Hey man its hella cool you post these games up and that you are working on your game. I keep noticing your feet, and i can see you are trying to stay low and wide, which is great. But if i could point out 1 thing, it's that your heals are always on the ground. Even if you have to play a little less wide it will be worth trying to always stay on the balls of your feet and keep moving. Even do a few laps around the table trying to stay in your serve receive position with both feet moving together as practice. If you can stay moving on the balls of your feet, it will stop you from reaching and being caught out of position.
Great videos! and great advice. Stay on the balls of your feet more. I would even set up a little closer to the table and a little more on the backhand corner which will force you to play many more forehand wing attack shots. Your set up is that of a forehand wing attacker, but I notice you instantly start squaring up to the table and falling back. My coach in the early 90's used to draw a box on the backhand corner and any ball out of that box I was attacking with my forehand on the 3rd and 5th balls after the serve. Def start working on turning your right foot 90 degrees or more so you can clear the hips and legs to build a "load" before a weight shift.
Probably your best opponent so far. He has good serves and returns, attacks from both sides, blocks and pushes, the whole gamut. If Eric's serves were oriented at making points directly, Dallas had follow-ups too. The match had quite a number of high quality rallies. Congratulations on having adopted the good habit of returning to neutral so fast and so consistently. It's a good thing the acquired improvements remain and don't vanish after the first successful implementation. I believe your next focus area is spin awareness. You still made 10 direct errors on return and gave a few easy ones for him to attack. From my viewer's position it was fairly easy to see if Dallas' serves were side+back or side(+top) but you seem to indiscriminately flick them back. Just like with Eric, you need to develop an eye for the opponent's serve motion, the contact point and the way the ball is coming at you, in order to discern backspin from topspin. This requires experience through match practice, but you can probably develop the eye by watching instructional videos on serves and returns. There are a few other things you can choose as next step, but I would focus on one only. Pick the one that appeals to you most - when an attack is available in the center of the table, you should start shifting more to the forehand than the backhand; the standard approach is: 2/3 of the table is fh, 1/3 is bh. Right now you are "running around the forehand" which is not the right course - serve variation; you serve mostly backhand sidespin, with top or back, short to the forehand; this made it very easy for him to return; you did vary towards the end, placing to his bh or middle, a little longer and included some fh serves too; there are many more options, look at his serve variation for comparison - now that you have adopted a neutral stance with the bat, you should also start activating your feet; you are rather "grounded", with the weight on your heels, while you should be in a continuous state of potential motion by bringing your weight forward, activating the front of your feet Are you watching instructionals? Pingskills is a good choice for basics. Ti Long is a top player and coach for basics and advanced. There are many others. Beware though of watching videos as a substitute for actual practice - I don't think you'll fall in that trap.
Do you really think that THIS: ua-cam.com/video/LmQNDC-1Ew0/v-deo.html is in any way, shape or form recommendable basic technique? Hate to say it because I really like the two guys as people, but Pingskills is... "dubious" at best. Ti Long is decent, especially in power generation mechanics due to his martial arts background, and in his videos he physically blocks his student's arm to not do the massive silly overswing Alois and Jeff are /intentionally teaching/ because that's just a huge red flag, but Ti Long also teaches some questionable other stuff (which he himself doesn't do when playing), and the problem with Ti Long is that he doesn't have any videos on how the actual game works other than stroke mechanics. The problem with instructional videos is that there's A LOT of questionable advice out there, sometimes even from very good players, and to judge the quality of a video, a viewer would need to know what an actually good and useable technique looks like, and if the viewer knew, they would not need instructional videos...
@@Gruntle-i8w Well that's why experienced players can weed it out for the novices. We can also debate it on the novice's home soil :) I agree that the particular video by Pingskills has ill advice on the follow-through. I would say though that you're good to go with 90% of what they teach and Ti Long probably close to 100%. There are others out there, like Dan and the gang but they have gone for match entertainment lately. No source is 100% reliable, nor you, me or the coaches we've had. Myself I'm getting conflicting advice from high level coaches in my club or on the internet. Eventually you have to make up your own mind and develop a personal style that works for you. I find the likes of Pingskills help more than they hurt, but we can disagree about that. Cheers!
