Expert in a Year ( Discussion / Questions / Feedback )

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Hello everyone!

You may or may not have heard about what I'm trying to do this year. It's called The Expert in a Year Challenge and the basic idea is to take a complete beginner (Sam Priestley, aged 24 at the start), spend a year intensively teaching him table tennis, and see how good he is by the end of the year. We ambitiously set ourselves the goal of getting Sam into the top 250 players in England. If you want to know more the videos below should explain all...



We started on January 1st, so we are now beginning the final 4 months of the challenge, and the focusing is switching heavily to match practice and training that will help Sam perform at his best in his matches. He will start playing tournaments in November (his first is the Bristol Grand Prix on November 15th) and finish a week and a bit into January 2015 (we will enter the Cippenham Teams 2 Star tournament together on January 11th to mark the end of the challenge).

I spoke to Dan and he thought it would be a great idea to start a thread here, on TTD, where people can discuss Sam's progress, ask questions, and give us some much needed advice to help Sam play his best ever table tennis over these final months.

Sam and I would really appreciate any help, support and encouragement you can give us and we're happy to reply to any questions you may have.

Thank you so much!
 
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Hey Everyone,

I'm looking forward to getting involved in the forum. If you've watched any of the videos please let me know if you can see any obvious mistake with my technique or match play, or tips on how best I should improve! The more input I get the better. I'm trying to improve as quickly as possible but I am finding it quite tough, so any encouragement is also very much appreciated.

If you're about in london and want a knock then let me know :).

Thanks
Sam
 
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Nice one coach Ben
Really excited and looking forward to the result after the year mark

I also have a student also called Sam (Samantha), she isn't a complete begginer and had a few months of social TT and I was basically her first coach.
She started with me from Feb this year, and have seen trumedous progess.
She is also an adult, but I don't think I can disclose the age here, her husband is an active rugby player :p

At a previous tournament, she had a good lost against a former Butterfly Sponsored junior - 16 years old and current SA women's number 4 player, this young girl was also a bronze medalist in Africa Cadets 2 years ago.

Points was 11-4, 11-8,12-10. Many great rallies too.
I receved many compliments from some SA legends regarding her progress.

So I personally believe your goal is achieveable.
Chance that my Sam spend more hours than yours, but I sure can see both putting on a big amount of dedication.

Good luck to you and Sam!

PS Samantha uses LKT Ayous Hiniko OFF- blade (80 grams) with Yinhe Moon on both sides. Basically my only student who obeyed my instruction not to go for FAST equipment :)
 
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Good to see coaches who motivates and train adult people ...4 yrs ago, i was a begineer and went to a local club...the coach's first reaction was: who wants to learn...i said its me...then i came up with 'learning has nothing to do with age'...

I really thank that coach for abandoning me that day...for u sir i had this incredible zest to achieve the impossible..
 
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i believe the task that you set is too difficult if not impossible to achieve with only 1 hour of training a day. i love the whole idea though and i really like the current progress. even if you don't achieve what you had planned, where you get will still be a huge thing and very much worth the effort.

at the moment i would say sam's match game experience is vastly inferior to his technique. his technique is great compared to when he started, but he lacks hundreds of hours of match situations where he gets very diverse shots from his opponents and learns to adjust to them. so now he is capable of executing some great shots from time to time, but misses a lot of simple ones because he hasn't had time to develop the feeling for various kinds of situations.

ben has obviously done a great job regarding sam's technique, but 1 hour a day can only get you so far.
 
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Ben/Sam,

Thank you for both coming to post on here ! I have actually been following this through Ben's own site, although I will admit I've forgotten to watch the most recent videos - time I caught up ! I wish I could do something like this , if only to turn the tables on the miserable old b*gg*rs at my club who refuse to have a knock with me because "The league starts soon and I need to practise against players of my standard !" Best of luck with the tournaments, Sam !
 
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This is a fantastic study and I hope you will continue it beyond a year.

There is, of course, no chance of reaching the top 250 players in England in a year. Not even if you spent 10 hours a day training.

