Technique advice for me

[blahness]

Thanks! When I do warm up hitting I usually just lean or reach for balls that are out of the zone, should I be moving even during warm-ups? I do love to hit fast and hit hard, it took some practice to slow down my swing a bit.

I think I'll try some return board practice next. You really need to control the power and location to get a rally going with the return board, and there's a bit of randomness built in. I had a long shift yesterday, and I'll be working Sat night, so training time has been limited, but I was a bit ahead of schedule moving into 2 location drills so I think the progress is still fine.

For me the triangle principle helped me a lot - basically I will always move my right leg to maintain a good triangle (two sides being my arms, the other side is my body, ball is one of the points) during warmups, and stick my butt out lol. Some leaning is probably unavoidable especially against inconsistent hitters (the old guys at my club will even occasionally give me underspin back with fade blocks, and a lot of penholders chopblock yikes, but I've learnt to adjust for those too)

I think return board is a really good idea to develop control. I saw someone actually even use smooth wood to simulate a frictionless anti? This way you can even simulate rally against long pips ppl.

 

[dingyibvs]

For me the triangle principle helped me a lot - basically I will always move my right leg to maintain a good triangle (two sides being my arms, the other side is my body, ball is one of the points) during warmups, and stick my butt out lol. Some leaning is probably unavoidable especially against inconsistent hitters (the old guys at my club will even occasionally give me underspin back with fade blocks, and a lot of penholders chopblock yikes, but I've learnt to adjust for those too)

I think return board is a really good idea to develop control. I saw someone actually even use smooth wood to simulate a frictionless anti? This way you can even simulate rally against long pips ppl.

I trained a looong time against a glass wall, that's how I learned how to loop initially. I'd serve a topspin to get a backspin back, or serve a backspin to get a topspin back, etc. I'd angle the table so I have to move before I loop, and I'd close my eyes right after I serve so I don't know exactly where it'd bounce to.

It does help quite a bit against anti and LP players. I mean, it gives basically exactly the amount of spin you'd expect from an anti/LP block of your loop.

 

[pingpongpaddy]

Thanks! When I do warm up hitting I usually just lean or reach for balls that are out of the zone, should I be moving even during warm-ups? I do love to hit fast and hit hard, it took some practice to slow down my swing a bit.

yes, playing FH to FH counter is the fundamental basic practice. If you can't do it properly, no matter how nice your stroke, you cant claim to have a good FH. To set the scene: FH to FH warmup going on, both players trying to keep it going, so you could say they are aiming at each others rackets. Inevitably however a ball will go off line, either to break the sideline or go to the body. A player with a good FH will automatically shift his position to line up his knee and shoulder behind the incoming ball
This will breakdown if the player is not constantly monitoring the bat of opposing player, so that he knows when to move. By practicing you gain the ability to react to changes of direction without thinking.
It's easiest to develop this skill with steady rally similar to the normal FH warmup, Note the skill is not a stroke its the ability to watch the direction of yr opponents stroke and react to it. People who have been through a good Junior coaching program may have already acquired this skill, but adult learners quite often are missing this important skill. They know they have powerful strokes but they break down when opponents make them move.
If you can learn to do continuous FH FH rally with varied placement you will solve this problem. It's key to play slow enough so that you can easily react at first. Long rally helps develop reaction habit and. strengthens leg. Once 5 minute is easily achieved you can speed up a bit. And now you have the skill of watching and reacting without thinking you can apply it to every other shot.
Are you a Ding YI fan? Soon you'll be moving and hitting like him

 

[dingyibvs]

So I've start working on a BH loop drive vs. backspin shot. Probably not gonna use it too often, but I'm inspired by LSD's BH lol. I've narrowed it down to two techniques. I used the first technique in the first 28 seconds of the video, and the rest the second technique. The advantage of the second technique is that I'd have the same backswing as my normal brush-heavy BH opening loop with the racket pointing down at the start of the forward swing. However, as you can probably see from the video, turning that into a loop drive seems pretty difficult.

The first technique is I think what I'll start practicing, as it seems to give much better contact much more consistently, though it does require me to adjust the backswing depending on whether I want to use it.

As for my FH loop training, I'm advanced a bit but still not at the next stage yet. I've turned the pace up a bit to 85 balls/min, and widened the distance between the two locations a bit. This basically pushes my physical limits, and I want to make sure that I can recover at the quickest rate and push off the ground with all my leg strength to move and still be able to execute the shot with good form. So far, that hasn't quite happened yet, not consistently anyway. Hopefully I'll be able to do it by the end of the week, then I'll move on to multi location training for looping topspins, and looping backspins from the BH corner for backspin loop training. Once I'm able to do that, I'll start employing the new techniques into my game play.