This is a really good discussion because someone like me basically signs up/subscribes to everyone on UA-cam and just absorbes all types of information and it's really hard to distinguish what is good and what isn't. I subscribed to the PingSkills podcast way back when they released regular episodes and found them entertaining/interesting, but didn't really need the 'joke of the day' to improve my ping pong skills. Even in the comments of that video they say: "Yeah, the follow through in today's game is probably too big." And interestingly enought I really, REALLY like Ti long, and he has one video that teaches how to increase spin on a backhand push. I implemented that a few months ago and was called out on it for bad form (probably because I was doing it really wrong) and when I went to a more 'basic' form, my backhand pushes improved quite a bit. I just don't think I'm at the stage to implement some more advanced techniques on basic forms yet, but I do like Ti Long a lot.
@@BenSucksAtPingPong Okay, if you find it interesting, let's share opinions. (UA-cam keeps eating this, I split this into 2 posts, one less productive, one more. Lets see if this works) For Ti Long, I assume you mean this video: ua-cam.com/video/48EfpeM-KLw/v-deo.html since that's literally the title. And watching that, I must apologize profoundly - when I wrote that Ti Long was decent, I didn't actually watch a recent videos, and the last time I watched any of his was quite a few years back, when he was posting his very first videos. Seem like Ti Long has gone full fake master on us. :( Okay, so, he now has a "world record". Let's look at that. Fastest table tennis shot? That doesn't sound very useful. Who records those... records? Guiness book? instagram.com/tabletennistilong_pro/p/C5kffrJB6_A/ That for sure looks like guiness book apparel, unfortunate that we don't really see the certificate. The stuff we do see is merch can buy for 7 pounds at the guiness store tho, no need to hold a record... (gwrstore.com/products/official-attempt-medallion) So let's look at the records. Yeah, they list a fastest table tennis shot, but...: www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/426620-fastest-table-tennis-hit-male No Ti Long, record holder is Łukasz Budner, a Polish Amateur at 116kph (and we know Pros could likely hit harder with a few tries, it's just that inviting guiness judges is expensive and nobody gives a shit other than amateurs for the lulz). So no Guiness World record, then what? Ah, in the video he holds up an entirely different certificate: "International book of records" so... an indian certificate factory claiming that "everyone can hold a record", with no judges and with no requirements other than sending in a video. So, who else did he compete against for this record: internationalbookofrecords.com/records/fastest-table-tennis-ball-shot noone, he's the first and only record holder, where everyone can hold a record to promote their business. So,m how fast did he hit? 195kph??? WOW!!!! Considering that an actual World No. 1 can do "only" 113 kph (ua-cam.com/video/cuqbJVVTeeY/v-deo.html), and due to basic physics it should become exponentially more difficult to speed up the ball, and the hardest hitters can do around 110-120kph, 195kph really sounds superhuman, doesn't it? I have to see that! Since he had to send in a video, can we see the video he sent in? Ooooh yes, can do actually! ua-cam.com/video/NxIL2lqJc3s/v-deo.html So we see Ti Long, claiming that he wants "to surpass the polish record"... but we already know that's a guiness world record, with much more stringent requirements, and that hasn't changed, so we know he won't, and he didn't. We have shills/witnesses with no stated qualifications. The tool is a cheap hobby radar, known for false reads which you are supposed to disregard (7 year old kid throws baseball harder than major league superstars or radar misread? You decide: www.reddit.com/r/Homeplate/comments/169qnsk/issues_with_smart_coach_pocket_radar/) We see Ti Long hitting some balls, consistently scoring between 74 and 90 kph. Then suddenly, without doing anything different, the radar shows its max value, 195kph. The english shill a.k.a. "witness who makes sure the devices work" just applauds. The device then alternates between random values between 70-90kph, and always 195kph (never 194, never 196). Noone present seems to find this suspicious. When you compare video frames, a.k.a how many pixels the ball travels per frame, between a 74kph shot and an imaginary 195kph shot, the more-than-twice-as-fast ball should travel twice the distance per frame, right? Well, check it yourself in the UA-cam video, no highspeed footage necessary to find out that 195kph should be somewhat different than 80kph. The ball doesn't travel faster. 