Yes, It's good to see you playing where you are the stronger one. So you started this game pushing back all his long serves and getting set to defend. Beginning with the point at 1:32 it's like you flipped a switch and realized you weren't still playing the first guy. From then on you were much more active in the rallies. So I can understand that's how you want to play, looping from both sides. And the mid-distance you like to go to supports that perfectly. You just can't block from back there.
I actually think the point at 1:32 was your best of the game, despite you losing the point. It visibly causes you some mental anguish to miss shots and lose points. This is natural, but it's hurting your development. These are practice matches, the point is not so much to win as to practice. So you really need to shift that mental pain to playing passively instead of winning or losing points. Try recording yourself at least a little every time you play. Watch it back and only judge yourself on whether you were active or passive at the right times. Don't judge the technique or results at all. You won't have to watch too much video before you start feeling it real time in games too.
It's not always bad to be passive or defend. If you are in trouble off the serve and receive then mindlessly attacking with no chance won't get you anywhere either. But this mismatch between how you think you want to play and how you actually default to playing is holding you back, and it could be fairly easy to resolve it.
Two coach sayings that helped me in this respect:
Brian Pace "Nobody cares how many practice matches you win."
NextLevel "Whether a shot lands on the table is not the most important thing." (paraphrasing NL, but he is here and can refine)
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- Thread starter UpSideDownCarl
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Coaches should be respected for teaching what "works", regardless of whether the physical or technical explanation is entirely correct. And I am fairly certain that what Guy is teaching "works", though as I have always said on the backhand that there are many options.
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Your game is too clean, you have to find something that troubles your opponent even if he is a better player than you are. Think about the elements of winning points and which one you want to develop - I would start with serve and third ball or ball placement - but there are definitely many options. You look like a very solid player, you just need IMHO to look for ways to get the opponent under pressure first rather than absorb the pressure all the time. You do a great job absorbing pressure so you might just decide to angle balls a bit more or hook balls a bit more but you need to avoid putting the ball on table and putting the best into the rally. Most high level TT has average point length shorter than 4 shots because the good players bring their weapons early and make you lucky to get into a rally. You have built up all the rally stuff but need to learn to bring the pressure earlier in the point.
There also some things you do with your footwork that slow you down and compromise your forehand seriously, you need to plan out your foot positioning and footwork better to improve your aggressiveness and rally speed.
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BRS gave you a lot of great comments. I think, like he said, you are sitting on a bit of untapped athleticism and I think it might be because you have a safety first mindset rather than a hit the ball powerfully and spin it more until it stops going off the table mindset. You need to be in the aggressive mindset with your feet all the time, you sometimes get into backhand stances or relax the pressure out of your knees, and when the ball comes back, if it is fast, you just touch it rather than playing a stroke. You should practice a broader range of power shots in motion in practice and see what your limits are. It is the only way to get better, putting the ball on the table all the time doesn't let you understand your stroke or how to adjust to the ball to get the effect you desire.
The biggest thing to work on is those reaching forehand blocks. Set your feet and play a real block or play a real topspin, but those reaching blocks are costing you points. You have lots of potential, don't waste it trying to put the ball in practice when you haven't tested the limits of the power you can bring to the ball.
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I've got a short clip on serve and attack, then backhand practice, and 2x practice matches. The last set of practice match 1 went to 22-20.. I think my friend got too exhausted, so he didn't want to play the deciding set.
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Since I am trying to rebuild my backhand (or actually, go back to what made my backhand special while refining a few things), you asked at the right time.
For me, this is still the best video on backhand topspin technique out there. I don't understand a word of it nowadays, but I remember that when someone translated it, there was stuff about "unsheathing the sword" and forming a crane or something with the shape of your elbow to the paddle.
Why is a video on the backhand flick a good video on the backhand topspin? Because understanding the backhand flick helps you see the importance of elbow position. If you want to play a powerful backhand topspin, your elbow position has to be out to the side and front so you have room to pull the racket into the ball. Many people see a powerful backhand think of it as throwing a frisbee. This is true but powerful frisbee toss needs to lead with the elbow. If your elbow is close to or just besides you, you cannot play a powerful backhand topspin with ease because your motion will be more left to right than back to front.
If you fix that part, in my opinion, a lot of stuff becomes easier. But if you don't fix that, a lot of backhands look good and somewhat correct, and some may even feel safe and good, but you can play all of them with your elbow leading and they will all be easier to execute and more powerful.
