How do I Improve my footwork?

SpinQuark said:

I am wondering about the best option for improving my movement and footwork. The above material and suggestions are helpful, but I do agree with Ash that many of the footwork practice drills are really quite advanced and require the skills in you and your partner to perform. I feel I need something which is going to get my feet moving as I have a great tendency to stay rooted to the spot and reach and bend back and forth, or to move my feet very late as I am making the shot rather than stepping first to arrive in the right place before playing the shot. Now I am in my 50s fitness is a big issue, but even before that I feel I need something to get my feet moving more at a subconscious thought level.

I am wondering about skipping which is mentioned above but doesn't seem to get highlighted much. It seems to be treated as a key piece of training for boxing, another sport requiring rapid foot movement.

Does anyone have any experience of using skipping and whether this really helps to develop foot movement? Is skipping used by advanced players and if not why not? Is it just too embarrassing and too hard to learn as a skill in itself? I don't want to waste time trying to learn to skip at my age if this is really not going to make a material difference?

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So, I have lots of information on this subject, perhaps too much. The first thing is, if the issue is endurance or actually is speed, then things like jumping rope or any cardio exercise that causes you to move your feet would help. Ladder exercises like the one in the second video posted by Tony's Table Tennis would help as much or more than jumping rope.

But, the issue in footwork is usually not entirely speed of feet or endurance. Usually it is two fold. The first thing is, your body knowing the correct actual footwork and being able to do the footwork and maintain good form in your stroke. This is harder than it sounds at first. My recommendation for that side of things is that, if you do shadow footwork drills in front of a mirror with a shadow stroke included, you can start developing the skill and coordination for the footwork drills when the ball is there. You can learn the footwork without this. But this makes it happen much more quickly. Drills like the ones in this video are very helpful to do shadow versions of:


Then the other part of footwork that is hard to get is doing the right thing when the ball is there. This is a very complex issue. Your stroke has to be compact enough so that you are set for the next ball as your shot lands on the table on the other side and before your opponent or training partner hits the ball. Then you have to be watching the ball as your opponent hits it. And you have to see what he has done with his racket, the angle of the racket, the spin he put on it, and the direction the ball goes as it is leaving his racket. Then you have to move to the right spot, with the right foot movements and set yourself for the next stroke.

Most people's feet are fast enough. Without the ball and the stroke, most people can move faster than is necessary for good footwork. The issue is seeing where the ball is going, moving to it, getting there and getting set before the ball gets there, and then taking a good stroke that leaves you set to watch the next ball. If you get there and your stroke is too long and you do not get reset for the next ball soon enough, you will not get to the next one.

The only thing that will really, really help with this is doing lots of all those footwork drills. LOTS OF THEM. Hundreds of hours of them. Preferably with a professional coach feeding you the ball, both from his racket and from multiball. The set footwork drills also need to lead you eventually towards random placement drills which are considerably harder.

For someone younger, it does not take as long to learn. But for someone over 25, it is harder, for someone over 35, it is harder still and so on. I am 48 and I am trying to tackle this same question. For someone over 45 it takes more work. Nothing can replace footwork drills fed to you by someone good enough to feed the ball at a high level. Even with that, it takes hundreds of hours of practice to start really getting the right footwork into your body. And then, it takes hundreds of hours more work to be able to take the right footwork when the ball placement is random.

Drills like ladder and jumping rope are great for your health, your cardio endurance and the strength of your legs, but they will not help you move to the ball if you are not doing the right foot combinations and you are not watching the ball and moving to the right place as a result of real good training.

One thing that does immediately help to a very small extent is to keep your feet moving all the time. So, as soon as the ball is in play, if you are on your toes the whole time and taking tiny steps until you see which direction you have to move, the feet move more readily if they start in motion. And in that 6 part video on "Chinese" footwork, that Dan posted above, the guy does say that somewhere.

Here is an example of how it is not how fast your feet move in and of itself:

Here is a video of Xu Xin:


Xu Xin is amazing. He is one of the fastest table tennis players today. If you watch the whole thing, his setting, his stroke, his accuracy, his movement from one ball to the next, it is amazing. However, if you just watch his feet, they are moving at a decent speed but it is not really so super fast as you might think if you were watching the whole context of what he is doing.

