What Role Does the Left Hand Play for a Right-Handed Player?
This is a brand-new, technique-focused column in a Q and A format. The mystery guests providing answers are two former national team players (both veteran coaches) who prefer to remain anonymous.
Question: When facing an opponent using short pimples on the backhand, what serves are most effective? Besides a short forehand ball and a long backhand ball, can I serve short to their backhand?
Short pimples don’t fear speed — they fear spin. If you serve short to their backhand and they’re a skilled player, they can flick it right back at you and it’s very uncomfortable. Against short pimples, you must open with long, heavy spin. The deeper the ball, the more the pimples struggle.
Go primarily with long backspin. The opponent will have a miserable time: they can’t loop it and it tends to slip off. Avoid serving topspin — if they push it back, you’re the one who has trouble.
Pimples in general don’t fear short balls. A short-pimple player can attack a short ball directly. Why do they hate long balls? Because they have to actively drive through the ball, and pimple rubber has no arc — so they make a lot of errors. On a deep ball, short pimples can still do a lift-loop. Long pimples and anti-spin can only borrow force — they have no good answer for depth.
Question: When I loop forward topspin, I tend to drop my weight very low. Sometimes retreating two or three meters, the incoming ball is low and flat, and I’m nearly squatting to counter-loop in order to keep my trajectory above the net. Is this correct?
Not correct. Squatting too much means you’re generating too much upward force, which reduces the forward force — so ball quality suffers.
If the ball is low, why not wait for it to rise a little before looping, instead of waiting for it to drop very low before swinging?
First reason: you’re not reading the incoming ball’s depth clearly.
Second reason: your footwork can’t adjust the body height up and down.
Third reason: you have no reference point for the incoming ball, so you can’t regulate your own body height.
Fourth reason: your leg muscles aren’t strong enough to constantly adjust footwork along the direction and position of the incoming ball. If your stance is too wide it will stress your thighs and knee joints. Legs too far apart usually means insufficient thigh strength.
Reading depth is the same as reading height: use the left hand to point at the ball as a reference to judge the contact point. Regulate body height up and down using the height of the left hand as a guide.
Use the left hand to point to the contact point for the ball, and use the right leg to adjust the body’s forward-backward weight. Short ball — step in; long ball — step back half a step.
The Left Hand’s Many Roles
Now let’s focus specifically on what the left hand is doing when you hold the paddle in your right hand.
The left hand has a huge range of uses — especially for women players using close-to-the-table rapid footwork, where it helps quickly adjust body height.
Because the left and right arms are the same length, keeping the left elbow the same distance from your body as the right elbow means the left middle fingertip marks the optimal contact point for an attacking stroke.
The left fingertip plus the rotation of the waist gives you the explosive topspin contact point. The height of the left hand is the height at which the right hand adjusts for incoming spin.
When the incoming ball is backspin: the right hand is one paddle-width lower than the left, drawn back. When it’s topspin: the right hand is slightly higher than the left, weight pressed down. For a flat ball, both hands are at the same height.
On receive banana-flip: the left middle finger is the force point for the flip. On push-short: the height of the left hand is the backswing height — and so on.
The uses are too many to list. Because you’re using the left hand, your contact point becomes much clearer. The length, height, and direction of the backswing all become more defined.
For a right-handed grip, using the left hand well means more relaxation, better rhythm, and a cleaner sense of the contact point. Backswing length and shot quality are both elevated. The left hand isn’t just for body balance — it serves a role on nearly every single shot. Practice it, and you’ll keep finding more uses.