It has been five weeks since my last coaching session. This means I have missed five lessons in a row. Busy with work and vacation related matters. Today came back to coaching after a long hiatus. Hence I will pen down some thoughts, like a dear diary kind of entry.
Usual warm up FH and BH. Coach will always check these two basics before he proceed to other matter, After being satisfied, he said something that was not said before.
He said, "Gozo, it is time to take your FH to a next level. By next level I mean I want you to shorten your stroke. I do not want you to take your usual big back swing to do your FH stroke. I want you to shorten it by half. Now with this shortened stroke you must really engage your core. Your power must come from your legs and your core and your wrist. Remember that"
With this we I tried his new style of FH. It is darn tiring, I have to hit it with the same power as before without the massive back swing. To up the ante, I can tell coach block with more active stroke. His rebound is coming back faster than usual. If I were to go back to my old habit of taking a long back swing, I will most likely miss the ball. However, if I were to follow his instruction to use legs plus core plus wrist, then my FH is fast, has a very low trajectory, just skimming over the net by a few centimetres.
I guess, when I am still a noob, taking a long back swing for FH is allowable and coach gave me passive block to assist me with that. As I move to more advance level, he is increasing the difficulty level.
Oh! On the BH side is also the same, he wants me to shorten the strokes as well. However, BH side is not an issue as I started as a blank piece of white paper on my BH and my BH was exactly what he wanted since day 1. My BH is those rapid fire 1st position off the bounce topspin type stroke. No issue there. I was already familiar with this since day 1.
After that we did the usual random drill for a while i.e., FH x BH topspin without any prior agreed pattern. I am surprised I am able to hit back a high percentage of the ball even though I had missed five weeks of lessons. I guess, my body did retain some muscle memory.
For the final last one hour of the lesson, we came to the gist of my training i.e., serve and 3rd ball attack. I told him in my casual game I am getting my points mostly from my FH loop. So he asked me to serve the conventional pendulum from my BH corner and he will return my serves. The term & condition imposed is that no matter where the ball is returned be it FH or BH side, I have to use my FH to attack. I cannot push or cut the ball. I can only loop or drive the ball and rally with my coach until one of us gets the point. To make it fair play, my coach did only return out of table balls for me, i.e., no drop shot or double bounce short ball from him. This was a very good simulation of actual game play and I love this drill a lot.
If the ball comes to my BH side, then I must pivot and either loop / drive the ball back, depending on the type of spin the ball carries. When my coach blocks, then I must be ready to step over to the FH side to return his balls. All in all, very happy with my lesson today and I can feel the progress that I have made over this seven months of proper coaching. Happy to say, I make less mistake too.
Thank you for reading. Stay happy and keep'em pongin'.