Start with this video which has other tips but the main one I want to you see is the importance of elbow positioning.:
The thing is that compared to video, I actually don't swing per se, backswing with my handle facing the target, then I pull the racket to the finishing position in a circle. So it looks a bit like this:
MY technique doesn't have quite the same finishing position as he does and I try to get my racket head pointing towards me on the backswing. But other than that, everything else he says about elbow positioning etc, is pretty much how I would teach it. You can make it really small or large.- the better you backswing, the more room you have to swing towards the ball as opposed to finishing with your racket pointing sideways. Some day, I may post my backhand training so you can see what I mean. In any case, good luck, hope all this helps a little bit.
The short below shows how my ideal backhand finishing position looks, but again, there are many roads to Rome, and there are lots of shorts of good backhands that don't look like this.
https://youtu.be/txi2Y-7ZoTU
I will post one example so that you realize in the end you can have an effective stroke with a different finishing position:
https://youtu.be/uCzYGk8XA7U
Your forehand 3rd ball is very consistent and spinny. And I like how you redirected to play down the line at the end of the clip. That's how you would play vs a penholder irl. His pushes were a little too easy to give you max benefit imo. Would suggest you let him push to 70% or 80% of the table and you try to play all forehands. Your fh does look to be well ahead of your bh right now, so you'd like to play fh over as much of the table as possible.
You also have a very different stance for fh and bh. Your feet are pretty much in a straight line when you practice backhands, and much more side-on for the serve and attack. You also stand with your feet quite far apart, looks like almost 2x shoulder width if I am judging it accurately on YT. So I'd like to see in the exercise how far you can move with your feet that wide, and also how fast you can flip your feet between that fh and bh position, because they are so different. Nothing wrong with that at all, it's good if you can adjust so fast actually. I'm just curious if in matches you end up playing some backhands out of your fh stance or vice versa. That would add difficulty.
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Thank you Brs for the tips!
I shall try and do that in my next practice.
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All table tennis technique is debatable, in the end most people just copy what the best players do and call it optimal technique. Sometimes, there is logic, sometimes there isn't. Mental reads and athleticism can make all things workable, even the supposedly impossible. After all, there are still people who say that something is technically wrong with Timo Boll's forehand, and it is one of the best in the world.
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IT is mostly so you can direct your momentum towards the ball. Cocking the wrist back towards you isn't something you force, it is ideally a side effect but what usually happens when your elbow is close to your body is that a lot of momentum goes sideways. Part of the reason why it is good to learn hitting technique before topspin technique is that you want your strokes to line up with the ball as much as possible, You don't want to think brush from the start as if you are avoiding the ball, you want to approach the ball with as much surface area as you can for as long as you can before to reduce the risk of missing contact. If the elbow is too close, the backhand has a very short window to line up with the ball. If you watch Ti Long's channel, he is working right now with a high level player with a traditional backhand which is completely excellent and they are talking through some of the nuances of what he has to do to modernize his technique. Obviously the player has fine technique, so these are all subtleties.
I have one more question: how much rotated should the body be on the forehand at contact and in finish?
Ma long here seems to have the left shoulder still in front at contact and finishes the turn after contact
https://youtu.be/jig_5SLN2Eo
On the other hand dima here seems to be chest face on and even rotates the right shoulder ahead at finish
https://youtu.be/7lUlC6uaibc
Is that just a function of intensity of their training? How much turned should the trunk be at contact?
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It has been a long time since I last posted a video of my TT. Here goes. Below is a match of me playing against a better player who uses one side long pimple and the other side tacky rubber. Naturally I lost badly, I was so confused with the spin. I played like a headless chicken. The purpose of this video is to show what happens when you are clueless about spin.
p/s I hope to put up a video of me playing against conventional player, that is to say, two side inverted rubber soon and hopefully with fingers crossed, I would not appear to suck so badly at it.
I think you turn up way too much. Can only hit backhand on the left side of the body if you kill it and have a lot of time. When the play becomes faster against better players you will have a hard time catching the ball if it goes to the forehand. If also think it easier to turn up the body and have time to do so on the backhand if you play a bit further away from the table but it will make it difficult to play short pimple forhand.
I recommend trying to hit the ball more in front of the body when playing backhand, or at least turn the body and not move the foot so long in front. Good luck 😀
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It is an individual result of how their athleticism makes them feel comfortable generating powerful strokes after years/decades of training. Very few players can get the depth of Ma Long's backswing consistently but if you can do it, sure, go for it. But for the rest of us, we just figure out with practice where we can hit and time the ball and get good quality. Half these techniques, my knees are too damaged to seriously copy them, so I make my own modifications. Even after lots of coaching, let's say you can hit the ball like Ma Long, but you get a better result and quality, which you can't explain, when you hit the ball like Dima or more likely your own way. What do you then do?