195kph is simply the toy's upper bounds setting/maximum measurement speed and it's an obvious radar misread. Shills and indian certificate factory don't care. So, we have a "coach", - who definitely knows that he didn't shoot the ball 3 times harder in some shots, - who should know how it should sound and how fast it should look if a ball suddenly travels 3 times faster than before if he has any TT experience. - who sees he has many many results in the to-be-expected range for someone who visibly isn't really hitting hard, but are a far cry from a world record. - who does youtube videos and should know that a video frame should show the distance the ball moves per frame to be two-three times higher. - who then still takes a max range false readout, and knowing he can't possibly even get a english beer factory world record, submits it to an indian certificate factory while buying guiness merch and posing it on instagram as a guiness record. - who then adds this fake world record to all his videos on his channel. - a channel which is supposed to have 150k subscribers, yet his world record video has only 2k views? So, either everyone present there is a complete d**ba** who has zero clue what they are doing, how the devices they use work or how different a table tennis ball would sound and look between 74kph and 195kph, or (which I feel is way more likely, but maybe I'm overestimating humanity): we have someone who has no qualms whatsoever to claim accolades which he fully well knows he didn't achieve and deceive his viewers and potential customers. Is any of these options a person you consider trustworthy to take advice from? For the table tennis in the video: - The students technique is perfectly fine to begin with. - Because the student is too good, Ti Long uses spin deception to force the student's ball to fly out. He's basically abusing the student to create clickbait. - The "fixed" push is always long, and not particularly fast. The stroke isn't a good short push anymore, it's a really low-quality "chop push", a different stroke that serves a different purpose. - By taking the wrist back so much, you telegraph to the opponent that it's going to go long. It destroys the surprise-effect of a long chop-push. Surprising the opponent with a variation of not-sure-what-spin-is-even-on-that-ball is much more important than highly predictable heavy spin. - There is zero discussion on what the stroke is used for in a tactical context, what the actual purpose of putting more spin is. - Ti Long is not really playing or engaging with his student to demonstrate anything in a match context, he's just standing there lazily serving low-quality multiballs and babbling nonsense. But the reason why I don't like this kind of discussion much is because if I trash that video, noone of us gains anything from it - just because I say "wrong!", that doesn't tell you the "right", and the way to develop is focusing on what's right, not on what's wrong.
hmmm, seems like the productive part is always getting eaten by youtube, so I can't really post a proper explanation of the aggressive push because I have no clue why it's deleting the posts. :( Lemme try to post 2 german video links (with subtitles, one baked in, the second on you gotta activate subtitles) Lesson 1: Pushing short (video has some baked-in english subtitles): ua-cam.com/video/GBsxqbBrDak/v-deo.html Lesson 2: Pushing long aggressively (need to switch on subtitles in youtube, not baked in!!). ua-cam.com/video/pfKN6kY3DK4/v-deo.html The coach is Philipp Floritz, he's currently as I'm writing this rank 15 in the German national ranking with a rating of 2451 TTR (For reference, Dimitry Ovtcharov - world rank 19 - has 2623 TTR, Patrick Franziska - world rank 12 - has 2598 TTR)
Hi, as a 2 star coach all the way from england. i would say you played very well considering that you have only played for 4 months. i can can see you have picked up some bad habits in this game such as; standing too far from the table serving with your backhand (which isnt a bad habit) at the same place with the same spin which the opponent can get used to as the match goes on. feedback: do avoid standing back try and stand more forward to the table so you dont end up reaching to attack the ball like i saw u did at the start of the match, as this used to be a bad habit of mine as well. what helped me was taking one or two steps forward just before the ball is in play (when the opponent is serving) as it helps to bring you closer and more central to the table. WINNING YOU MORE POINTS. as for the server, i can say your serve isnt bad but just before u try and serve just see where the opponent is stood, for example is he stood close to the table serve fast and long to his body making him having to move for the ball and panic. secondly vary the spin on the ball, and practice your serve more varying your serves with either back spin, top spin or backspin/ side spin or topspin/sidespin. If you search up Craig Bryant on yt he gives much more better info than i do on serves> Your Progress is impressive Keep it Up
