We Play A Technical Sport: Work on Your Technique

Directed at U1400 players especially - using bed and floor serves to work on your technique

Technique is king in our sport.  It's impossible to make good shots repeatedly without good technique.  This is probably true for just about every major sport, and true for all racket sports.  However, in table tennis, the small table size, the light weight of the ball, the influence of spin and the variety of equipment that people can use to play makes technique especially important.  Major improvements in technique lead very quickly to major improvements in playing level, even when other factors like fitness level and health and even movement remain the same.

Acquiring new technique takes time, but it will do much more for your game than any purely strategic adjustment will, though in our sport, most strategic adjustments are tied to technical changes.  Better technique is about being able to consistently hit and return more types of balls on the spectrums of spin, speed and placement, and especially on the higher ends of those spectrums.

Work on your technique.  The simplest way to do so no matter what level you are as a player (mostly if you use inverted rubbers) is to get away from the table and work on putting spin on the ball.  Do floor and bed serves and try to get as much backspin, sidespin and topspin as possible using fine, brushing contact.  Floor and bed serves work because they give you instant feedback on how much spin you are producing.

Here are some potential results:

1) The skills from timing the ball better will lead to better/spinnier serves, better spin loops and better pushes.  

2) The muscles in your hand and wrist will get stronger with the practice enabling you to spin the ball more and hit the ball harder with shorter strokes.  

3) Your feel for the ball will get better.  

4) The arm motion on those floor serves is pretty similar to the arm motion on slow spin loops and slow spin loops will radically improve your ability to attack backspin and to beat people who are not used to dealing with the level of spin you put on the ball (and this level of spin problem always changes as you get better and better at TT).

5) Your pushes will get better, as the stroke for a push is similar to the stroke for a backspin serve.

6) You will get better at varying spin because since you can generate more spin, you can always choose to generate less, while without being able to generate more, you couldn't really vary spin.

To cut a long story short, all your strokes should largely get better because the motion for serving and the use of elbow and wrist is pretty similar to what you will be doing with a lot of balls when your TT gets better.  And you will be able to decide whether to use more speed or less speed.

Once you develop a good (top)spin strokes, you leave one class of opponents behind and begin to face another class of opponents fairly quickly.  So why not invest the most time on what will pay the most dividends (improving your ability to generate spin) as opposed to just doing things that get you far less bang for the buck (assuming that you play sufficiently to care about improving)?  Look at the topspin production drill that Waldner performs at the end of the video.  It's an example of using feedback to assess the quality of one's stroke.

One of the reasons why many people do not work on their topspin is that they unfortunately believe that if they don't have perfect technique (bent knees, etc.) they cannot topspin.  The truth is that table tennis, as a racket sport, first and foremost depends on arm mechanics.  Players with higher goals and more time who start as kids are taught more good habits and learn to model better players almost instinctively.  For the rest of us, if we patiently get the arm mechanics right, and can add some body turn to it, we will win 90% of the battle, which is probably much more than what most people think they can win.  And you may not even have to bend your knees.  

The other is a patience issue - learning to spin the ball and get the timing right for off center contact takes time, and many people want quick results, end up rushing and using shortcuts that create bad technique and tense muscles.  That's why it's best to start with floor and bed serves, where the ball is relatively controllable - learning in table tennis is like everything else, where you should start simple and increase the difficulty with time.  (Always try to stay relaxed - ask yourself every 5 minutes or so while learning whether you are relaxed).  But if you don't start, it's almost impossible to get there without miracles.  Why wait for miracles when you can do floor and bed serves today?