Do you decide you want to hit the ball like Ma Long? Or do you want the better quality for yourself when you hit the ball like Dima or more likely your own way? I have seen both choices by players even sometimes the same player choose both.- some players want to emulate the player they like the most, other players just want to play the best quality stroke for themselves, not really caring so much whether it is 100% textbook or not. In the end the principles of throwing things will not change, but how someone adapts it to table tennis consistency and timing and equipment is entirely personal. I prefer that such decisions be made for you by looking at what works in your game, the only exception is if people can see something that may cause problems as they get better.
What you are looking at is not one of them. IT can be answered almost entirely by looking at your results.
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You might consider taking these simple actions:
1) Research on the internet the basic information about how long pips work.
2) Ask this player if he would consider playing matches with you for 30-60 min once or twice a week and you pay him a small fee (maybe 1/5th of what you were paying your coach) so you can practice against this kind of player and learn how to play LP and how to read spin better.
It is worth understanding that any player who has that much trouble reading spin variations should, for his own development consider learning how to read spin a priority and also consider himself at the very beginner stage of the most central aspect of table tennis (understanding SPIN). Please understand, I don’t mean this as something negative. If I was you I would think of it as a positive that you know what you are weak at and you know what you need to work on: reading and responding to incoming spin (and/or DEAD BALLS).
if you take it to heart to learn the skill of reading what spin is on the ball, YOU WILL IMPROVE DRAMATICALLY.
With that skill of learning to read and respond to incoming spin you should also learn when to take controlled high spin, high arc loops, when to just softly place the ball back on the table with no spin, and when to smash or loop kill.
At the moment your default response is to swing wildly while you are stressed and rushing when you don’t know what spin is on the ball. All this does is cause you to miss. You would be better off just putting the racket out and letting the ball hit your blade face to see what happens so you can at least see what spin is on the ball.
Anyway, it would be worth playing with this guy or someone who plays like him so you can learn to handle incoming spin variations.
And also, thank you for posting. Personally, I think, if you really wrap your mind around it, this video could be very very useful and instructive for your development.
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Greg Letts has great articles on learning to play against long pips.
https://gregsttpages.com/archives/equipment/rubbers/how-long-pips-really-work/
Relative to our playing levels, DerEchte and myself are pretty decent, DerEchte because of his heavy spin, me because I trained in Philly where there were lots of good long pips players. It is good to serve topspin and backspin to the pips and train yourself to play the next ball as you should, use the sound of the pips contact to distinguish between it kills spin and when it lets it pass through, and just learn to look at the ball. Even if you still suck after playing for a month, your level of suck will at least be tolerable..
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We could write a WHOLE BOOK on how to play vs LP players. If you go to Korea, 80% of the women players and 10% of the men use inverted/LP. Take a vacation there and you will have full exposure.
I agree with Carl that it starts by understanding spin and how to read it... and how to make adjustments in both stroke/impact and position. An easy adjustment is when opponent hits with LP, you should MOVE IN some. That will help you with your timing. You move BACKWARDS nearly every time he does an LP bump.
I agree with NL that you can get some quick info from Greg Letts' articles. I read all of them and agree in principle with Greg... Greg has to over-simplify things, so I understand why he says what he says. Friction LP players still need to read spin and adjust... but their equipment gives them more room for some error and still keep it on the table. I played once a week with an LP bat in Korea just to understand it better and how they think/decide.
I think your success vs this player that you should easily defeat (but get wiped out) starts with understanding LPs (NL's suggestion) and goes to Carl (understand spin) then back to NL (Greg's articles on tactics and adjustments).
I play with heavy spin, overwhelming spin that even LP will not get on the table with their normal preferred grip and impact. NL plays another way (setup shot hit by them or through them) I win many points on serve vs LPs... remember that they have to read spin too. I give EXTRA HEAVY UNDERSPIN short or half-long at first... they net the first few... then I go no spin or light spin... then I get balls out... then when/if they adjust, those balls are high and ready for a loop kill. If they adjust, then I do the same fast/deep to their FH. They fail with inverted, so they use LP on their wide FH corner, which opens up the BH corner on my next shot. I also later serve deep near BH corner endline fast with heavy underspin... then I take away spin and get the same opportunities. Then I go back to short dead/low, then spin away the long return. Always keep them off balance and always attack first in good rhythm and timing. Spin and direction are big weapons... but it gets setup with first heavy underspin, then disguising it when you take away spin.
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The look on their face when they look at their rubbers thinking something is wrong there is PRECIOUS.
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