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Yep, I think so. There's a lot of "huh what the fuck" moments where I have to suddenly snap the racket in some weird way because I was way too late or early or close or whatever. I paid a bit more attention at looking at the ball clearly through the whole flightpath and it helped, though. I...

Did one more because my body was feeling good. We see if I regret it tomorrow. Drills and some games at the end. Fared alright in the games, better than I'd expect. Nothing of note, too rusty. Lots of very weak serve receive from me against heavy and deep serves, typical stuff. In the drills...

I don't usually do stuff with a hundred balls, so I use the Hand Mk. I.

To be fair the performance difference between table tennis rubbers and blades is much lower on account of them being human-actuated and the forces being so much lower. The laptime difference between a poor driver and a world champion might be 10% in absolute terms. I wonder how many people get...

Everyone's entitled to be as much of a goober as they like. :) I do feel like the goober-index has risen a few levels since I last posted here, though. Everyone just talks about equipment and drama now and not so much about, you know, hitting the ball.

There'd be little downside to collecting empirical data and quantifying some things. In a perfect world of course. I suspect nobody will do it because acquiring the dataset is difficult unless you have personal access to hundreds of professionals and measure their parameters. I'd love to see it...

Well, I do have a physics simulation background, so I guess I have that inclination. I do understand what you mean though. I just think it's important to separate the things to avoid magical thinking. It's probably better if we know more precisely what effects actually happen from what things...

Another session today. Amazingly some aspects of my game have improved, and my physical conditioning is much better. I did make sure to take very frequent breaks in order to not wear myself out. In terms of improvements, my stroke is fuller, although the contact is still only about 20-30%...

That's fair and I agree, but I don't think I commented about that. My post was purely about the performance of the serve, not the human or psychological aspect of the serve.

Don't you think it'd be a good idea to post some video of yourself playing? A year isn't that long, and your level could be very different depending on if you train with a coach for 30 hours a week or if you hit casually for 3. I think it's going to be difficult to gauge how appropriate any...

None, as in 0%? I guess I don't know anything about serving in matches. Feel free to pick into it if you're going to say that *none* of it is true.

I prefer to have about 60 setups that I cycle through on every point. Really keeps them guessing.

It's necessary to throw the ball a little bit towards you for a good serve motion. Otherwise you'd need to throw the ball in front of your chest (which some people do), or move backwards. For a typical pendulum serve at least, I don't find any benefits on axe type backhand serves. I don't think...

You'd need to look at the blade face surface and measure the roughness, but ultimately they should be all fine, shouldn't they. I wouldn't worry about "what Ma Long uses" because it's not going to be the same blade and it doesn't have to be because you're not the same players. Even if you get...

Maybe. The contact time is probably too low. If the rubber is always below optimal temperature and the mu increases rapidly with temperature, then the quick ramp might give a momentary real increase in friction, but it'd need to rise enough in temp. Would not be very difficult to just calculate...

I have a hypothesis that flash heating at the contact patch also matters a lot, with the typical trend of higher friction rubbers being more sensitive to thermals. So you might not be able to really evaluate performance without sufficient heating ie: strong enough stroke. Do you know if that is...

I don't worry about it too much because no matter what you do, the rubber will harden and the wood will degrade from temperature and moisture effects. I just cover the rubber with something so that at least it doesn't catch dust before the next session. Maybe a rinse with water once in a while...

Finding out differences like this is one of my motivations for doing simulations, particularly on the hobby side for things that aren't "useful professionally". There's a lot of myths you can dispel and the community usually becomes a little more educated from it. Like you said it's easy to...

You're right, my mistake. Would holding the sheet on with psychic telekinesis count as "other"?

I feel like it'd be "easy" compared to simulating some other things, but making testing rigs is difficult, and it won't be free. There's almost no framework for it, so you'd need to do a lot of the work yourself. Probably also we will find out what we already know. :) I think correlation would...