I'm very interested in this training plan discussion. Thanks wrighty67 for bringing it up. Sorry for such a long ramble post, but maybe there is something in it worthwhile.
Multiball for me is a question of training time. At home I have 12 -14 hours a week for TT. Three hours one-on-one with a coach, three or four hours training with partners, and another few hours playing practice matches. No multiball.
A few weeks a year I take vacation and go to camps and play 5 - 7 hours a day, two training sessions and then matches in the evening. There it is normally two hours of multiball a day, because we have time. And it works reasonably well to identify a skill or two to work on, drill it with multiball in the morning, after lunch work the same things in single-ball exercises that are more point like, and then try to bring it into actual open play.
But there is a coach at my club whom I respect very much who does tons of multiball. And her players improve a lot. Like NL said it depends on the reasons and plan behind it, and the attention that you and the coach put into it. I also agree with NL that footwork is 'the lowest priority thing for an adult beginner
who isn't going to get really good.' But for now it doesn't matter. First you learn each stroke from one position before you start adding movement, anything else will only slow your progress. The most common mistake I see people make is to move on too fast to advanced strokes and serves. People try to do chiquitas who don't have a stable backhand hit. We try to serve reverse pendulum and don't have a quality short backspin serve. It is insane how long it takes to learn the basics, and people get frustrated. It's understandable. But everything else is built on those basics. If yours are weak you will get stuck later and that is more frustrating. Here is a video that lays out some basic tests to see if you should move on from a skill. I doubt I would pass on the first attempt.
I'm an intermediate player with decent but not good technique. I still lose more points on my own errors than by having winners hit past me. So I'm focused on consistency and placement. In practice that puts a ton of pressure on footwork, and not building up tension through a very long rally. My one-to-ones go like this.
warmup fh-fh,
warmup bh-bh,
countertopspin fh-fh close to table,
one bh - one fh to his bh,
coach fh loops from his bh to my bh block,
bh-middle-fh-bh-middle-fh to his bh,
coach loops down the line to my bh block,
random number of bh-bh then he plays free I play all to his bh/middle,
he serves short free I push diagonal, he opens I counter fh or block bh, free.
So it goes from static, to semi-random, to full random like a typical practice design. The key to this training is we do every exercise except the last two randoms until I play one ball on the table 30 times. Then we move on. It can be the first ball of that exercise, or we can use a whole basket and have to start again. We started at 15 times, then 20, now 30. 30 touches is as high as we will get, now I try to raise the quality a tiny bit each time. This is absolutely ridiculous from a match simulation perspective. I will never play a real 60 shot rally in my life. But if I now miss two makeable balls out of ten where before I missed three of ten, that changes the result of any close match. There are also some psychological benefits from this because in training I sometimes get to 28 or 29 and miss. Or my coach misses. Either way it's annoying. But I have to forget it and go on, if I get upset I will be stuck on that one thing for the whole hour. This carries over to matches.
With partners I can't do that kind of training because we don't have the consistency. So a lot of time I do whatever they like to do, because I want them to keep training with me. One guy only wants to do serve and receive, which is the best. Other people I will try to train against their strength. One guy is very bh dominant so we do mostly bh to bh. Or I will ask what is your best serve? And we do third ball drills where I try to stop them from attacking off their best pattern. Rarely I find someone who doesn't mind feeling bad during practice, and we can go weakness vs weakness. With one guy I did a thing where we start from backspin and then free rally with both of us trying to hit the other guy's elbow/pocket every ball. That was horrible. It was like one uncomfortable ball after another with no rest for ten minutes. And the rallies were almost all damn short, as you can imagine. The worse you feel while doing a drill, probably the more you are getting out of it. If you feel great and like an excellent player doing an exercise, ask yourself how much are you really learning? And that's the root of my problem with multiball.
Finally back to you wrighty67, and your training plan for six hours a week. What is your priority in table tennis? Do you want to max out your highest level eventually? How discouraged will you get if you lose a lot of matches over a long time? If other people who started the same as you progress faster? How much effort and time do you want to put in, and what is realistically achievable within those limits?
If your goal is to win more matches sooner then I would focus very tightly on the first four balls. Pick a pair or two of serves, like straight backspin and no-spin, or backhand side-backspin and pure sidespin, and practice until they are very good. Learn to hit, push long, block, and fh loop vs backspin. This will give you some basic patterns like:
Serve no-spin get a pop-up and hit it
Serve backspin get a long push receive, if to your fh loop it, if to bh push it back
Receive with a long push, he pushes back if to your fh loop it, if to bh push it back
Receive with a long push, he loops, you block.
Train the hell out of those four basic patterns. In USATT terms this will get to you between a 1600 - 1800 rating depending on your shot quality and how much of the table you can cover with your forehand. You will win lots of matches that way. The downside is when you want to be better than usatt 1800 you may have to go backwards and learn some fundamentals you skipped earlier.
The other option is similar to the Chinese TT certification video. Spend a ton of time just on hitting properly. Then another ton of time on moving side-to side properly while you hit. And tons more on each tiny basic block because they all have to be solid and it takes a crazy amount of work. You can't win matches with only a hit, or any small set of skills. Opponents will simply avoid what you can do. You will lose a lot, and badly, for a long time. But once you learn a thing properly you won't have to go backwards later.
It's sort of a choice between very very slow progress and many losses early, but steady progress to whatever is your max level, or comparatively quick progress through the skills with some feel-good match success early, then a very tough plateau at intermediate level. Either one is mentally tough to take. The slow and steady way takes an almost unimaginable number hours of dedicated effort before you reach a decent level, and also some deliberate destruction of the ego. It's up to you which way suits you better.