 

[jk1980]

it looks incredibly harsh and hard and not like a loop at all, tbh.

Others might think differently, but it might as well be a smash.

Even when slowing the video down to 25% speed it is pretty fast and movementwise the path of the bat is basically upwards until you hit the ball and then you instantly drag yout bat to the side.

It is actually unclear if that imparts any spin at all.

If you would do it slower you could see the arc more clearly and have the evidence that you actually impart topspin. The hand movement after the hit is really like you would want to backhand slap somebody.

my trainer would always tell me that my hand should guide the ball hance the top of the racket should face where i send the ball in that "after-hit" phase.

apart from that i like the movement from the body/legs that gives extra upwards momentum

 

[dingyibvs]

it looks incredibly harsh and hard and not like a loop at all, tbh.

Others might think differently, but it might as well be a smash.

Even when slowing the video down to 25% speed it is pretty fast and movementwise the path of the bat is basically upwards until you hit the ball and then you instantly drag yout bat to the side.

It is actually unclear if that imparts any spin at all.

If you would do it slower you could see the arc more clearly and have the evidence that you actually impart topspin. The hand movement after the hit is really like you would want to backhand slap somebody.

my trainer would always tell me that my hand should guide the ball hance the top of the racket should face where i send the ball in that "after-hit" phase.

apart from that i like the movement from the body/legs that gives extra upwards momentum

Oh yeah, it's meant to be harsh with a focus on speed for sure. I'm decent with spinny shots on the BH side now but I'm having trouble finishing points with power. Not really my focus right now, I'm still focused on consistency and placement, but sometimes I need a break from my regular trainings and I like to use the time to explore a method to achieve maximum power to the BH shots. First I aim to find the best contact for power generation, and then I'll look for ways to add better body movement to improve the power and consistency.

 

[NextLevel]

So I've start working on a BH loop drive vs. backspin shot. Probably not gonna use it too often, but I'm inspired by LSD's BH lol. I've narrowed it down to two techniques. I used the first technique in the first 28 seconds of the video, and the rest the second technique. The advantage of the second technique is that I'd have the same backswing as my normal brush-heavy BH opening loop with the racket pointing down at the start of the forward swing. However, as you can probably see from the video, turning that into a loop drive seems pretty difficult.

The first technique is I think what I'll start practicing, as it seems to give much better contact much more consistently, though it does require me to adjust the backswing depending on whether I want to use it.

As for my FH loop training, I'm advanced a bit but still not at the next stage yet. I've turned the pace up a bit to 85 balls/min, and widened the distance between the two locations a bit. This basically pushes my physical limits, and I want to make sure that I can recover at the quickest rate and push off the ground with all my leg strength to move and still be able to execute the shot with good form. So far, that hasn't quite happened yet, not consistently anyway. Hopefully I'll be able to do it by the end of the week, then I'll move on to multi location training for looping topspins, and looping backspins from the BH corner for backspin loop training. Once I'm able to do that, I'll start employing the new techniques into my game play.

IMHO, The differences are largely in how the backswing affects your timing and contact point (though that is obviously the most important thing for you). I don't see much difference in the two. There is no reason you cannot kill or spin the ball with either stroke, the full use of the arm is what tends to kill the ball, the turning effect of the stroke is what tends to get the spin. What you need to find (through experiment) is how to contact the ball solidly if you intend not to spin it and you want to keep the second backswing. It probably means you need to get a certain contact point on the ball earlier than you did with the new stroke. If you follow the full path of your stroke with either backswing, you will figure out where you need to get to and produce largely the same results with either stroke. The only thing is that currently, you think about them differently and that makes a big difference in how you contact the ball.

 

[dingyibvs]

IMHO, The differences are largely in how the backswing affects your timing and contact point (though that is obviously the most important thing for you). I don't see much difference in the two. There is no reason you cannot kill or spin the ball with either stroke, the full use of the arm is what tends to kill the ball, the turning effect of the stroke is what tends to get the spin. What you need to find (through experiment) is how to contact the ball solidly if you intend not to spin it and you want to keep the second backswing. It probably means you need to get a certain contact point on the ball earlier than you did with the new stroke. If you follow the full path of your stroke with either backswing, you will figure out where you need to get to and produce largely the same results with either stroke. The only thing is that currently, you think about them differently and that makes a big difference in how you contact the ball.

I'm still exploring the two techniques and the more I look into it the more confused I get. I went from thinking that they're very different, to they're not very different, to now thinking they're very different again.

