Old memories. This topic was once the origin of the greatest flame war in the history of table tennis forums, featuring the infamous PNachtway and one or two other people vs about everyone else. If I remember correctly, it started at MyTT, eventually spread to OOAK forum. Now PN was one strange dude, who managed to get banned from every English language TT forum on the planet including this one. However, he is also a physicist and mechanical engineer and dynamical modeling of complex systems is how he makes a very good living. And weird as he is, perhaps the phrase idiot savant fits, about mechanics and classical physics he knows his stuff profoundly, and presented proof that what matters is the racket speed and its coefficient of restitution, and that does not necessarily correlate with blade weight. I have absolutely no doubt that he is right on this. But, this guy also would say that is all there is to it, as if the blade can play the sport by itself.
Hence flame wars. Because 100% of players, including pros, will tell you that heavier blades FEEL faster and probably play faster. Nobody who has been in the sport for long can deny this. Obviously the mechanics of the racket-ball interaction is not all there is to it, a point he would deny vigorously.
I strongly suspect that a key aspect is that we need to consider the combination of the blade and the player -- blades don't play by themselves -- and the player consists of complex neural sensory systems, neural motor systems, and a set of muscles of different sizes and contractile strengths. If you use a heavier blade you use a slightly set of muscles and what neurophysiologists call motor units. And through some combination of factors, the heavier blade -- assuming it is not too heavy -- allows you to play stronger shots with a sensation of less effort. If the blade is too heavy you are forced to use much larger motor units and so you lose all fine control. But there is a optimum.
In other words, I think this is largely a physiological phenomenon but a very real one. And I believe that heavier blades do play faster for most people. Now I might be wrong too. We all see things through our own lenses, and I am a physiologist. I am also a player who has had experience with a lot of blades and I KNOW that heavier blades feel faster and this requires an explanation. And that is the only one I can come up with.