If you compare the speed of Xu Xin's feet to the speed that this guy generates in some of the drills he does in this video, including some of the ladder drills he does starting at 1.23, Xu Xin's feet are nowhere near as fast and his body is not being moved by his legs half as fast.


Now, all those drills would definitely help you move faster and use your feet with better coordination. But, they would not do too much to help you have the skill to be able to do what Xu Xin is doing. It is still worth doing them. But shadow drills and footwork drills with a player who can really feed you top notch multiball and move you with non-multiball footwork drills as well.

But the drills should lead you towards this:


And what is great about this last drill is, not only is it random placement, but you can see that the coach is trying to trick Zhang Jike with head fakes. The movement itself is really not that fast but, the reaction time from one ball to the next and the way he is moving Zhang Jike make it amazing that he gets to the ball so much of the time and amazing that he gets it on the table.

The set footwork drills need to lead to this ability to see, OFF THE RACKET, AS THE BALL IS BEING HIT, where the next ball will go. The set footwork drills help make it so, when ball placement is random, you still use the correct footwork so they build the muscle memory for the random drills so that you end up using the correct patterns.

But, only doing those drills a lot, in conjunction with random drills, can you start to really develop the ability to watch the ball and move to the right place. Most of the time you really are only moving a few feet in either direction at most. The table itself is only 5 feet wide. More often than not you are only moving a few inches.

What do you need to do to get your reset fast enough so that you can be set and watch the ball before it hits your opponent's racket. The lower the level ov player I play, the easier that is. The higher the opponent's level the harder. On service, when setting for your third ball, it is the same thing. You have to be ready for the ball before your opponent makes his/her receive so that you can move to where they put the ball.

Now that is a completely awesome response.

There is so much for me to consider there. This sport has so many layers of skill and it is only as you start to acquire one layer that you begin to realise that this is only a stepping stone to the next skill layer. It is only now that my own basic strokes have improved that I am appreciating the need to reach a level where your conscious focus can move from the execution of your own stroke to watching your opponent and his bat angle etc. It is truly astonishing what the human brain can achieve at the subconscious level once it is trained in. As children we learn to catch a ball by repeated practice but in the end somehow our brain tracks the speed and trajectory of the ball, extends our arm above our heads to a place we cannot see with our eyes, and our fingers grab as the ball hits our palm - all achieved in the end in a split second without any conscious thought except the desire to catch the ball. Learning table tennis is like being a child learning to stand, then balance, then walk forward, then anticipate a moving balls future position, then catch it etc. Each skill has to be acquired and trained into the subconscious before the next can be layered onto it. I guess this process of training the neural network inside our brain becomes slower as we get older but somehow this only makes us more self aware of the process and makes it more wonderful to contemplate.

Yep. One level of practice is needed to get you ready for the next level.

And to me, it is amazing how something like practicing shadow strokes with footwork drills can actually help to some extent. How it gets your body, your mind and your muscle memory ready to do it when the ball is there. And it is also interesting how it will only take you so far. At some point, if you are not getting practice seeing the ball coming off the opponent's racket and moving to where it is going the shadow footwork drills will not be that productive. But what they do is help your body learn how to generate a good stroke, and how to move with good foot placement patterns, and how to move, set and maintain a good stroke. This makes it so that, when you are doing a footwork drill with someone feeding you the ball (whether they are blocking to and feeding you the ball to the appropriate spots for the footwork drill or feeding you multiball) you are not trying to learn how to do the footwork and how to plant your feet and set yourself and maintain a good stroke after moving. If you are trying to learn that stuff and trying to watch the ball, move to it and hit it too, then the footwork drills will not be as useful.

And once you are solid at all the basic footwork drills, they lead you towards being able to move to the ball and take a good stroke when the ball placement is random like in a game. But that also needs to be trained into the body-mind. Random footwork drills can any number of degrees of difficulty. I have seen some random multiball drills where the placement can be short of long, fast or slow, either side, every angle imaginable and underspin and topspin mixed. It gets much more challenging when the next ball could be anywhere and could be any spin.

But, if your footwork is not that great, doing shadow drills with all the basic footwork patterns will help get you ready to do those same drills at a higher level when the ball is there.