The ball, of course, only cares about the point of contact, and it's about the same for both swings, but everything about how to get there seems to be different. Here's a quick video I made on the two forms. For each form, the racket angle at the point of contact can be adjusted to close more to add more spin or open more to add more speed.

With the first form it's clear that you can add speed much more easily. I've been practicing adding some oomph to my BH stroke for a few weeks now, and it's been difficult unless I have power to borrow from. With this new form, the power addition is instant. I've only been exploring this form for a few days, and barely at that since I've been focusing on my FH, and I can already add power much, much more consistently to my shots. I wonder if the downside is that it's more difficult to add spin when I want to?

 

[jk1980]

you demonstrate 4 different movements, whereby the second one would be most stable.
All others would make the resulting ball more inaccurate and fly somewhere you did not intend to if you missed the point of contact just by a split second.

That is why you want to have a fixed plane on which the bladeface moves for a certain amount (that is your window in which you can hit the ball properly).

All movements bar the second one change not only the sideways orientation of the blade but also the angle, which results in a more open angle if you hit it earlier than normal and a more closer angle if you hit it a split second later. in the former situation you probably would put the ball over the table and in the latter you probably put it into the net.

edit: the very last movement seems to be also ok and staying on the same plane.

 

[dingyibvs]

you demonstrate 4 different movements, whereby the second one would be most stable.
All others would make the resulting ball more inaccurate and fly somewhere you did not intend to if you missed the point of contact just by a split second.

That is why you want to have a fixed plane on which the bladeface moves for a certain amount (that is your window in which you can hit the ball properly).

All movements bar the second one change not only the sideways orientation of the blade but also the angle, which results in a more open angle if you hit it earlier than normal and a more closer angle if you hit it a split second later. in the former situation you probably would put the ball over the table and in the latter you probably put it into the net.

edit: the very last movement seems to be also ok and staying on the same plane.

They're 2 different movements. The 1st and 3rd show one technique, and the 2nd and 4th show the second technique's. I understand what you're saying, but a purely single plane swing is a purely brushing stroke and 1) will generate no power, and 2) require extreme precision in positioning to get adequate contact with the ball. In this case, you simply replace the requirement of precise timing with the requirement of precise positioning. The added safety of that technique is that it produces a slower ball, not that the technique is necessarily so much easier to execute.

I'm guessing there's a reason most of the pros use the first technique and not the second one. I'm wondering if anyone uses the 1st technique here, and if he knows why that was chosen? See the video below of LSD using the 1st technique, and if you watch the whole game in slowmo you'd see that both guys use that technique almost exclusively.

You can close the bat angle to get a spinnier shot as well, as demonstrated in this video with Liam Pitchford. I actually started thinking about this technique after @NextLevel posted this video:

The first thing I noticed was that Liam's FH rubber was almost facing forward on the backswing, which absolutely does not jive with the 2nd technique, so I started exploring how I can make that work and arrived at this. You can see that Liam maintains a more closed bat angle to get more brushing. After seeing LSD's monstrous BH, which maintains a more open bat angle and generates more speed, I decided to explore it further and now I'm questioning whether I should change my technique. It'd be annoying since I just spent a few months working on the 2nd technique, but so much of BH is about timing, body positiong/usage, so changing just the wrist movement shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[NextLevel]

I'm still exploring the two techniques and the more I look into it the more confused I get. I went from thinking that they're very different, to they're not very different, to now thinking they're very different again.

The ball, of course, only cares about the point of contact, and it's about the same for both swings, but everything about how to get there seems to be different. Here's a quick video I made on the two forms. For each form, the racket angle at the point of contact can be adjusted to close more to add more spin or open more to add more speed.

With the first form it's clear that you can add speed much more easily. I've been practicing adding some oomph to my BH stroke for a few weeks now, and it's been difficult unless I have power to borrow from. With this new form, the power addition is instant. I've only been exploring this form for a few days, and barely at that since I've been focusing on my FH, and I can already add power much, much more consistently to my shots. I wonder if the downside is that it's more difficult to add spin when I want to?

The ball cares both about the point of contact and the swing plane/trajectory. My point is that you can keep the swing plane and contact point the same for both strokes and get similar effects regardless of backswing, it just may not be mentally comfortable for you. The balls will not be *that* different. But of course, your consistency and quality is the most important thing.

The second and the 4th are more natural, but I suspect that I use all four swings. depending on how I read the ball and how much I need to go up on the side to trap the backswing.

 

[Der_Echte]

There are so many ways to make a bh topspin at all three speeds and in between with different level of spin.

