Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

[Haito]

Pushing topspin and nospin with quality by taking it late on the fall. I'm trying to visualize it and having trouble with what it looks like. To me the trajectory feels like it'd make it impossible and you'd have to either give up height or spin.

There are two muscle groups connected to your fingers, thumb and pointer is one, second group is the middle, ring and pinky. Muscles controlling them are routed a bit differently. I do not remember from the top of my head how exactly. When you tighten group 1, the wrist should be loose. When you tighten the muscles group 2 it locks your wrist into a straight position. If you have loose wrist by holding the racket with g1, and then tighten middle finger (using it as an example, since most people have most control over that one), the wrist shoots to straight. You can use this for brushing. That is how I've been taught. Same principles apply for motorcycle grip and throttle control, and many other domains. When looping backspin, you can use this to generate stupid amount of ARC. At least 2 people in Dusseldorf upon learning this went from netting every cut ball to getting them over the nett.

When pushing long, you start with loose wrist cocked up, tightening finger makes the wrist go straight, and relatively down. If you imagine the ball projected on side view of the table (left side is you (9, right is opponent 3), I brush on about 7 to get long, 9 to get short. Short touch with no added spin is touch no brush on 6:30pm ish. By brushing I mean follow a line tangent to a circle, and the contact point refers to the number on the clock.

There is also "scooping", but that one is hard and not reliable.

The guy who I quoted probably meant this by using fingers. I laid it out for a person as autistic and analytical as myself to understand. Same principle applies for serving. I did not find any way to serve stupid enough backspin to make even pros net the ball. (they might have just underestimated me cause I don't play very well, I am not even club level player, I am just an amateur, not even 5th league...)

 

[Archosaurus]

Yeah, I don't believe the omission of the ball in the demo is not as accidental as one might believe. Its a stroke I tend to use against lower rated players who attack easy pop ups viciously but tend to struggle to do the same when the ball is lower but giving balls that sit to the kinds of players I usually play against is just quasi-suicidal for my style.

There certainly seems to be a lot of theoretical table tennis going on around here. The first drill a coach made me do here when I showed up to a club was backhand flick against backspin serve from the forehand corner.

@Haito
Like I said, I'm not really interested in a theoretical explanation. I wanna see you guys do it. Having a hard time visualizing what we're talking about.