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Just use the Innerforce with the T05FX. Get used to the feeling of holding the ball - it will feel like a pillow sometimes but that is okay and is part of this. If you don't like T05FX, then learn to do a glue job and take the 05FX rubbers off and use the Rasant Grip on the Innerforce. Rasant Grip is a good rubber and on the low end of what I would have started you off with. I would never have given you T05FX (I am a huge T05 fan for the record) but that's just me - I believe people can/should use soft blades with medium hard rubbers to start off.
It may sound crazy to you but your current strokes will work better with the Innerforce Setup because Soft Rubbers grant spin more easily when you don't brush the ball violently.
Ultimately, you need to learn to brush the ball on both backspin and topspin loops and you want the ball to arc - you don't need to lift the ball when playing vs. topspin but you need to brush it. You want to be able to control the arc by changing your feeling of the ball on the stroke, thereby changing the degrees of spin. To get a little detailed, the ITTF Advanced manual describe the two major looping contacts as "peeling/coating" and "gumming" - you "coat" to get slow heavy spin and you "gum" to get drive spin. Right now, you are mostly gumming on all your shots but gumming with dodgy timing and stroke angles on the backspin because you haven't developed the range to vary between "coating" and "gumming". Your gumming on topspin on the forehand in the last lesson was excellent.
To loop backspin initially, it is easier in real matches to get a "coating" brush motion and when your timing is really good, you can gum with more experience (and in many situations, you will still need to coat as this is safer when you are late to the ball and the heavy topspin generated causes problems for many opponents). But again, all this comes with feeling. If you don't get it, you will be slapping that backspin ball into the net for months.
It may sound crazy to you but your current strokes will work better with the Innerforce Setup because Soft Rubbers grant spin more easily when you don't brush the ball violently.
Ultimately, you need to learn to brush the ball on both backspin and topspin loops and you want the ball to arc - you don't need to lift the ball when playing vs. topspin but you need to brush it. You want to be able to control the arc by changing your feeling of the ball on the stroke, thereby changing the degrees of spin. To get a little detailed, the ITTF Advanced manual describe the two major looping contacts as "peeling/coating" and "gumming" - you "coat" to get slow heavy spin and you "gum" to get drive spin. Right now, you are mostly gumming on all your shots but gumming with dodgy timing and stroke angles on the backspin because you haven't developed the range to vary between "coating" and "gumming". Your gumming on topspin on the forehand in the last lesson was excellent.
To loop backspin initially, it is easier in real matches to get a "coating" brush motion and when your timing is really good, you can gum with more experience (and in many situations, you will still need to coat as this is safer when you are late to the ball and the heavy topspin generated causes problems for many opponents). But again, all this comes with feeling. If you don't get it, you will be slapping that backspin ball into the net for months.
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Do you need different blade/rubber at different stage of learning? I don't know the answer. I have only used T05 T64 since I started table tennis 2 years ago. I used 2 blades, rosewood XO and maplewood. I have been told by many coaches that my setup is "wrong" and not suitable for beginers. However, after all thes training, I get completely used to my setup and have no problem with it. In fact, I literally cannot play the game without my own racket. So I am wondering, can you choose setup like this:
1. decide which style/player you want to copy
2. buy the ultimate setup for that style/player.
3. Just try to get used to it from day one.
Arguablly you could save a few quid by not having to buy intermediate setups.
Here is just my own opinion.
1. decide which style/player you want to copy
2. buy the ultimate setup for that style/player.
3. Just try to get used to it from day one.
Arguablly you could save a few quid by not having to buy intermediate setups.
Here is just my own opinion.
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mcaisbyz2, are you a ranked player in the UK? How old are you?
No one is asking him to buy intermediate setups. If he was a young child, I would let him use his Palio TCT. Children learn to make anything work and have incredible feeling - the extra TCT power might help as well. But he has set aggressive goals and he needs something that lets him learn how to manipulate the ball. I would have asked him to get Tenergy 05 but at this point, equipment should not be a big focus as he already has good materials. But a TCT composite is too much and it will ingrain some bad habits.
