Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

Originally Posted by latej

Hi Richie, for the record I didn't comment on the 2 year old clip. The push with the left leg - yes - everything starts on the ground :-) Der_Echte pointed this to me too, since then I check it regularly. It feels good when the hips rotate, but they rotate as consequence of the leg push, so focusing on that is better.

I'd like to return to what you said earlier about being told to "relax". So when someone told me to relax I think it is the best advice, and it is also nr. 1 priority for me. It is easy to relax when you are not moving, but how to move the arm fast and be relaxed? And that is what TTNuri, and probably many others, are saying. They explain, how it works, so that you can afford to be relaxed, so that being relaxed (having the arm relaxed) follows as consequence. Sorry that I am stubornly repeating it, I just think it is important. For the record, what Zeio said about primary and secondary acceleration, it is directly related, same thing in fact.

Yet another way to think about it is - the form of a tradeoff. Will arm do the work or will body do the work? I guess we agree it is preferable if body does the work. But we need to give it time, and engage the arm after that time, after delay. I'm sure you understand. I think it is worth to try to experiment with it a bit... You are giving me motivation, and I am giving you my thoughts :-)

What NL wrote about BH, I think it is really good. Try this: put yourself in the position in which you are when Nicky hits the back-spin at you, and you are awaiting the ball. Now try to move your playing arm a bit down and let the bat point to the ground. The body instinctively turns a bit and you (LH) put more weight on the right foot, automatically. I think you can experiment with this too. Not in the backswing phase, but just about when you are going to shoot the BH top-spin. This will put the weight where it should be (you can then push it (the right leg), mirror to the FH way) and make the rotation possible.

Oh yeah, I was just trying to recall my experience from then, I'm aware you weren't commenting on that old FH
And I completely agree with you about the context of relaxation that you're talking about. That's not the context I've been told to relax in my past experiences. People would contradict themselves by telling me to use the forearm and the wrist etc and then also tell me to relax. So I was utterly confused by the advice.. how do I "use" them and at the same time relax those parts? Maybe this my my own fault - I took what they said literally. I didn't know otherwise until I started doing a lot more research and learning through Brett etc. When they said use maybe what they really meant was to include it in the swing.. who knows.. but I've had advice where I'm supposed to tense my forearm but at the same time relax the forearm. I think these days I can place the advice of being relaxed in context and understand how to achieve it a bit better, but a few years ago when I didn't have much of a clue that advice was more frustrating than anything - especially when it'd conflict with other advice.

it's indeed as you say, relaxation follows as a consequence and I think particularly of using the body in the right order and if one doesn't feel what that's like, then in my opinion, it's very hard to improve technique until that feeling is familiar.. and when one is getting contradicting advice it gets even more confusing to figure things out. But yeah, I agree there's a tradeoff and what you're saying is extremely important! I'm a big fan of the TTNuri channel, it has a lot of the stuff Brett has been saying too.

It's not always possible to use the body perfectly and to be completely relaxed etc - it's just something to aim for when practicing and then hope it shows up in matches. In matches all kinds of suboptimal technique happens, especially for us amateurs that don't have the physique of the pros and then there are many other things that matter. If people prefer to focus on those they can still get to a good level - technique isn't everything. I just so happen to enjoy developing it because I started out with and played for years with no technique at all and I didn't enjoy playing not know what I was doing.

Thanks for the BH tips. It felt really good in todays training, my FH on the other hand felt awful.. and I've had some pain in my right hip for some time which is a little worrying. Time to take a break and maybe get it checked out. I started getting this pain when I was rotating them too much and it hasn't gone away.

if you feel pain, its probably because you are doing something wrong. you should listen to your body

Pain can be due to everything basically. I think it is more because of to intense use of some muscles in combination with weak or and short muscles. More variation of the training, more strength and stretching will help I think. Try not practicing for a while and see if it becomes better. Then you know if it is from overuse or not.

I think we could think a bit more like gym work out in tabletennis. Periodize a bit. It is not so odd if we get injury or pain if we almost only practice one stroke for a long period of time or do almost only heavy exercises every day.

