Guys, I think I've finally figured it all out. FH and BH, I think I can play the way I want now!
On the FH side the main missing piece appears to be avoiding excessive backswing, especially with the arm. This allows me to always catch the ball a bit in front of the body and before the ball falls too low. I've made this a focus of my training for a couple weeks now, and surprisingly it's already starting to make a difference in my game. Usually FH training takes a looooong time to show up in my game, so I'm very glad to see this.
On the BH side, I finally figured out the proper way to loop. Starting off I was doing a very brushy move, and as I've mentioned in recent posts I've been trying to add more hitting into my stroke. I've tried 2 methods for this, one is to use kind of a BH flick (the classical pancake one, not the banana one), where you kind of approach the ball from the bottom, then flip the racket over as you contact the ball so finish with the racket facing down. This results in a very up-then-down kind of stroke, which worked reasonably well in practice against backspins but has rather inconsistent contact particularly against topspin balls due to the amount of movement required near contact.
The 2nd method is to swing the racket like how you would backhand slap someone. The arm motion is fairly smooth from slightly down to slightly up. This results in much more reliable contact, but I either have too much hitting or too much brushing depending on my racket angle. Against topspin it seemed to work reasonably well, but against backspin this was very difficult to loop drive--either I'd have no arc and safety or it was a very brushy stroke.
The last couple of days I started focusing more on timing. I've been hitting BH shots too far forward of the body. That's something my coach and I have been focused on fixing and I've made a lot of progress in it, so I wanted to start applying it against backspin as well. While doing that, all of a sudden I came upon a new BH swing technique as well. I'd basically approach the ball similar to technique #2, but then flip my arm swing downward as I contact the ball (but importantly don't change the racket angle with my wrist). This is resulted in very consistent contact, hitting deeply into the racket even with my Q968/D09C combo, yet also with the feel of extremely good brushing and spin. For the first time ever, I could hit powerful BH loop drives against backspin in practice again and again, and more importantly, I could really visualize the trajectory of the ball as I contacted it! I then tried the same technique against topspins, and it works just as well!
It's still early days and even in practice I still need a few tries before I find the feeling, but may when I get into my rhythm does it feel good! Piaah piah piah piah the balls just get crushed one after another! It also looks good too! I always wondered how the pros finish their BH loops with the racket almost perpendicular to the ground, well this is how. I've tried to replicate it by approaching the ball with a fairly open racket, but it just results in too much hitting, low arc, and low safety. But if you add a downward motion by the arm swing at contact, all of a sudden you add in the arc and spin without sacrificing the solid contact and speed.