Even now, Andy may not have any understanding of what I am talking about, but now he is aware of it, he will look for the feeling of the shot and he will see that he can find it if he uses something less stiff. When looping, you want to feel as if you are holding the ball on your paddle. IF you are playing with something that shoots the ball out, you can't feel that.
I can send Andy one of my blades for free - I am ready to stand behind my advice to that extent. Playing this game without feeling is the biggest mistake an adult learner can make.
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mcaisbyz2, are you a ranked player in the UK? How old are you?
No No I am no a ranked player lol, I just love playing TT. I am 35 and I made some progress in the last 2 years, but far from a good player. I am just wondering why my coach said my setup is wrong but I feel it works for me well.
How do you become a ranked player in the UK anyway?
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mcaisbyz2, are you a ranked player in the UK? How old are you?
No No I am no a ranked player lol, I just love playing TT. I am 35 and I made some progress in the last 2 years, but far from a good player. I am just wondering why my coach said my setup is wrong but I feel it works for me well.
How do you become a ranked player in the UK anyway?
By playing tournaments and beating ranked players.
Your coach said your setup is wrong because he thinks for your skill level, you can't manipulate the ball with feeling using it. I can't say that without being there, but my experience tends to dissuade me from recommending hard outer plies to learning players with one curious exception - when they use Tenergy 05. I used the Yasaka Extra Offensive when I was lower rated because I wanted an offensive blade but as I got better, I realized that the ball contact time feeling was much too short for me to do what I liked to do.
Tenergy 05 is a ball hugging rubber with a very elastic topsheet so you can feel the ball with it, almost no matter what you use, when looping/spinning. For the flatter strokes, things get a bit trickier.
Again, the faster the equipment you use, the more demands you are placing on the player to have good feeling and timing to make blocks, add spin, make controlled slower loops, etc. You want to feel as if you are catching and releasing the ball when looping and if you don't have that feeling, you will find it hard to control the ball. Because that time of contact is very short, some people like to make it sound as if it is useless. There are many theories about it, but I don't know any good player who plays without referring to it. When a coach uses your paddle and says it is too fast for him, he is really saying that he can't feel the ball with it or that the ball flies off before he has a chance to manipulate it based on what he likes to use.
As I have gotten better, I have gotten better at using certain kinds of composites with Limba/Anegre outers, but I play well enough with my traditional all wood blades so I haven't been convinced that I need to make a switch. This is something that many adults wait until later to learn - the ones who supposedly want to be like the pros continue to use the faster offensive blades, but even the pros tend to mostly use arylate or ALC blades at best with the exception of the new young guns. MY favorite coach says that an OFF- blade should be good enough for anyone. Again, the faster and stiffer the blade, the more pressure it puts on your feeling for the ball.
If you enjoy your blade, keep using it. If you want to get serious about improving, buy a classic blade in the Limba Ayous Anigre tradition and understand it. Those were the blades many of the world's best players traditionally used so it at least helps you understand what is happening when you deviate from established tradition. You may hate it initially because it feels slow and soft, but the idea is supposed to be to give you time to spin the ball and add rotation so it is like a pillow or a trampoline with long contact, as opposed to being like a hard quick contact where the ball bounces off before you have a chance to impart spin with your stroke.
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[h=1]Table Tennis lesson 21st July 2015 Part 3 - the beginning of the video[/h]
In that video, your forehand is beginning to look like the forehand of a good player (again, if you rotate your core more rather than leaning on your right foot, your balance will be better and the shot quality will improve). Of course, your coach is pushing you on technical details, as he should.
If you watch the video, there are times when your racket contact becomes extremely silent (around 3:40-3:58 or so) and the ball quality at those points should be extremely high. It would be interesting to see if you could feel that with your racket - those are more brushy/coating type contacts and show that you were very relaxed - he actually blocked one of your shots off the table when it went square into his paddle.
While you shouldn't focus on it to the point you stop hitting the ball, you should always be aware of how a good shot feels. Ball bashing is a good skill, but it isn't always the main point of this sport. The most dangerous shots from many players come from extremely silent contact where you feel you didn't hear them hit the ball - the amount of spin generated on such shots is ridiculous.
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I will see if I can give a useful answer to this.
First, if your coaches are saying that your setup is not good for you, they may be seeing something that you are not quite understanding about what is happening when you are using your racket. You might be used to it. You may have adjusted your game to it. But how you adjusted your game to it might be in ways that will prevent you from getting better.
