If you are an amateur player (like me), you'll probably want to focus on improving at the table rather than with physical drills out of the table. At my level, I feel that footwork has very little to do with physical fitness and much to do with a better grasp of how to move around the table. Read on my rant below if you want.
As for physical drills (do I really have to?
), rope jumping and jogging (dancing maybe?
) are cheap and available to everybody
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A few things I've learned about moving/footwork:
#0. How tense I am when playing dramatically affects my footwork. Simple tips for me: relax, lower my shoulders, don't crouch excessively, lean forward, stay on my toes. Crouching too much, playing on my heels or with flat feet, staying stationary in between shots and tensing up is the perfect recipe to be incredibly slooooow (especially when receiving serves). For instance, taking a step (even almost in-place) or springing up a bit as the player executes his serve toss gets me in the right dynamic to receive the serve.
#1. Improvements to my footwork are driven by, and in turn drive improvements to my stroke technique, so (at my level) I think of them and train them as a whole. For instance: I've worked a lot on properly integrating my FH and BH together. I want to switch between BH and FH quickly if I misjudge the player's intentions, and I want to retain control and power in that situation. I keep trying different things, adjusting my stroke form, body position and my footwork to find out what's most efficient.
#2. Adjust my position with respect to the table
right after hitting the ball. For sure I know where the ball I played is going to land. By default (and prior to the opponent hitting back or to the ball even landing) I cover the worst case returns that the opponent can perform (left/right extremes on my side of the table). Visualise some kind of triangle/cone originating from the landing point of my shot, extending towards the extreme return placements on my side of the table, and move to the middle of it. Also it keeps me in a dynamic stance, and I'm faster to move to meet the other player's shot afterwards.
So to practice "footwork", I'll go with very simple drills that have strong elements of randomness.
# Have a knock with somebody, playing anywhere on the table. If the partner is overwhelmed I'll limit my returns to one half of the table (their strong side). To make things more difficult, I'll force myself to play -say- no spin balls accurately to the player's bat, at a regular pace; to make things easier for myself I'll slightly vary the shot location (wider? to the hip?), depth and spin. I'll purposely adjust the pace of the exchanges to practice #1 and #2 somewhat comfortably (if I'm too comfortable it's not good, increase speed/spin).
# Play simple schemes (such as backhand to backhand, falkenberg), but after a very quick warm up add randomness to them. If I'm doing the drill the partner gets to return the ball wherever they want once in a while, then we go back to the previous routine. For instance, in a backhand to backhand drill, the partner randomly plays to my FH, I return to BH and we restart BH to BH (or we play the point). Without randomness, I feel the drill is a waste of my time. When I know where the ball is going my footwork and body stance have nothing in common with a game situation.