Originally Posted by Takkyu_wa_inochi

my opponent gave me a video of our encounter in a tournament last Sunday and i took the time to make stats on it.

I won the game 3-0 (10 9 10), it was a bad tournament but a good win for me (id say the guy was playing around 2000 eq), but a rather meaningless one because when we played together in our group match, i was already out last and he was already guaranteed 1st place.

Anyway, what struck me in the analysis, is that excluding serve aces, the number of winners was always smaller than the number of direct mistakes than i did in every game. (w/m 5/8 ; 5/7 ; 5/5) . Said otherwise, if i had made fewer mistakes (esp on BH receive) i could have won largely 11-5 every game. There were very little winners from FH , 3 attacks + 1 block + 1 counter in the whole match , OTOH 8 winners with BH. I thought i played better in G2 because there were 2 very good points, but stats says G3 was better as I received correctly his knuckle (half) long serve to my FH in that game.

One area of satisfaction is that without the pressure, my long serve was quite effective, with spin and good speed and length. so i kept on doing it. It made the few times where i served shorter more effective.

Due to the high number of mistakes from both sides, and the play which was very BH oriented with little FH rallies, i wouldn't rate it as a great match although there were some highlights and I'm less happy about my match after seeing the stats than when i just won where i thought i just played really well.

The obvious lesson is that avoiding stupid mistakes should be the number 1 priority if i want to get to a higher level

I think its a good exercise for all to do this from time to time.

PS. The guy doesn't want me to share the video

It's funny how it works. I had a similar experience a while ago. There was one set where we had a couple of good points - I lost the match but still felt happy about it. Then I watched the match and saw that I made a large number of mistakes, more than the points where he hit winners and suddenly I was less happy lol. I'm sure I've had the opposite - where my opponent has made many mistakes and I've felt that I haven't done much and won, that I don't feel great about either even if it's nice to win.

Originally Posted by UpSideDownCarl

I know I am talking about something a little to the left of what you guys were talking about. However, it is worth understanding that, with how our bodies, joints, bones, connective tissue, bone shape, range of motion......work, something that is "right" for one person might not be safe for another person. So, I am not 100% sure "right" is the right word for the scenario. From a technical standpoint, the mechanics of a stroke could be perfectly acceptable and there is still a possibility that it could cause harm or damage to a person with a particular joint structure.

But, it would be safe to say that if performing a stroke or action, the mechanics of that motion causes pain, particularly joint pain, then, the specific person would need to adjust the movement so it did not cause the him/her that pain.

This is also part of why it can be risky to try and imitate the way another player (like a pro) does a particular stroke. The stroke could be great for Ma Long and not so good for me.

I agree Carl - right is the wrong word, but even if it hurt or not, I think it was more inefficient than the alternative. Why it started hurting was probably more because I was turning my waist/hips as hard as I could to get more power and doing that over and over again too much.. bit stupid of me really. Since I changed the focus I don't feel as much pressure in my hips and it also made it unnecessary to rotate my hips all the way to the right (since I'm no longer consciously twisting them and just let them rotate from the force of my leg).. feels much better this way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkTH...e=emb_imp_woyt

Hi Richie, in your new FH video (above), of the first 3 top-spins, which one do you prefer? I liked the 3rd the most. Perhaps you have been rotated a bit more to the side and also positioned ideally and the ball had ideal height. It looked to me like you started the primary movement, and then the arm tanked the momentum from it a bit, and it flied nicely. I think this is the direction, still I believe it is possible to use the arm muscles even less. So I thought maybe if you are rotated to the side a bit more during back-swing, this would automatically make you rotate the body a bit more, before you engage the arm, and the arm would get a bit more momentum from the body, allowing you to use less muscle.

Originally Posted by latej

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkTH...e=emb_imp_woyt

Hi Richie, in your new FH video (above), of the first 3 top-spins, which one do you prefer? I liked the 3rd the most. Perhaps you have been rotated a bit more to the side and also positioned ideally and the ball had ideal height. It looked to me like you started the primary movement, and then the arm tanked the momentum from it a bit, and it flied nicely. I think this is the direction, still I believe it is possible to use the arm muscles even less. So I thought maybe if you are rotated to the side a bit more during back-swing, this would automatically make you rotate the body a bit more, before you engage the arm, and the arm would get a bit more momentum from the body, allowing you to use less muscle.