In this comment on the rubber glueing video, he mentioned having played his rubbers for 2 years: ua-cam.com/video/dzd9gKMS4Mo/v-deo.html&lc=UgzVUTayZxXBf0xQn-l4AaABAg.AAOhRb3HgsbAAQfR72w4om And in another comment (don't recall where), he once mentioned having been on the LP crew, which I assume is for example why he's doing all the "This is where I would normally twiddle but now I have pips-in so I don't do that anymore" movements with his fingers after every other stroke. So that's prolly many more years of aquiring bad habits. Agreed on the "too close to table" part. For me, my coaches fixed that by standing right behind me when playing fast drill and just body-blocking me. Which never really happened because as soon as they stood there I was being super conscious about my movements to not hit them with my racket. But this very heightened consciousness about my position while drilling made me progress on the issue really fast I feel, more so than just being told to pay attention to it. I've been doing the same to other beginners, and also never got hit or bumped. I'm very reluctant to tell people that they should put a seperator or other obstacle behind them as I still worry that they'll trip over it backwards and impale themselves. :P Maybe sometimes there's a extra player in the hall who could occasionally do the body blocking for Ben.
Thank you! I've been playing longer than 4 months, but I have only been recording my play these past few months and I think my progress has been a LOT faster because of it. Thank you for the tips!
Yes, I've actually been playing many years (at work, etc) but I have been playing serioulsy (with coaching, clubs, tournaments, etc for about 3 years. I have just noticed that now that I'm moving more, I might be moving BACK too much as you've also noticed. Hopefully the awareness will be enought, but if not, maybe a partition will help before putting someone back there.
Hey man its hella cool you post these games up and that you are working on your game. I keep noticing your feet, and i can see you are trying to stay low and wide, which is great. But if i could point out 1 thing, it's that your heals are always on the ground. Even if you have to play a little less wide it will be worth trying to always stay on the balls of your feet and keep moving. Even do a few laps around the table trying to stay in your serve receive position with both feet moving together as practice. If you can stay moving on the balls of your feet, it will stop you from reaching and being caught out of position.
This is really good advice, and something I will focus on the next club night - THANK YOU! I appreciate all of your support!
Gotta stay on my toes!
Great videos! and great advice. Stay on the balls of your feet more. I would even set up a little closer to the table and a little more on the backhand corner which will force you to play many more forehand wing attack shots. Your set up is that of a forehand wing attacker, but I notice you instantly start squaring up to the table and falling back. My coach in the early 90's used to draw a box on the backhand corner and any ball out of that box I was attacking with my forehand on the 3rd and 5th balls after the serve. Def start working on turning your right foot 90 degrees or more so you can clear the hips and legs to build a "load" before a weight shift.
Probably your best opponent so far. He has good serves and returns, attacks from both sides, blocks and pushes, the whole gamut.
If Eric's serves were oriented at making points directly, Dallas had follow-ups too. The match had quite a number of high quality rallies.
Congratulations on having adopted the good habit of returning to neutral so fast and so consistently. It's a good thing the acquired improvements remain and don't vanish after the first successful implementation.
I believe your next focus area is spin awareness. You still made 10 direct errors on return and gave a few easy ones for him to attack. From my viewer's position it was fairly easy to see if Dallas' serves were side+back or side(+top) but you seem to indiscriminately flick them back. Just like with Eric, you need to develop an eye for the opponent's serve motion, the contact point and the way the ball is coming at you, in order to discern backspin from topspin. This requires experience through match practice, but you can probably develop the eye by watching instructional videos on serves and returns.