I have taken a quick look at your website and look forward to spending some more time following the progress - and the coaching inputs - with interest. I will be interested to see how the serving skills develop as well as the shot techniques. I know how long it has taken me to learn how to brush the ball - for example to be able to serve a ball that will spin back to the net.

I understand it must be best to develop good technique first, but really there is no way you can learn how to subconsciously react well enough to match play situations and improvisations in 4 or 5 months.

One thing I have always wondered is whether a set of Table Tennis skills metrics could be established which would help to objectively rate different skill levels. A bit like say progressing through music grades:
Ability to return 50 successive backhands
Ability to return 100 successive backhands
Ability to hit 50 short serves successively
Pendulum serve - backspin and top spin
Backhand serve - backspin and top spin
Reverse pendulum serve - backspin and topspin
Ability to complete 10 falkenberg rotations
etc etc
 
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This is great! How are you finding Sam's performance so far? Will you play a lot of tournaments now for the final 4 months?

He is playing well. His technique and fundamental game is solid and it is slowly, week by week, transitioning into his competitive game. We have 11/12 weeks roughly until his first tournament so we still have plenty of time and then I reckon we will do about 6 or 7 tournaments in total. Basically every senior tournament in November and December.
 
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i believe the task that you set is too difficult if not impossible to achieve with only 1 hour of training a day. i love the whole idea though and i really like the current progress. even if you don't achieve what you had planned, where you get will still be a huge thing and very much worth the effort.

at the moment i would say sam's match game experience is vastly inferior to his technique. his technique is great compared to when he started, but he lacks hundreds of hours of match situations where he gets very diverse shots from his opponents and learns to adjust to them. so now he is capable of executing some great shots from time to time, but misses a lot of simple ones because he hasn't had time to develop the feeling for various kinds of situations.

ben has obviously done a great job regarding sam's technique, but 1 hour a day can only get you so far.

It probably isn't impossible but I agree that it is very close to impossible. That's why I chose it :)

You are completely right about the disparity between Sam's technique and his match-play. We've got a little while to focus our attention solely on closing that gap and hopefully it'll pay off.
 
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This is a fantastic study and I hope you will continue it beyond a year.

There is, of course, no chance of reaching the top 250 players in England in a year. Not even if you spent 10 hours a day training.

I have taken a quick look at your website and look forward to spending some more time following the progress - and the coaching inputs - with interest. I will be interested to see how the serving skills develop as well as the shot techniques. I know how long it has taken me to learn how to brush the ball - for example to be able to serve a ball that will spin back to the net.

I understand it must be best to develop good technique first, but really there is no way you can learn how to subconsciously react well enough to match play situations and improvisations in 4 or 5 months.

One thing I have always wondered is whether a set of Table Tennis skills metrics could be established which would help to objectively rate different skill levels. A bit like say progressing through music grades:
Ability to return 50 successive backhands
Ability to return 100 successive backhands
Ability to hit 50 short serves successively
Pendulum serve - backspin and top spin
Backhand serve - backspin and top spin
Reverse pendulum serve - backspin and topspin
Ability to complete 10 falkenberg rotations
etc etc

I'd love to continue it beyond the year. Have to see if Sam is up for it. It certainly wouldn't continue to be every single day though. Not sure my marriage could take it! Haha

I disagree that top 250 is completely out of the question but then again, who knows. Where would you draw the line? Is top 400 possible in a year? Top 350?

Yeah I'm not sure whether we should have started playing matches from the beginning and just incorporated it into Sam's training. It's difficult with a limited amount of time to choose what is the most important. If we had done more matches earlier one Sam's technique may not have developed so quickly. It's a tricky one.

I like the idea of some kind of objective technique/skill level. Shouldn't be too hard to put together. I reckon it would have little correlation to performance in a match, especially if you were to do it with a bunch of your average club players or local league players. Would be a good way of displaying who the best practice partners are though!
 
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I think teaching basics for a while, then going into matches later on is better

In match or any other fun games, the player can easily build up bad habbits.

In teaching basics, I incorporate different match like "set pieces". So this help train the player to know "when to do what" in matches.
For Samantha, this work out great. However, she did come into the game with some bad habbits so that took a while to fix.

