brain first registers the sensation, the ball has traveled several meters away from you. What you actually feel is a memory of an event that’s already happened, so you’re effectively playing in the past. However, the better you get, the more you can rely on unconscious processing and predictive motor loops (i.e., muscle memory), with reaction times on the order of 150-200 ms, letting you react significantly faster than you can consciously process what’s happening. But still not remotely fast enough to consciously adjust your contact in real time.

Yes, feeling is great when learning or adjusting your game. The feedback of the impact and visual trajectory of the ball are useful for future shots. When learning, you have time and chance to adjust/fine tune the shots. When playing, you often reverse to trained shots because there are a bunch of stimuli and emotions in game and the brain is busy, not so responsive to learning something new. You can guess the kind of spin the opponent hits you with and try to adjust your angle, speed, so on. But the learning curve is already in the past trainings and games.

Great players use also feeling to select the appropriate type of shots from their already existing arsenal and adapt to the opponent.

 

[NextLevel]

That's probably the explanation for some players. No question feeling serves as feedback for future adjustments, not for the shot in flight.

Contact lasts on the order of 1 millisecond. Initial conscious awareness of contact happens no faster than 80-100 milliseconds after contact (20-30 ms for peripheral transmission, 60-120 ms for cortical processing and awareness, with full conscious integration of the event taking as much as 500 ms, though the brain “backdates” the sensation so you perceive it as happening earlier). By the time your brain first registers the sensation, the ball has traveled several meters away from you. What you actually feel is a memory of an event that’s already happened, so you’re effectively playing in the past. However, the better you get, the more you can rely on unconscious processing and predictive motor loops (i.e., muscle memory), with reaction times on the order of 150-200 ms, letting you react significantly faster than you can consciously process what’s happening. But still not remotely fast enough to consciously adjust your contact in real time.

I have not fully bought into the argument against the ability to change your intentions based on short contact time. No one really changes it in the way described but what is an empirical observation is that the sixe and nature of the follow through tends to affect the shot being played. A table tennis shot is a vector and and you measure vectors by their effect at the point of contact but this is influenced by ehat happens before and after the contact as you are just looking at a part of the shot. I think the focus on short contact time obscures this.

 

[andymagata]

I have not fully bought into the argument against the ability to change your intentions based on short contact time. No one really changes it in the way described but what is an empirical observation is that the sixe and nature of the follow through tends to affect the shot being played. A table tennis shot is a vector and and you measure vectors by their effect at the point of contact but this is influenced by ehat happens before and after the contact as you are just looking at a part of the shot. I think the focus on short contact time obscures this.

Ditto

Unless it is your intention of having a follow through that influences the way you touch the ball I do not understand it.

 

[victormanriquey]

As the game has changed with the current ball, I see over the last 5 years that professional coaching is moving away from the all body strokes you mention and more towards fast and compact strokes with an emphasis on speed and recovery, as the game has moved that way as well. This is also why equipment choices have trended towards faster over the past few years, at all levels.

Of course for amateurs who are not shooting to become high level players any style can work and if larger strokes is how they want to play, there is benefit to higher dwell time and less reactive equipment.

Yes I see this very clearly too, also from most of the chinese influencers on youtube, it's nowadays much more compact and focused on backhand, some now even recommend to put the right foot slighty forward. What a change with before!

 

[victormanriquey]

That's probably the explanation for some players. No question feeling serves as feedback for future adjustments, not for the shot in flight.

Contact lasts on the order of 1 millisecond. Initial conscious awareness of contact happens no faster than 80-100 milliseconds after contact (20-30 ms for peripheral transmission, 60-120 ms for cortical processing and awareness, with full conscious integration of the event taking as much as 500 ms, though the brain “backdates” the sensation so you perceive it as happening earlier). By the time your brain first registers the sensation, the ball has traveled several meters away from you. What you actually feel is a memory of an event that’s already happened, so you’re effectively playing in the past. However, the better you get, the more you can rely on unconscious processing and predictive motor loops (i.e., muscle memory), with reaction times on the order of 150-200 ms, letting you react significantly faster than you can consciously process what’s happening. But still not remotely fast enough to consciously adjust your contact in real time.