There is only one bh where I do not emphasize spin production... the short arm hit.

All the rest have spin... and like nl said, how and where and how much in which way you prep your swing and how little or much you crouch or bow counts a let and sets the stage for your impact and result.

Will be with you in person one day and show you.

For the bh vs underspin, think more of bringing top of bat down a bit below man zone inside your left thigh for more spin and think of going down and up/forward and striking the ball at belly button or up to 6 inches higher.

Being loose in prep and explosion is important, you only firm AT impact.

Prep bat progressively higher and to left of belly button for a more open bat Forward swing to hit or powerloop.

 

[NextLevel]

They're 2 different movements. The 1st and 3rd show one technique, and the 2nd and 4th show the second technique's. I understand what you're saying, but a purely single plane swing is a purely brushing stroke and 1) will generate no power, and 2) require extreme precision in positioning to get adequate contact with the ball. In this case, you simply replace the requirement of precise timing with the requirement of precise positioning. The added safety of that technique is that it produces a slower ball, not that the technique is necessarily so much easier to execute.

I'm guessing there's a reason most of the pros use the first technique and not the second one. I'm wondering if anyone uses the 1st technique here, and if he knows why that was chosen? See the video below of LSD using the 1st technique, and if you watch the whole game in slowmo you'd see that both guys use that technique almost exclusively.

You can close the bat angle to get a spinnier shot as well, as demonstrated in this video with Liam Pitchford. I actually started thinking about this technique after @NextLevel posted this video:

The first thing I noticed was that Liam's FH rubber was almost facing forward on the backswing, which absolutely does not jive with the 2nd technique, so I started exploring how I can make that work and arrived at this. You can see that Liam maintains a more closed bat angle to get more brushing. After seeing LSD's monstrous BH, which maintains a more open bat angle and generates more speed, I decided to explore it further and now I'm questioning whether I should change my technique. It'd be annoying since I just spent a few months working on the 2nd technique, but so much of BH is about timing, body positiong/usage, so changing just the wrist movement shouldn't be too difficult.

I think once you get below the ball, and you backswing with your racket pointing towards you, you will be able to use almost anything to swing at the ball as long as you get the right contact point with a reasonable stroke plane. I have started trying to stop backswing downwards (in my head at least) and just take the racket back and start below the ball.

 

[blahness]

Besides the reply on myTT, I will share what I have settled on personally for my own BH loop. I too have experimented a huge ton on wrist movements for the BH loop and settled on this mechanism (no wrist movement, only thumb driven supination where I use the middle joint of the thumb to initiate the supination which acts to close the racket angle during contact and create spin). I found that dropping the racket/wrist creates a weaker impact (at least for myself) which I didn't like (like what you did). This is a bit inspired by badminton training where they too teach pure forearm supination on the BH with a relatively stable neutral wrist (ie not dropped or raised). Personally I have used 1 to 4 at various points (there's even more varieties lol) and gave up on them (I even aggravated my wrist injury with some of them), but I think 2 is the better base to work off except you probably don't need to drop your wrist so much.

 

[blahness]

I would want to add something: Most of the pros are not mere mortals - there's many reasons why they're at the top of the world especially in terms of physical abilities and touch. Hence a lot of their strokes and even equipment may not be suited for amateurs. It's actually much easier to watch pro women players to emulate imo. Flashy BHs like Ovtcharov's and Liam Pitchford can be incredibly hard to time well and imitate.

For eg Lin Yun Ju plays with his bat on the table almost as if he's inviting the long fast serve in a cocky fashion, but in reality he's almost never caught by that long serve lol... The other example is the BH chiquita from the FH short corner - that requires a huge reverse crossover step to even get there in time and you then have to recover the same way back to cover the BH side weakness. Almost all the pros can do it! However it doesn't mean that it's a good idea to imitate at an amateur level though.

 

[dingyibvs]

I'm a total BH newb, so I've decided to say screw it, I'm just gonna listen to you guys. I can generate spin and speed with my current technique, and the exact backswing and forward swing will probably change depending on situation, so I'm not gonna stress it and just work on my timing, consistency, placement, and body usage.

 

[Kopp]

.. It's actually much easier to watch pro women players to emulate imo. ..

💯

 

[dingyibvs]

Alright, here's a practice video of me against one of the better players at a club I frequent. He's a lot better than me and I have a ton of issues with his service receives, but he has troubles with my attacks, so the focus of this practice session was me serving and then attacking his receives (we had already done about an hour of very, very basic FH/BH practice beforehand, just the very basic warm-up like drills to work on fundamentals). You can see why I can't yet put anything I've practiced into real game yet. The main issue I can see is slow response time due to a combination of slow recognition, slow decision making, and slow recovery after both service and loops.

