Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

The earlier you take it, the more pace, spin and power you get to borrow, the later you take it, the more pace spin and power you can add. The top of the bounce usually means just after the top of the bounce when it is just after its highest point.

I would just try both and see which I prefer and which gives me consistency. Both have important advantages and disadvantages but are important in a well rounded game.

If I do a backhand flick as the ball is rising, it often leads to the opponent hitting it into the net. It's harder to accomplish this kind of flick on a heavier ball since it is after all on the rise. If I take it later it's more loaded with spin.

The footwork into the table to do the proper backhand flick is important and unless you specifically practice this it tends to go away . Its about anticipation and wrist strength. my preference is , for topspin balls I don't try to put a banana , for slight underspin or regular underspin ball , putting the sidespin on it helps to increase the consistency of flick, you can essentially flick a little slower to start with because your opponent is not yet used to your side spin . so it really depends on where the serve is but overall, I tend to take the underspin serves a little later and add a little side to them . For no spin, flicking is not easy if the serve has good power and placement .... I generally try to soft flick them if I can read them early enough ...

I just want to reiterate what carl has been telling us for ages now. Yesterday was the first time I played where I didn't do mirror strokes before going into hitting with someone. Boy did the initial hitting feel like a nightmare. I was stiff, SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE, wasn't able to move hardly at all, and my back actually kind of hurt trying to force movement before my joints were lubricated well.

All I was thinking was "jesus I must have slept terribly to be this stiff" needless to say I played terribly for a long while.

Last night I got to hit with Edmund Suen. We didn't record because the circumstances were not quite right for it. It was a bit crazy at SPiN. But man we had fun.


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Shuki said:

I just want to reiterate what carl has been telling us for ages now. Yesterday was the first time I played where I didn't do mirror strokes before going into hitting with someone. Boy did the initial hitting feel like a nightmare. I was stiff, SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE, wasn't able to move hardly at all, and my back actually kind of hurt trying to force movement before my joints were lubricated well.

All I was thinking was "jesus I must have slept terribly to be this stiff" needless to say I played terribly for a long while.

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Hopefully at some point you warmed up and things started to click and feel more lubricated.

And from the sounds of it, it may have been a day when your system was on a down cycle. We have those. Our bodies go through phases where things are on an upswing and everything works better and physical exertion is easier and we get stronger faster and phases where our bodies need more rest and less physical exertion.

There are times when just chilling out is important.

Right now I am there in a big way.


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UpSideDownCarl said:

Hopefully at some point you warmed up and things started to click and feel more lubricated.

And from the sounds of it, it may have been a day when your system was on a down cycle. We have those. Our bodies go through phases where things are on an upswing and everything works better and physical exertion is easier and we get stronger faster and phases where our bodies need more rest and less physical exertion.

There are times when just chilling out is important.

Right now I am there in a big way.


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What I came to realize recently, is that balance is extremely delicate.

Firstly, the easy things: Eat well for play, get good sleep.

Second: those mental issues. Make yourself relaxed but still confident in your strokes and focused.

Thirdly the hard part: Don't get too good at mental issues. This is the balance difficulty.
-If you get TOO confident you'll get lazy with your strokes, not get into place. This will make you start to miss and the confidence is then gone
-Dont be too relaxed or you won't be moving enough and executing strokes properly.
-Dont be too energetic or you'll lose the relaxed parts you need and you'll burn through energy from the tensed muscles.
-Dont focus too hard or the rest of your game will break

The list goes on and on and finding that balance of just the right amount of each thing is difficult, and different for each person.

A friend says I play better when I don't film myself. It might be true. I guess it's just funny that so many interesting moments happen when the camera is not on.

Now let me give you all an example of how the universe speaks to you and how you should take a hint.

So after the matches against Douglas in the last video I posted, I commented that I needed to get by backhand opener back. And he said that yeah, that I probably lost it because my backhand stroke grew in size. And I said that was not a good reason because I should be able to have different strokes.

Then I lost to the #1 seed in a tournament on Sunday in part because of poor serve return. After the match I spoke to a friend about it and he felt that I was swinging too hard on my backhand when a short stroke even in the long serve would work.

Then I opened up Larry Hodges blog and his tip of the week was to use shorter or smaller strokes to return serves.

Okay, if I don't get it already, I will never get it!