Thanks for the greatly explained timeline of events in ms, I had not seen it with this detail before

 

[NextLevel]

Ditto

Unless it is your intention of having a follow through that influences the way you touch the ball I do not understand it.

Agreed.

That’s actually a surprising result. We always hear that wood blades get more
Dwell and slower speed resulting in higher arc. More spin with the szlc could partly be explained that more speed may result in more spin. But the question I personally have is can you get better spin then a wood blade on the zyre 03 on slower or no spin balls? Those are the ones I struggle with on the zyre 03.

Honestly, for me, no spin balls are rhe best part of Zyre. The problem is that you need to get the ball into the sponge. If you are used to just getting grip, it doesnt go as well. But if you press down with a closed angle, miracles happen.

 

[NetProphet]

As the game has changed with the current ball, I see over the last 5 years that professional coaching is moving away from the all body strokes you mention and more towards fast and compact strokes with an emphasis on speed and recovery, as the game has moved that way as well. This is also why equipment choices have trended towards faster over the past few years, at all levels.

Of course for amateurs who are not shooting to become high level players any style can work and if larger strokes is how they want to play, there is benefit to higher dwell time and less reactive equipment.

I think we are just speaking different languages here because you keep referring to professional programmes and here again, professional coaching.
Honestly, I have no experience of what professional coaches prescribe or spend countless hours doing with their students so I can't offer any opinion or even an interesting follow up to what you've said.
But I believe you're correct so I'll leave that there.
So my experience is in coaching received from some very good coaches (one of them has 2 European medals) and I suppose they're showing us different things (vs what you'd see with coaches to the pros) and teaching us how to use the proper sequence for effective technique, all amateur coaching at appx 1300-1800 TTR (German level of ranking).
Could be in a few yrs when the batch of us (my 10-12 regular training partners in this coaching) have this down that they will show us shorter strokes for more effective play and better recovery time etc.

Bottom line is while I'm trying to plug directly into the original blog post it seems you are thinking on a different level.

 

[Dr Evil]

I have not fully bought into the argument against the ability to change your intentions based on short contact time. No one really changes it in the way described but what is an empirical observation is that the sixe and nature of the follow through tends to affect the shot being played. A table tennis shot is a vector and and you measure vectors by their effect at the point of contact but this is influenced by ehat happens before and after the contact as you are just looking at a part of the shot. I think the focus on short contact time obscures this.

What happens at the point of contact is definitely influenced by what happens before contact. You can't accelerate your swing to contact speed instantly, so backswing and forward swing determine contact speed as well as contact angle, swing plane, etc. It's also true that your intention (conscious or unconscious) of how precisely to swing will determine all these things, and these things will largely determine what happens on follow through after contact. While follow through has no physical effect on what the ball does after contact, it can often feel like it does because your brain is capable of re-ordering the sequence of events that happen too fast for real-time conscious perception. So when your brain constructs your conscious perception it can feel like the follow through had some effect on the trajectory of the shot, but what actually happens is that your pre-contact intention of how to swing had that effect. The illusion that follow through can effect the flight of the ball can be useful in helping you to adjust future swings because follow through is a necessary part of the feeling your brain anticipates when sending motor instructions for each shot.

 

[NextLevel]

What happens at the point of contact is definitely influenced by what happens before contact. You can't accelerate your swing to contact speed instantly, so backswing and forward swing determine contact speed as well as contact angle, swing plane, etc. It's also true that your intention (conscious or unconscious) of how precisely to swing will determine all these things, and these things will largely determine what happens on follow through after contact. While follow through has no physical effect on what the ball does after contact, it can often feel like it does because your brain is capable of re-ordering the sequence of events that happen too fast for real-time conscious perception. So when your brain constructs your conscious perception it can feel like the follow through had some effect on the trajectory of the shot, but what actually happens is that your pre-contact intention of how to swing had that effect. The illusion that follow through can effect the flight of the ball can be useful in helping you to adjust future swings because follow through is a necessary part of the feeling your brain anticipates when sending motor instructions for each shot.

