Had a session at the Alameda club yesterday, first time in over a month. Man it's hard to play there occasionally, those Stiga tables are soooooo bouncy, it takes an entire session to get used to it lol. Too bad I won't have a chance to play there for probably another month, gonna be rough the next time I go as well.
I also had a great practice session today. Taking some of the points Jan Valenta's video mentioned into account, I tried to be extra conscientious today during practice. From the videos I took of my FH practice at Alameda as well as last week's practice, I noticed that I'm still kicking up a bit too much with my legs, so that was my focus: legs. For the entire practice any time I did FH, my focus was on the right leg movement. Weight transfer from right to left, movement as much in the horizontal plane as possible, and in as much of a rotational movement as possible. I decided to forgo everything else for now: activation sequence, not overly rotating my body, arm angle, watch the ball. Forget all that, I just focused on my legs. The plan is to get that right, then start adding things one by one. I'm too anal to leave my current FH form alone, I want it to be close to perfect.
Another point I took from Valenta's video is that new processes are most vulnerable to disruption within the first 4-6 hours. As such it's tricky to play practice matches when learning a new technique, the focus needs to be on applying the new technique. With that in mind, I spent all my mental energy during practice matches on the new technique, only adding things when they're not in conflict with it. For service receives I tried to receive almost exclusively with my BH, really practicing my BH flicks, which let's say did not go that well lol. Then in rallies I just put my BH on autopilot while focusing on the FH, specifically maintaining a lean and doing the correct leg movement. The reason I had to add the lean is because too often I hit shots leaning back, which prevents the correct weight transfer so I needed to maintain the lean in order to execute my leg movement. It sounds so simple but it was so damn difficult to execute, but I did manage to improve by the end.