So when I played the league on Tuesday, my serve return game was clearly stronger because I was using shorter strokes. Most importantly, my banana flick had a resuscitation. Many of you probably have no clue how critical and important my backhand attack of short serves was to my game coming up. Losing it just set me back seriously. Or at least, kept me static for a while.

Yesterday, I won the first game against Douglas 11-0 just back hand flicking every serve or short ball. Almost lost the match though. But I think the banana flick is back and good days are ahead again.

I've had balance issues for a while. My left leg is super weak because i tore my Achilles pretty bad when I was young and really didn't like to use my left leg as much after that.

Because of this my right leg is much more developed.

So my coach recommended I start working on strengthening my left leg. I've been working on it and it hurts a lot. Not sure if it's just because it's weak, maybe the surgery wasn't great when I was younger our whatever. But I've been keeping at it.

Then came games. After working that left side and then doing table tennis drills/games things felt terrible. Like my Achilles was going to snap. Not pain but uncomfortable. The best way I can describe it, is by extending your arm all the way. And then someone pushing on your elbow to force it to try and extend farther. Didn't want to go to the doctor yet. So I came up with a quick fix.

Volleyball shoes. Screw table tennis shoes and their having no ankle support. These guys made it so I could play again pain free!




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Went to a community center today. Recorded myself playing. Dunno if it was the nerves of being recorded, using a Raquet that's not my own, or just a bad day. But I played atrocious and so did my opponent. Opponent is 1720 defender.

I think I'll upload even though I did poorly just so I can see my strokes/ timing problems. On my way home!


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Shuki said:

I've had balance issues for a while. My left leg is super weak because i tore my Achilles pretty bad when I was young and really didn't like to use my left leg as much after that.

Because of this my right leg is much more developed.

So my coach recommended I start working on strengthening my left leg. I've been working on it and it hurts a lot. Not sure if it's just because it's weak, maybe the surgery wasn't great when I was younger our whatever. But I've been keeping at it.

Then came games. After working that left side and then doing table tennis drills/games things felt terrible. Like my Achilles was going to snap. Not pain but uncomfortable. The best way I can describe it, is by extending your arm all the way. And then someone pushing on your elbow to force it to try and extend farther. Didn't want to go to the doctor yet. So I came up with a quick fix.

Volleyball shoes. Screw table tennis shoes and their having no ankle support. These guys made it so I could play again pain free!

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Interesting. My current shoes are somewhat worn out so I'll need new ones soon-ish. Since I was never too fond of TT shoes I'm always looking for alternatives. Besides the ankle support would say that there are other notable differnces compared to regular TT shoes?

I had training with a coach yesterday along with my teammates in prep for the comp. We each get 20 min from the coach. The last few min of my time, he started giving me multi-ball of short and long forehand and backhands. I have never felt so out of breath before, to the point I was getting chest pain. After that, I totally understand the importance to have good cardio.
I think I am gonna have to start working on that.
After playing 3 days of TT consecutively, today I played again (4th day), and nothing worked, loops and all. I tried to train but just not working. I think it is my body telling me I need a rest. Ok, time to sleep then.

You are right, Cardio definitely helps. What it does essentially is that your body gets used to exertion and you can think more when you are less tired. However, from my experience, along with Cardio you will still need multiball or do cardio with side step drills , essentially the traditional cardio does not do a as much as you would think to get your body used to side steps ... my experience ...

JeffM said:

I had training with a coach yesterday along with my teammates in prep for the comp. We each get 20 min from the coach. The last few min of my time, he started giving me multi-ball of short and long forehand and backhands. I have never felt so out of breath before, to the point I was getting chest pain. After that, I totally understand the importance to have good cardio.
I think I am gonna have to start working on that.
After playing 3 days of TT consecutively, today I played again (4th day), and nothing worked, loops and all. I tried to train but just not working. I think it is my body telling me I need a rest. Ok, time to sleep then.

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Running cardiovascular fitness is totally different from the fitness required to do footwork intense explosive multiball. Not even close. You get tt fit through intense footwork drills and explosive combination drills. I have seen people who can run 3200 meter under 12 minutes tap out of multi all after 5 minutes.

Monster is so right.