You also can't break at the ball and follow through and have exactly the same effect on the ball. That's my main point. A lot depends on what we define as follow through. If you define as follow through things that happen 1 second after you hit the ball, those things are unlikely to be part of the swing that made the ball do what it did. But it is very hard to have a *continuous* swing with a short follow through and a longer follow through and have them have the same exact effect on the ball. My point is not that the follow through has an effect so much as the follow through is part of the effective vector that created the stroke. Two strokes are not exactly the same if they have different follow throughs. Now I think reinterpreting it as a psychological issue and an illusion is convenient for the "too short to have an effect theory". But I suspect that if people investigated the issue empirically, they would find that the follow through is not quite as optional as they think it is because swinging with the intent of stopping your stroke affects the way you swing at the ball.

 

[ThePongCommenter]

I think we are just speaking different languages here because you keep referring to professional programmes and here again, professional coaching.
Honestly, I have no experience of what professional coaches prescribe or spend countless hours doing with their students so I can't offer any opinion or even an interesting follow up to what you've said.
But I believe you're correct so I'll leave that there.
So my experience is in coaching received from some very good coaches (one of them has 2 European medals) and I suppose they're showing us different things (vs what you'd see with coaches to the pros) and teaching us how to use the proper sequence for effective technique, all amateur coaching at appx 1300-1800 TTR (German level of ranking).
Could be in a few yrs when the batch of us (my 10-12 regular training partners in this coaching) have this down that they will show us shorter strokes for more effective play and better recovery time etc.

Bottom line is while I'm trying to plug directly into the original blog post it seems you are thinking on a different level.

Yeah for sure, many different valid coaching methods for different types of students. For those who are being taught to take bigger all body techniques as you mention, I would agree that a relatively slower and less reactive setup would be a good idea I wouldn't go so far as all wood and slow rubber personally but I think something along the lines of an inner ALC or inner ZLC with Rozena would be fine and allow you to comfortably play shots from all ranges while still having control for larger strokes

 

[Dr Evil]

You also can't break at the ball and follow through and have exactly the same effect on the ball. That's my main point. A lot depends on what we define as follow through. If you define as follow through things that happen 1 second after you hit the ball, those things are unlikely to be part of the swing that made the ball do what it did. But it is very hard to have a *continuous* swing with a short follow through and a longer follow through and have them have the same exact effect on the ball. My point is not that the follow through has an effect so much as the follow through is part of the effective vector that created the stroke. Two strokes are not exactly the same if they have different follow throughs. Now I think reinterpreting it as a psychological issue and an illusion is convenient for the "too short to have an effect theory". But I suspect that if people investigated the issue empirically, they would find that the follow through is not quite as optional as they think it is because swinging with the intent of stopping your stroke affects the way you swing at the ball.

If I'm understanding correctly then I agree. Follow through is a necessary part of the action pattern. Just as you can't accelerate from zero to swing speed instantly (so backswing/forward swing is a functional part of contact characteristics), you can't stop your swing instantly at the moment of the contact. Follow through is determined largely by decisions your brain makes before contact (though it's also somewhat determined by the nature of contact, so if you swing and miss your follow through will be different than intended) and sometimes before you even begin your backswing (especially on fast compact shots like a backhand off the bounce).

The decision about when to apply the brakes (i.e., when to stop your active forward swing and let your forearm and/or wrist snap through the ball) will have a major impact on follow through, but it's also a decision (often unconscious) that's made before contact. I'm actually working on this right now in an attempt to make my backhand more compact like LSD et. al.

 

[NetProphet]

Slow setups are overrated... sometimes you just want big power from small strokes.

This is an advanced way of thinking.
Did you learn with fast Carbon and fast rubbers?
In fact this is a question to anyone who is ignoring the point in the OPs post.
Who has actually learned from the beginning with fast carbon and fast rubbers?
And conversely who has been trying to learn the game (perhaps like so many people, without coaching) and found themselves in a situation where they could not control their equipment?

Bad technique with all wood is the same as bad technique with carbon.

No its not.
Imagine you trying to learn good technique. Imagine you don't have it. How is a blade that's more forgiving going to make it harder to learn the right way of doing things?
I'm not saying it cannot be done with Carbon, I'm asking why the other way is a bad idea. The answer is it's not.