There are a few other things you can choose as next step, but I would focus on one only. Pick the one that appeals to you most
- when an attack is available in the center of the table, you should start shifting more to the forehand than the backhand; the standard approach is: 2/3 of the table is fh, 1/3 is bh. Right now you are "running around the forehand" which is not the right course
- serve variation; you serve mostly backhand sidespin, with top or back, short to the forehand; this made it very easy for him to return; you did vary towards the end, placing to his bh or middle, a little longer and included some fh serves too; there are many more options, look at his serve variation for comparison
- now that you have adopted a neutral stance with the bat, you should also start activating your feet; you are rather "grounded", with the weight on your heels, while you should be in a continuous state of potential motion by bringing your weight forward, activating the front of your feet
Are you watching instructionals? Pingskills is a good choice for basics. Ti Long is a top player and coach for basics and advanced. There are many others. Beware though of watching videos as a substitute for actual practice - I don't think you'll fall in that trap.
Do you really think that THIS:
ua-cam.com/video/LmQNDC-1Ew0/v-deo.html
is in any way, shape or form recommendable basic technique?
Hate to say it because I really like the two guys as people, but Pingskills is... "dubious" at best.
Ti Long is decent, especially in power generation mechanics due to his martial arts background, and in his videos he physically blocks his student's arm to not do the massive silly overswing Alois and Jeff are /intentionally teaching/ because that's just a huge red flag, but Ti Long also teaches some questionable other stuff (which he himself doesn't do when playing), and the problem with Ti Long is that he doesn't have any videos on how the actual game works other than stroke mechanics.
The problem with instructional videos is that there's A LOT of questionable advice out there, sometimes even from very good players, and to judge the quality of a video, a viewer would need to know what an actually good and useable technique looks like, and if the viewer knew, they would not need instructional videos...
@@Gruntle-i8w Well that's why experienced players can weed it out for the novices. We can also debate it on the novice's home soil :) I agree that the particular video by Pingskills has ill advice on the follow-through. I would say though that you're good to go with 90% of what they teach and Ti Long probably close to 100%. There are others out there, like Dan and the gang but they have gone for match entertainment lately.
No source is 100% reliable, nor you, me or the coaches we've had. Myself I'm getting conflicting advice from high level coaches in my club or on the internet. Eventually you have to make up your own mind and develop a personal style that works for you.
I find the likes of Pingskills help more than they hurt, but we can disagree about that.
Cheers!
This is a really good discussion because someone like me basically signs up/subscribes to everyone on UA-cam and just absorbes all types of information and it's really hard to distinguish what is good and what isn't.
I subscribed to the PingSkills podcast way back when they released regular episodes and found them entertaining/interesting, but didn't really need the 'joke of the day' to improve my ping pong skills.
Even in the comments of that video they say: "Yeah, the follow through in today's game is probably too big."
And interestingly enought I really, REALLY like Ti long, and he has one video that teaches how to increase spin on a backhand push. I implemented that a few months ago and was called out on it for bad form (probably because I was doing it really wrong) and when I went to a more 'basic' form, my backhand pushes improved quite a bit. I just don't think I'm at the stage to implement some more advanced techniques on basic forms yet, but I do like Ti Long a lot.
@@BenSucksAtPingPong Okay, if you find it interesting, let's share opinions. (UA-cam keeps eating this, I split this into 2 posts, one less productive, one more. Lets see if this works)
For Ti Long, I assume you mean this video:
ua-cam.com/video/48EfpeM-KLw/v-deo.html
since that's literally the title. And watching that, I must apologize profoundly - when I wrote that Ti Long was decent, I didn't actually watch a recent videos, and the last time I watched any of his was quite a few years back, when he was posting his very first videos.
Seem like Ti Long has gone full fake master on us. :(
Okay, so, he now has a "world record". Let's look at that. Fastest table tennis shot? That doesn't sound very useful. Who records those... records? Guiness book?
instagram.com/tabletennistilong_pro/p/C5kffrJB6_A/
That for sure looks like guiness book apparel, unfortunate that we don't really see the certificate.
The stuff we do see is merch can buy for 7 pounds at the guiness store tho, no need to hold a record...
