Ideas for makeshift return board/spin "measurement" device
I should probably grab myself a few decent sheets, then.
Although it's not that I don't know how to brush the ball at all. It's more so a case of I can't control the spin on the way down, and if I use the same arm motion I do when serving heavy, I'll be picking up the ball from the corner of my room.
So, here are the two basic things:
1) if you actually knew how to brush for real, the ball coming down would be very easy to control because you know the right contact. With the right contact that exercise is very easy. And with new rubbers that grab well you can learn it.
2) If what you do for heavy serves would end your ball further than the palm of your left hand as in Brett's video and you couldn't swing to spin heavy and have the ball spin fast but not go far, then it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY--as your most recent video shows--that you really know how to make the refined contact for spin contact. The instability and unsteadiness of how you hold your blade face in that simple exercise also shows that to be the case. You can't make that contact without the blade face being stable and while you are holding your racket the blade face is wobbly.
The good news is, if you admit to yourself that you may not know something and that you may not know what you don't know, then you just might be in a perfect position to learn what you don't realize you don't know.
Learning to spin hard, but then make the right contact to bounce it up will help my strokes, correct?
Let's see if I understand this: you are talking about in that little touch exercise? If your contact is correct when the ball is dropping, it will help you learn the feel of barely grazing the ball but getting the rubber to really grab the ball. This will not help your strokes. And perhaps your strokes are fine. But it will help your contact. And without more refined contact and a more stable blade face, it will be quite hard for you to learn to spin the ball well. FOR THAT YOU WILL NEED RUBBERS THAT CAN GRAB THE BALL. Anyone who looks at that video and can make the right kind of contact can see that the ball is slipping off your rubber which means that, even with the right contact, that rubber doesn't have enough grip to grab the ball well. Therefore you are handicapping yourself by trying to learn good technique with equipment that is not capable of performing the technique.
The only person you will handicap is yourself though.
I did a few hours of hitting thrown balls today and I concluded that I have still a very slight flat hit bias in all my strokes. The angle is correct, but the contact often does not go over the side of the ball, but travels slightly into the ball. I understand that I'd want to try to slice a peel off, but right now I'm taking a small chunk off the side. I don't have this problem in serves, because I've been practicing it the correct way for as long as I can remember.
It may very well be that those rubbers are not allowing you to learn the contact of looping.
Again, someone who loops well may be able to loop with your rubber. But not because the rubber is good. Instead because the player's contact is good. But trying to learn to create the right kind of contact with dead rubber isn't likely to go well.
Maybe because my rubber is not very reliable in terms of generating spin on contact, I have some "insurance".
I've seen plenty of guys with seriously dead rubber able to serve with decent spin. But the real test of how good your spin contact is, on serving would be, being able to serve heavy, and short. Like the contact on the serve at the beginning of the killer spin video. Or like some of the contacts Brett makes when he is spinning the ball and catching it. A few of those are really heavy with soft contact and a relaxed forearm/wrist whip. So if you are trying to make heavy spin contact and the ball flies across the room, it is worth knowing: THAT AIN'T IT! If you put all your effort into spinning the ball, there shouldn't be much foreword momentum on the ball. Your racket should pull past the ball while the ball is on the rubber.
@Suga D: can you post that pull ball vid you created for Professor PNut?
Either way, what do you guys think is the best way to train this problem away?
The first thing would be simple: you need new rubbers Brah! Get em! You could get cheap ones. You could get Dawei 2008XP. You could get Chinese Tacky rubbers:
They are good for spin contact, last a long time and are pretty cheap. You could get real equipment: Baracuda, Aurus Soft, FX-P, FX-S. Those are good rubbers for learning to spin.
Should I just strive to not hit so flat and keep missing balls until I get it?
Not unless you are into pain and punishment. This is a futile cause with the rubbers you are currently using.
Is the rubber far too dead and crappy to ever be worth improving with?
Now you are getting the picture and why so many of us could see in your first video that you flat hit and didn't make spin contact.
And that was why I asked you to try that exercise. That exercise made clear exactly what we were seeing. You need to learn the right contact. It shouldn't be too hard for you. But you need rubbers that can grab the ball.
I recommend you might as well get an acceptable blade while you get the rubbers. It can be decently inexpensive. Like Yinhe/Galaxy 896 blade is $16.00 (USD). Rubbers in the price range of $8.00-$20.00 per sheet: there are dozens of excellent rubbers you could get.
Say you got:
Galaxy 896: $16.00
Dawei 2008XP $8.00
And you splurged on the FH rubber and got Air Illumina Delta $18.00
The total price of the setup would be $42.00 and a place like Colestt would give you a build a combo deal of $40.00 or so. If you went budget and got 2008XP on both sides, the total price would be $32.00 and the combo price at Coles is $30.00.
Other popular rubber options might be things like 729 Focus III Snipe for $14.00.
You do need new rubbers. It might be fun to just spend a few extra $$ and get a whole new setup.
Good luck bro. Without good rubbers, like the Killerspin video says, it is hard to learn the proper contact technique.