She trains with me around 6 hours a week, and have another 3 hours of matches, and 3 hours of extra practice. So total 12 hours.

IMO, for adults improving in little time, it depends a lot on the player too.
If the player is naturally gifted, has enough passion and dedication etc

I feel Sam is doing brilliant for the 9 months of 1 hour a day. Say 270 hours only.
When I trained around 40 hours a week, I do that hours within 2 months :p

Imagine if Sam did 2 hours a day, I wonder how 1 vs 2 hour will end up. Really interesting.
I like Ben's "Expert in a Year", it should become a BBC Sports documentary
 
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i believe the "10 000 hours to become an expert at anything" theory is closer to reality than what you guys are trying to do, but ofcourse there are so many factors in there and it's very interesting to see how much someone can do in so little time with the propper coaching. subscribed to your youtube channel ben.
 
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I dont mean to sound too harsh but it seems to me that his strokes are too "stiff". I would like to hear other players opinion about that also :p

To be more precise , I think that Sam is too focused and as a result he "forces" himself sometimes

Its only a personal assumption, Im not inside Sam's head after all, but judging by his posture and face expressions while he strikes, I think he tries too hard sometimes and he focuses too much on the starting and ending position of the stroke.

He should be relaxed focus only at the ball and just let the stroke happen by itself, without thinking too much or evaluating his own effort while he plays.
My opinion is that table tennis strokes are about igniting the correct motor skill for every different incoming ball.

If he lets his body completely loose his strokes will be more fluent and efficient.

Now for the whole 250 or 350 ranking "issue", I will disagree with users that claim it is impossible to achieve. Its not like I dont like their opinion but more that I like Ben's approach on the matter. Setting high goals forces you to give your 101% of effort.

If Ben or any other coach has the target of lets say "reaching top 200" in any national league, it doesnt matter which one your first results will be just an indication. Let's say Sam reaches top 500 in January 1st 2015 (I dont know if it is good or bad cause I dont know the playing level of players in GB) , Ben will reevaluate his training program/process learn from his mistakes and make a better program for the next time, same thing goes for Sam.

If Ben didnt set a high goal and compromised with a small one because "for Sam or any other beginner player it is impossible to reach high levels of play in one year only" then he wouldnt make the mistakes that he made in the first place.

Actually, he would make much fewer "experiments" in the training of Sam resulting in less mistakes resulting in less overall experience both for him and his player.

Ending I will agree with Tony and others that said focusing on the basics at first and then slowly implement the basics on match play is a better way to go. Motor skills are crucial in table tennis and learning them "wrong" means that you will have to spend some time in training correcting those small "errors", if you learn your basics perfectly then you dont have to lose valuable training time to correct them in the future.

My suggestion would be to focus exclusively on the basics. FH and BH topspin,pushes and serves. If you like match play then I think it will be efficient to play points with certain procedure only, not free points at the beginning of his training. For example, serve/receive push long, Sam starts with a topspin lifting the backspin perfectly Ben blocks and Sam finishes the point with a topsping.

Of course footwork is very important, so here is where multiball will do the job. Do the same exercise in multiball untill Sam does it effortlessly without errors and then implement it to match play.

Sorry for the long post guys, Im watching your effort since day 1, I would like an autograph of Sam if he likes lol :p

Best luck for your efforts, you are certainly an inspiration!
 
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I totally agree about what TTFrenzy said. Your technique is correct but I think you lack of speed both in your footwork and your strokes. The legs should be more dynamic (a good tip is to stay on your tiptoe), move and adjust more often. And when you hit the ball you really need to "whip" the ball to give some power by relaxing the upper part of your body more ;) Good luck !
 
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He is playing well. His technique and fundamental game is solid and it is slowly, week by week, transitioning into his competitive game. We have 11/12 weeks roughly until his first tournament so we still have plenty of time and then I reckon we will do about 6 or 7 tournaments in total. Basically every senior tournament in November and December.

Fantastic work! I am looking forward to videos from these tournaments, this will be a good indication to see how Sam is playing.

Good luck!
 
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