Here, I will give you an example. In the videos of Andy, NextLevel noticed the harshness of the contact on many of Andy's shots and how the ball flies off his racket without a very big swing and without much body in the stroke. In the videos you can see the kind of impact Andy is making on contact and how many shots are going long. You also can see in the videos places where the contact is better and the accuracy increases. But from watching it is possible to actually see that Andy will be better suited to the type of blade NextLevel recommended and that I chimed in about. You can actually see in the videos that Andy would improve faster with an all wood, 5 ply blade that has certain wood layers. Particularly a Limba outer ply.
The tricky part of what I just said is that, most players at a certain level feel better with the faster equipment because it feels really good on that kind of direct impact but that feedback cycle is part of what would delay a player's development of better contact for looping: The hard hit feels good and makes the ball fly even if it flies off the table. The more delicate, more precise contact that you need to develop for higher level shooting is not rewarded by positive feedback in the faster composite blades that so many more top pros are using these days. It is also worth knowing that, before 2011, there was only ONE men's singles world champion who used a composite blade! (Schlager). All the others used all wood blades when they won the WTTC.
The game is changing and more top players are using blades that are not advisable for developing players. Those top players spent more time between the ages of 4-12 years old using all wood blades with good feeling than you could possibly imagine. Thousands of contacts a day for a period of years. By the age of 12 most of those top players have better technique and have had more ball contacts than most of us will ever get in our whole lives!!! Unless you do actually train 6 hours a day 6 days a week for 5-8 years!!!! Think about it.
So this leads me to an analogy that you need to think creatively to wrap your mind around. Say you were learning to drive a car. Say learning to drive a car required as much technical skill, proficiency and preciseness that we all realize is needed in table tennis. This is why it takes so much work to develop a good loop.
So you are at that stage where you have never looped before, NEVER REALLY LOOPED, even if you thought you were looping and it was actually just a drive instead. So you've never looped--I mean driven, 'eh'hem--and you get in the car and the course you have to drive through is an obstacle course that is like the double black diamond level of moguls on a ski slope. And now you have one more handicap: the car you are about to drive (somehow, magically) can't go slower than 120 mph!
In that scenario, there is very little chance that you would develop the driving skills of Mario Andretti.
I guess another analogy, if you couldn't ski and all you were allowed to ski on were the hardest, highest level ski slopes, you probably would develop bad habits, not good ones and you wouldn't even know the difference.
So, I have two friends who, when they were kids, were on the national team of their country. They are both from Europe. They both coach in NYC where I live. Both of them, separately, based on me asking questions, told me that when they were kids, training on their national team, the coach didn't ask them what equipment they wanted to use. They didn't get a choice. They were given a FIVE PLY, ALL WOOD blade that was OFF- in speed rating. And that was it. The coach decided which one would be best for their development.
Both gave me the same basic story without knowing the other one would give it to me. One of those two told me: "if you just want to play and have fun, then get whatever blade you want. Timo Boll ZLC, Primorac Carbon, it doesn't matter. But you won't improve as much. If you actually want to improve, then get a five ply, all wood blade with good feeling. That will help you get better faster." I was using a Clipper at the time.
It is also worth knowing that the Chinese kids, as they are developed are given something pretty similar. There are standard blades that those kids get for while they are young and learning technique. Avalox P-500 used to be one of those blades. But there were a few.
So the idea of just getting the blade you would like to grow into sounds nice. But it really doesn't work that way if you want to get better. Also, the price of that Stiga Allround Evolution is $40.00 (USD). For the price of a Rosewood you could get 3-5 of them depending on which Rosewood. So I doubt that is really saving money.
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Hahahaha - maybe this explains why I am seeing so many Stratus PowerWoods all over NY...
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Hahaha. The truth is, I don't know if they are telling other people that.
I was picking their brain and asking a lot of questions. I had already been told information about slower all wood blades long before. I was trying to convince a friend not to buy a TB ZLC when he was my level. At the time I had switched up from a Primorac Off- back to a Clipper.
But after talking to them I moved back down to a Stiga Allround Evolution. And it was the right thing to do.
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