(gwrstore.com/products/official-attempt-medallion)
So let's look at the records. Yeah, they list a fastest table tennis shot, but...:
www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/426620-fastest-table-tennis-hit-male
No Ti Long, record holder is Łukasz Budner, a Polish Amateur at 116kph (and we know Pros could likely hit harder with a few tries, it's just that inviting guiness judges is expensive and nobody gives a shit other than amateurs for the lulz).
So no Guiness World record, then what?
Ah, in the video he holds up an entirely different certificate:
"International book of records" so... an indian certificate factory claiming that "everyone can hold a record", with no judges and with no requirements other than sending in a video. So, who else did he compete against for this record:
internationalbookofrecords.com/records/fastest-table-tennis-ball-shot
noone, he's the first and only record holder, where everyone can hold a record to promote their business.
So,m how fast did he hit? 195kph??? WOW!!!!
Considering that an actual World No. 1 can do "only" 113 kph (ua-cam.com/video/cuqbJVVTeeY/v-deo.html), and due to basic physics it should become exponentially more difficult to speed up the ball, and the hardest hitters can do around 110-120kph, 195kph really sounds superhuman, doesn't it?
I have to see that! Since he had to send in a video, can we see the video he sent in?
Ooooh yes, can do actually!
ua-cam.com/video/NxIL2lqJc3s/v-deo.html
So we see Ti Long, claiming that he wants "to surpass the polish record"... but we already know that's a guiness world record, with much more stringent requirements, and that hasn't changed, so we know he won't, and he didn't.
We have shills/witnesses with no stated qualifications.
The tool is a cheap hobby radar, known for false reads which you are supposed to disregard (7 year old kid throws baseball harder than major league superstars or radar misread? You decide: www.reddit.com/r/Homeplate/comments/169qnsk/issues_with_smart_coach_pocket_radar/)
We see Ti Long hitting some balls, consistently scoring between 74 and 90 kph. Then suddenly, without doing anything different, the radar shows its max value, 195kph. The english shill a.k.a. "witness who makes sure the devices work" just applauds.
The device then alternates between random values between 70-90kph, and always 195kph (never 194, never 196). Noone present seems to find this suspicious.
When you compare video frames, a.k.a how many pixels the ball travels per frame, between a 74kph shot and an imaginary 195kph shot, the more-than-twice-as-fast ball should travel twice the distance per frame, right? Well, check it yourself in the UA-cam video, no highspeed footage necessary to find out that 195kph should be somewhat different than 80kph. The ball doesn't travel faster. 195kph is simply the toy's upper bounds setting/maximum measurement speed and it's an obvious radar misread.
Shills and indian certificate factory don't care.
So, we have a "coach",
- who definitely knows that he didn't shoot the ball 3 times harder in some shots,
- who should know how it should sound and how fast it should look if a ball suddenly travels 3 times faster than before if he has any TT experience.
- who sees he has many many results in the to-be-expected range for someone who visibly isn't really hitting hard, but are a far cry from a world record.
- who does youtube videos and should know that a video frame should show the distance the ball moves per frame to be two-three times higher.
- who then still takes a max range false readout, and knowing he can't possibly even get a english beer factory world record, submits it to an indian certificate factory while buying guiness merch and posing it on instagram as a guiness record.
- who then adds this fake world record to all his videos on his channel.
- a channel which is supposed to have 150k subscribers, yet his world record video has only 2k views?
So, either everyone present there is a complete d**ba** who has zero clue what they are doing, how the devices they use work or how different a table tennis ball would sound and look between 74kph and 195kph, or (which I feel is way more likely, but maybe I'm overestimating humanity): we have someone who has no qualms whatsoever to claim accolades which he fully well knows he didn't achieve and deceive his viewers and potential customers.
Is any of these options a person you consider trustworthy to take advice from?
For the table tennis in the video:
- The students technique is perfectly fine to begin with.
- Because the student is too good, Ti Long uses spin deception to force the student's ball to fly out. He's basically abusing the student to create clickbait.
- The "fixed" push is always long, and not particularly fast. The stroke isn't a good short push anymore, it's a really low-quality "chop push", a different stroke that serves a different purpose.
- By taking the wrist back so much, you telegraph to the opponent that it's going to go long. It destroys the surprise-effect of a long chop-push. Surprising the opponent with a variation of not-sure-what-spin-is-even-on-that-ball is much more important than highly predictable heavy spin.