I find it hard to say, but now that you point it out I agree I prefer the 3rd one. Maybe I rotated a bit more and put more pressure on my leg! Brett has told me to try to bring my right knee more in so it points to my left calf muscle, I'm not always doing this properly - if I do that the left leg push has more impact on the rotation. So what you're saying makes sense as I think that would rotate me a bit more to the side. I can also for sure use less arm, now I feel like being told to relax my arm makes total sense and that's one of the next steps.

Btw, thanks everyone for your comments. I learn a lot from these discussions and they're super motivating. I wish I had you all to coach me for real lol and that I had feedback when I first started. Table tennis can be played in many ways and I'm using the wrong language when I say right/wrong about the technique stuff. My goal is to play more efficient table tennis while my body is still healthy. I believe TT technique has been extremely non-intuitive for me as I played for many years before I saw more efficient technique. I'm bad at copying so to find the right feeling, I like to know what I should be doing and then I can find the feeling by trying and error correcting. With the BH against backspin example, I'm aware it's not fully functional yet and I would of course have to modify the stroke depending on the ball, time etc. When I'm trying to learn something new I try to isolate the movements first and if I find the feeling then the old stroke will no longer feel as good and it disappears naturally. Then the stroke can be linked to other strokes and vary depending on the ball etc, so it's not too much at once.

The bad thing is that less efficient technique can feel good, my arm quite likes to do things on its own. The hip rotation thing felt good because I got good power and I didn't realize (even though I should know better and it might be obvious to others that do it the more efficient way) that I wasn't pushing with my leg.

Everyone learns differently and have different goals, I'm only describing my experience and I could perhaps do a better job at describing it! My perspective changes the more I learn

Originally Posted by Richie

I find it hard to say, but now that you point it out I agree I prefer the 3rd one. Maybe I rotated a bit more and put more pressure on my leg! Brett has told me to try to bring my right knee more in so it points to my left calf muscle, I'm not always doing this properly - if I do that the left leg push has more impact on the rotation. So what you're saying makes sense as I think that would rotate me a bit more to the side. I can also for sure use less arm, now I feel like being told to relax my arm makes total sense and that's one of the next steps.

Yes, he is step(s) ahead. I only observed, but he already told you what to do so that, as a consequence, you get more rotated and more down. Different level...

Btw, thanks everyone for your comments. I learn a lot from these discussions and they're super motivating. I wish I had you all to coach me for real lol and that I had feedback when I first started. Table tennis can be played in many ways and I'm using the wrong language when I say right/wrong about the technique stuff. My goal is to play more efficient table tennis while my body is still healthy. I believe TT technique has been extremely non-intuitive for me as I played for many years before I saw more efficient technique. I'm bad at copying so to find the right feeling, I like to know what I should be doing and then I can find the feeling by trying and error correcting. With the BH against backspin example, I'm aware it's not fully functional yet and I would of course have to modify the stroke depending on the ball, time etc. When I'm trying to learn something new I try to isolate the movements first and if I find the feeling then the old stroke will no longer feel as good and it disappears naturally. Then the stroke can be linked to other strokes and vary depending on the ball etc, so it's not too much at once.

The bad thing is that less efficient technique can feel good, my arm quite likes to do things on its own. The hip rotation thing felt good because I got good power and I didn't realize (even though I should know better and it might be obvious to others that do it the more efficient way) that I wasn't pushing with my leg.

Everyone learns differently and have different goals, I'm only describing my experience and I could perhaps do a better job at describing it! My perspective changes the more I learn

I think your description is perfectly clear and also your way of learning is your way of learning and there is no reason to not trust it unconditionally.

Your FH topspin is good and further progress is only a matter of time... Trust it. Remember the bottle cup challenge? It's like the universe is telling you, trust... ;-)