How to Improve Quickly When Practice Time Is Limited
This is a brand-new, technique-focused column in a Q and A format. The mystery guest providing answers is a former national team player (and veteran coach) who prefers to remain anonymous — they just want a quiet life and a good night’s sleep, not fame.
Question: As a skilled amateur who is also middle-aged, how do you keep improving when time for practice is limited?
At your age, ten or fifteen games shouldn’t be that tiring. Most likely you’re wasting a lot of energy unnecessarily.
Table tennis is about using a short burst of explosive force at just the right moment. If your legs, body, and arm are already loading too early, you’ll tire out quickly.
What you need to learn: at the instant of contact only — and only then — clench and drive every part of the body involved in hitting the ball. That’s when ball quality skyrockets. At all other times, aside from the front foot and knee carrying your weight, everything else should be relaxed.
If you genuinely have a physical issue and can’t generate power, learn to borrow power from the opponent — use spin, angle, timing variation, short-long variation, serve, and other individual techniques in combination. For example: serve no-spin to set up an aggressive topspin; combine return speed with angle, or mix spin with placement and depth. These tactics are very effective. Use more technical combinations and avoid being one-dimensional.
Question: I always feel like I’m not driving through the ball enough — it doesn’t feel solid. What should I do?
You’ve fallen into a common trap. Punching through the ball doesn’t require a lot of force — a single finger is enough.
It’s the same principle as a backspin push. On your pushes, you’re almost certainly not contacting the ball solidly enough. First, practice the feeling of truly catching the ball. If your push is solid and clean, your topspin loop will be solid and clean too.
Feel the contact at your fingertip. Relax the shoulder, upper arm, forearm, and wrist completely. At the moment your fingertips contact the ball, go from loose to tight, from slow to fast, and suddenly brake — you must find that sensation. Once you do, hitting the ball becomes effortless and the quality is very high.
Punching through doesn’t need big force; it needs a clever snap. You need to clearly feel the moment you grip the blade and brake — going from loose to tight, then accelerating to a sudden stop. Relaxed, then explosive. Right now what you need to learn is not how to generate power but how to relax.
The feeling people describe as generating heavy spin — holding the ball long on the blade — is actually a ball that seems to sit on the rubber for a long time before leaving, and then comes off extremely fast. Relaxed, then explosive: practice feeling that repeatedly.