- There is zero discussion on what the stroke is used for in a tactical context, what the actual purpose of putting more spin is.
- Ti Long is not really playing or engaging with his student to demonstrate anything in a match context, he's just standing there lazily serving low-quality multiballs and babbling nonsense.
But the reason why I don't like this kind of discussion much is because if I trash that video, noone of us gains anything from it - just because I say "wrong!", that doesn't tell you the "right", and the way to develop is focusing on what's right, not on what's wrong.
hmmm, seems like the productive part is always getting eaten by youtube, so I can't really post a proper explanation of the aggressive push because I have no clue why it's deleting the posts. :(
Lemme try to post 2 german video links (with subtitles, one baked in, the second on you gotta activate subtitles)
Lesson 1: Pushing short (video has some baked-in english subtitles):
ua-cam.com/video/GBsxqbBrDak/v-deo.html
Lesson 2: Pushing long aggressively (need to switch on subtitles in youtube, not baked in!!).
ua-cam.com/video/pfKN6kY3DK4/v-deo.html
The coach is Philipp Floritz, he's currently as I'm writing this rank 15 in the German national ranking with a rating of 2451 TTR (For reference, Dimitry Ovtcharov - world rank 19 - has 2623 TTR, Patrick Franziska - world rank 12 - has 2598 TTR)
Hi, as a 2 star coach all the way from england. i would say you played very well considering that you have only played for 4 months.
i can can see you have picked up some bad habits in this game such as;
standing too far from the table
serving with your backhand (which isnt a bad habit) at the same place with the same spin which the opponent can get used to as the match goes on.
feedback:
do avoid standing back try and stand more forward to the table so you dont end up reaching to attack the ball like i saw u did at the start of the match, as this used to be a bad habit of mine as well. what helped me was taking one or two steps forward just before the ball is in play (when the opponent is serving) as it helps to bring you closer and more central to the table. WINNING YOU MORE POINTS.
as for the server, i can say your serve isnt bad but just before u try and serve just see where the opponent is stood, for example is he stood close to the table serve fast and long to his body making him having to move for the ball and panic. secondly vary the spin on the ball, and practice your serve more varying your serves with either back spin, top spin or backspin/ side spin or topspin/sidespin.
If you search up Craig Bryant on yt he gives much more better info than i do on serves>
Your Progress is impressive
Keep it Up
In this comment on the rubber glueing video, he mentioned having played his rubbers for 2 years: ua-cam.com/video/dzd9gKMS4Mo/v-deo.html&lc=UgzVUTayZxXBf0xQn-l4AaABAg.AAOhRb3HgsbAAQfR72w4om
And in another comment (don't recall where), he once mentioned having been on the LP crew, which I assume is for example why he's doing all the "This is where I would normally twiddle but now I have pips-in so I don't do that anymore" movements with his fingers after every other stroke. So that's prolly many more years of aquiring bad habits.
Agreed on the "too close to table" part. For me, my coaches fixed that by standing right behind me when playing fast drill and just body-blocking me. Which never really happened because as soon as they stood there I was being super conscious about my movements to not hit them with my racket.
But this very heightened consciousness about my position while drilling made me progress on the issue really fast I feel, more so than just being told to pay attention to it.
I've been doing the same to other beginners, and also never got hit or bumped.
I'm very reluctant to tell people that they should put a seperator or other obstacle behind them as I still worry that they'll trip over it backwards and impale themselves. :P
Maybe sometimes there's a extra player in the hall who could occasionally do the body blocking for Ben.
Thank you! I've been playing longer than 4 months, but I have only been recording my play these past few months and I think my progress has been a LOT faster because of it. Thank you for the tips!
Yes, I've actually been playing many years (at work, etc) but I have been playing serioulsy (with coaching, clubs, tournaments, etc for about 3 years.
I have just noticed that now that I'm moving more, I might be moving BACK too much as you've also noticed. Hopefully the awareness will be enought, but if not, maybe a partition will help before putting someone back there.