Oh dear god, are you creating a straw man in your head. 'Oh, it sounds as ridiculous as this therefore....'
What I've said is nothing like the idea that left and right handed players are so different.
I'm saying that BH and FH mechanics are very different.
Again, nitty gritty. You can pronate or supinate while washing the dishes, is washing dishes similar to playing a FH Loop?
This is physics, this is obviously the same for ball and racket contact. This is irrelevant as regards the mechanics of swinging your arm and the body movement required in creating contact.
Yes, and it's irrespective of the players philosophy, it's biology.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were famous.
So Viscaria and a driven belief that BH and FH are the same, this is where I went wrong 30 yrs ago! It's a pity, maybe if I knew all this back then I'd already be NextLevel eh!
Well we have a pretty small TT community in the US so everyone tends to know everyone. I used to be a staple of TTEdge.com videos at one time. I just got injured then got married and now other things have mixed priority with TT. But I enjoy and love the sport and do what I can to support and promote it and to help adult learners understand it better since I went through a lot as one. There was a time it wasn't uncommon for me to go to an event and have someone say hi to me because they were familiar with TT videos or my channels or my posts and thank me for encouraging them in some fashion. Happens far less these days, but I make the point so that we have it clear that I have no reason to make statements that I cannot stand behind in person since I am relative public as a TT person. So usually, when someone is being continually rude about a disagreement, I realize when they continue to do it without sharing much about themselves that a lot of their rudeness is driven by anonymity and they feel they can act in ways they wouldn't if they were more public. If they do so as public personas, that is a rarer and different story.
I said that the way the forehand and backhand produce spin is pretty much the same. They are throwing motions, similar to throwing a Frisbee or a discus, there are physiological differences that make both strokes different but if one can generate fairly similar racket head speed with swings on both sides, there is no strong reason to treat them differently. So can you treat the forehand and backhand differences the same as the differences between washing dishes and playing table tennis strokes? Sure you can. But can you look at the similarities and use them to illuminate technique and even sometimes understand the shots better for your personal game? Sure. As I said, it was partly how I developed my approach to these shots.
I also said that one can treat FH or BH as similarly or as differently as one wishes based on one's philosophical and strategic approach to the game. I gave the example of Noshad Alamiyan. Who plays a backhand in a situation where many players would play the forehand (one can focus on the supposed reason which is largely besides the point), to make the point that the backhand can do just about everything the forehand can, it is just a matter of how the stroke fits into your game and of course, the way the forehand being played mostly besides you allows for more swing room while maintaining visibility. Now in many ways and for obvious reasons, a lefty often plays a backhand where a righty would play a forehand and vice versa. Now for the swing it self, a player can take a broad curved stroke swing approach to top spin that is similar on both sides. One also needs to find whippy strokes on both sides, and because of the speed of table tennis, usually both sides cannot have equally big strokes especially close to the table, one has to be prioriitized as ready (usually the backhand) and the other has to be transitioned into (usually the forehand).
But as I said on another thread, usually, players who make the backhand sound like an alien next to the forehand In my Experience usually don't have good backhands. In anything in life you can focus on what is similar and what is different. I like to believe that for some approaches to table tennis, the gap between forehand topspin and backhand topspin is not huge, once certain limitations are accepted. Obviously you may think those limitations make the gap huge and that is understandable. I just have never agreed with that, partly because I played good backhands before I played good forehands.
Finally a lot of my approach and my focus is on coaching and learning, not getting good results in matches immediately. Not whether a player can use a Viscaria with Tenergy 05 to play well immediately he gets it, but whether if they decided to get pushed with the right exercises to understand how to control it, whether they can play reasonably well with such a fast setup and develop into good players over time. Most people who assume the answer is no make a lot of unstated assumptions about the ability of the human body to adapt and focus on short term results more than I do. It might not be the optimal way for some coaches to develop some players. But that is why I go back to the philosophy of the coach. Some coach might say only use all wood 5 ply with All+ rating with Mark V until so so and so thing is achieved. That is okay too as long as it is part of the coach's tested and tried approach to developing a good player. What a good high level coach showed me was that if you can push yourself to test various approaches on a player, you can get interesting results from them over time as long as you take a broader ball read-and-control approach and not just a "perfectly put the ball on the table" approach.