On services I need to work on accelerating at the right time. I've been accelerating way too early so contact is way too thin, not creating enough spin. He pointed that out to me and I find that to be very true.

I feel fairly good about my form on both sides now doing single-sided practice, so starting this week I'll try to put everything together with FH/BH combined random location practices. I think this will help with my recovery time. I'll start including a motion to ready position after services to help improve my readiness to respond to the opponent's service return. I'll probably devise more complications to my loop vs underspin drills to include service receives.

Slow decision making is just gonna take some time, I'll make it a point to start applying it into games and eventually I'll get used to responding to certain shots a certain way instead of having to think about it. Slow recognition will need to come from a lot more experience. Against penholders I especially have trouble with it because I feel that with a flick of the wrist they can send shots anywhere with varying spin. Maybe that'll get better too when I feel more comfortable with other aspects of my game.

 

[blahness]

Alright, here's a practice video of me against one of the better players at a club I frequent. He's a lot better than me and I have a ton of issues with his service receives, but he has troubles with my attacks, so the focus of this practice session was me serving and then attacking his receives (we had already done about an hour of very, very basic FH/BH practice beforehand, just the very basic warm-up like drills to work on fundamentals). You can see why I can't yet put anything I've practiced into real game yet. The main issue I can see is slow response time due to a combination of slow recognition, slow decision making, and slow recovery after both service and loops.

On services I need to work on accelerating at the right time. I've been accelerating way too early so contact is way too thin, not creating enough spin. He pointed that out to me and I find that to be very true.

I feel fairly good about my form on both sides now doing single-sided practice, so starting this week I'll try to put everything together with FH/BH combined random location practices. I think this will help with my recovery time. I'll start including a motion to ready position after services to help improve my readiness to respond to the opponent's service return. I'll probably devise more complications to my loop vs underspin drills to include service receives.

Slow decision making is just gonna take some time, I'll make it a point to start applying it into games and eventually I'll get used to responding to certain shots a certain way instead of having to think about it. Slow recognition will need to come from a lot more experience. Against penholders I especially have trouble with it because I feel that with a flick of the wrist they can send shots anywhere with varying spin. Maybe that'll get better too when I feel more comfortable with other aspects of my game.

I watched a bit, and I used to have a lot of the same issues and had to fix them one by one. The fundamental issue is that the time you take to initiate a stroke is too much - and the only way you shorten it is by eliminating arm movement as much as possible and keeping elbow close to body, use weight transfer, hip rotation for all strokes.

For the recovery after serve - Recovery is not all about the arm, but also about the centre of gravity and balance. The fundamental issue is that you're still serving with mostly arm power instead of a focused weight transfer with the elbow close to the body. If you use arm movement - the arm goes out and you then have to spend time pulling it back to the ready position which wastes a lot of time. If you dont even use much arm, your elbow is already right where you need it for the ready position.

So for serve, you start with weight on the left foot, throw the ball using weight transfer to the right foot, and then when you serve transfer your weight to the left foot with the hip rotation, and then using that momentum you rotate and land in the ready position with both feet simultaneously before the second bounce of your serve - you can video yourself serving to make sure. Right now you're landing with two steps and one feet at one time which slows it down tremendously - and the receive surprises you because you were still busy recovering and didn't have time to observe the movement of the opponent. The other way to make recovery easier is not to serve with your right foot level with your left, but with it further back from the table (right foot behind left) and not so rotated, this reduces the rotation and makes recovery easier.

 

[blahness]

With FH and BH loops - FH is significantly better than BH because you use weight transfer well so your feet automatically wants to find a good position, whereas with BH that action is largely missing especially the hip rotation and weight transfer, and the use of the centre of gravity to control the arc. With your BH, it also seems that you can't loop the ball stably at 10% power with just your arm and fingers - if you figure that out you'll not only get a lot more stability and spin in the BH loop but you'll have unlocked the chiquita too in all likelihood. It might be better if you opened the racket angle more and get the feeling of solidly lifting the ball first - closed racket angles require a lot of lifting support from the lower body and very refined/accurate timing which is much more demanding on the BH.

But FH also could use a bit of tightening of the stroke especially for the elbow position during the backswing could be much closer to the waist - one way to tackle it is to train such that your elbow physically touches the waist at the end of the backswing - that helped me a lot personally. The other thing is to spin the ball more - your success rates went up once you did that, your spin is already killer enough. But it's already a very good and threatening FH!