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Not sure if it is the right place to ask, so please direct me to the correct if it isn't.
Is it too late to start again?
I started playing table tennis when I was young, it was a family activity that we all enjoyed. Eventually my mum took me to a table tennis club at the weekends, when I was 8 or 9, and got picked to train under the coach directly. I spent about 2 years doing drills and footwork, and got pretty good at it but had to relocate back to UK from Hong Kong, so I stopped playing all together. Now I am 23, I want to start playing again but I feel that I am too old to get decent again. And don't know where to start.
Another worry is that even though I trained with handshake grip, it doesn't feel natural anymore. I started with penhold grip but changed because all the other kids were handshake. It seems like no western countries are using that grip, and I don't know how to learn it correctly.

Depends on what you call decent.

I would call the playing levels of Next Level and Der_Echte decent... and we both started as old Azzaro adults.

You are 23 and already had some decent training. I would rate your chances of getting better than both of us as very possible.

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mky said:

Not sure if it is the right place to ask, so please direct me to the correct if it isn't.
Now I am 23, I want to start playing again but I feel that I am too old to get decent again.

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Well, it is probably too late to become a World champion, but there is no such thing like being too late to become a decent player. People start even later without any prior experience and learn techniques, play tournaments and enjoy the game very much.

And don't know where to start.

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I think that the best thing is to find a club nearby, preferrably with a coach.

Today I went to an usual Saturday tournament at my club. Most of the times I played there before it ended pretty bad - I actually had a decent tournament once or maybe twice out of 7+ and it is quite frustrating when you fail to deliver a performance at least close to your normal at a tournament at your home club.

Today things went pretty good. I finished 7th overall out of 23 people. I managed to beat a man I've been losing to recently, because my nerves today were pretty damn solid. This tournament was actually pretty tough from mental aspect - 6 out of 9 matches I played today ended in the decider, and as good as it gets, all of them in my favour.

I had to play my chinese friend in the groups. We play together in training very often since May-June but we didn't play a tournament match all this time. In training sometimes I manage to win against him, but getting to play him in a tournament revealed a lot better play from his side that he didn't show too much in training, so I got quite a bad 0-3 loss against him.

After the competitive part, I asked a veteran that I hadn't got to play too often until now to play a match. He is definitely the more skilled and more experienced player so I definitely wasn't expecting for some miracle. I've lost 1-3 but it was the most interesting, exciting and exhausting match I've played today. The rallies were longer than with anyone else, a good amount of counterlooping and he has really challenged me to move as fast as I can. He loops with both his backhand and forehand, has very good control on his loops and varies placement very well. Still, I managed to stay close and I'm quite happy with how I played against him.

Shuki said:

Then came games. After working that left side and then doing table tennis drills/games things felt terrible. Like my Achilles was going to snap. Not pain but uncomfortable.

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There are a few things here Shuk, including the fact that volleyball shoes help, that indicate that, with the strengthening, you probably need to stretch the calves particularly the left.

An important thing to know with calf stretching, there are two important muscles to stretch in the calf. One is called the gastrocnemius and the other is the soleus.



The gastroc is over the soleus. They both attach to the Achilles' tendon. The gastroc crosses the knee and attaches to the distal humorus. The soleus attaches to the proximal lower leg bones (tibia and fibula).

To stretch the gastroc, your knee should be straight. Most people just do this stretch and miss the soleus. To stretch the soleus you need to get ankle flexion but you need to do this with the knee bent so the gastroc is on slack.

You probably need both, but you probably need to stretch the soleus more than the gastroc.



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Yesterday I played on a frictionless table for the first time. I was AMAZED. Almost lost to a tennis player on the table but it was quite an experience.

This table doesn't grab the ball at all. I tested this by trying ghost serves that were hit HIGH. I'd load the ball up as much as possible and it would move forward bounce on my side, then their, then theirs, and off the edge. No sign of slowing down even a little bit let alone coming back.

So how could I use this frictionless table to my advantage? And then it came to me. I could serve Bullets. No such thing as a fast serve that would double bounce so no reason to keep players honest with short serves.

The biggest problem I faced on this table, was that I couldn't loop. It wasn't my timing, it was my inability to deal with a topspin ball hitting my side of the table, and then that ball wouldn't gain any spin so I'd graze it like it would normally have been, with more spin.

Like when you want to serve a dead ball you have to give the right amount of underspin because the friction will turn it into no spin.

Have any of you experienced playing on a table that acts like this? I think they should make shuffle boards of this material haha


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