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When you wrote this: "I know some of these players are or have been in the top 50 in Norway, and all of them certainly are in the top 100. Not to be mean to those players or anything, but they all have their own peculiarities in their strokes, but the main theme is that they have acceleration on contact, all of them move properly in position and they have good timing -- the stroke itself is really not that important as I view it."I am sorry. I must have missed the context of what makes this important, or deemed it as not important to answer. The way my arm moves is just not what I am working on right now and there are only so many things you can improve at the same time to not lose focus and deliberation. Also, I think its important to strictly distinguish interaction with people on the internet from the relationships and feedback you get from people offline. I also have an online coach that watches videos of me, but the coach at the club is focused on building everything from where my feet is planted in each shot; so, untill I am able to properly adjust my feet to every ball, he is not going to pick on the details of my armswing. I believe this method is the right one because muscle memory is "programmed" for the whole body at the same time, meaning that if you learn a stroke when your feet is planted wrong, it is hard to translate that into moving your feet differently .... or maybe its just two different ways to Rome. Right now, its very hard for me to improve my reaction times because I have this habit from training with a robot that makes me not properly perceive the movement of my opponents racket to earn valuable milliseconds to adjust my position. Table tennis is so hard! I just have to practice practice practice. In matches, all the technique things quickly go out the window and I just use my reach and slow racket to win points on awkward balls.
I was trying to understand whether you felt that your movement training would make your competitive with the top 100 players after you completed all your training. The cognitive demands of table tennis are very interesting, I sometimes wonder whether my game would get better if I wore glasses or got surgery for my left eye. I was trying to understand what you think goes into making a player really good by seeing whether you thought your current approach was a realistic path to competing with players in the top 100.