In fact, carbon is preferable because it punishes bad technique because you can't have good control with carbon with bad technique

And this is exactly the situation the OP described where so many people get exasperated and often give up. The counter to it is someone having a more controlled setup and being able to enjoy themselves at this same stage.

so it forces you to rethink your technique especially in terms of spin production. But with all wood stuff even terrible looping technique can produce good spin so one can be fooled by a suboptimal stroke for a long time.

So you get to land the ball and have fun rather than get pissed off and stop playing.

 

[victormanriquey]

This is an advanced way of thinking.
Did you learn with fast Carbon and fast rubbers?
In fact this is a question to anyone who is ignoring the point in the OPs post.
Who has actually learned from the beginning with fast carbon and fast rubbers?
And conversely who has been trying to learn the game (perhaps like so many people, without coaching) and found themselves in a situation where they could not control their equipment?

Completely agree here, I have hard proof for a longer period of time that this happens way too often.

No its not.
Imagine you trying to learn good technique. Imagine you don't have it. How is a blade that's more forgiving going to make it harder to learn the right way of doing things?
I'm not saying it cannot be done with Carbon, I'm asking why the other way is a bad idea. The answer is it's not.

Also agree, bad technique with all wood feels very different than bad technique with a cannon blade. It's not about landing the ball on the table (forgiveness), it's about feeling so that you can realise faster how to correct it.

And this is exactly the situation the OP described where so many people get exasperated and often give up. The counter to it is someone having a more controlled setup and being able to enjoy themselves at this same stage.

Correct, exactly my point.

 

[victormanriquey]

If I'm understanding correctly then I agree. Follow through is a necessary part of the action pattern. Just as you can't accelerate from zero to swing speed instantly (so backswing/forward swing is a functional part of contact characteristics), you can't stop your swing instantly at the moment of the contact. Follow through is determined largely by decisions your brain makes before contact (though it's also somewhat determined by the nature of contact, so if you swing and miss your follow through will be different than intended) and sometimes before you even begin your backswing (especially on fast compact shots like a backhand off the bounce).

The decision about when to apply the brakes (i.e., when to stop your active forward swing and let your forearm and/or wrist snap through the ball) will have a major impact on follow through, but it's also a decision (often unconscious) that's made before contact. I'm actually working on this right now in an attempt to make my backhand more compact like LSD et. al.

I saw a video recently of this, and I fully agree. Essentially, before you swing, you must decide when you brake. Once the movement has started, if you brake, the stroke breaks, and not in a positive way.

 

[DrBean]

This is an advanced way of thinking.
Did you learn with fast Carbon and fast rubbers?
In fact this is a question to anyone who is ignoring the point in the OPs post.
Who has actually learned from the beginning with fast carbon and fast rubbers?
And conversely who has been trying to learn the game (perhaps like so many people, without coaching) and found themselves in a situation where they could not control their equipment?

No its not.
Imagine you trying to learn good technique. Imagine you don't have it. How is a blade that's more forgiving going to make it harder to learn the right way of doing things?
I'm not saying it cannot be done with Carbon, I'm asking why the other way is a bad idea. The answer is it's not.

And this is exactly the situation the OP described where so many people get exasperated and often give up. The counter to it is someone having a more controlled setup and being able to enjoy themselves at this same stage.

So you get to land the ball and have fun rather than get pissed off and stop playing.

The only time I used a wood blade was when I first started. The closest thing I've come to it since is a CNF blade.

That was the most frustrating period - not because of the blade, but because it was hard for me to understanding what I was doing right or wrong. That lasted less than a month before I hired a coach and concurrently changed to a V14 Pro. It didn't feel stupendously different to me, but I wouldn't generalize that to everyone else. Importantly, I used rubbers that were pretty mild (39 and 37 H3).

To me the continuity of being able to use a single blade was a big factor in developing skills. But I was also an athlete, which most table tennis players aren't, and in hindsight I think the biggest contributor to that was footwork. I've never had to think about it, I just did it.

For the beginner it's important to be able to slow things down so you give yourself enough time to think. If I had to think about my feet, which I think is more important than what happens up top, I don't think that initial period would have gone nearly as smoothly. There's just so much going on in table tennis, and beginners can really only think about one thing at at time.

 

[ThePongCommenter]

Completely agree here, I have hard proof for a longer period of time that this happens way too often.

What is the hard proof?