Right hand shake hand grip flick drills

Right hand Shake Hand grip 3rd Ball attack

One of the Fundamental techniques of table tennis is to attack after you serve. Wang Liqin 3 times World table tennis Champion shows his techniques to attack from FH & BH side of the table.

Right Hand shake-hand grip Server Techniques

Fundamental Serve technique which covers both long and short serve to the backhand corner and forehand corner. Wang Liqin the 3 times world table tennis champion showing his serve techniques. 

Reverse Penhold Backhand (RPB) Grip in Table Tennis

What Type of Player Uses this Grip?

This grip is currently being used by attacking style players who prefer to play with heavy topspin on both sides. As a relatively new grip, it remains to be seen whether its use for other styles will become popular. World No.1 Wang hao’s game has a tremendous difference after 2007 world championship. The major reason is the RPB grip. His game gets an advantage of attacking opponent at every corner of the table even when wang hao is receiving the serves.
On the forehand side, this grip is similar to the traditional Chinese penhold grip. On the backhand side, the use of the rpb grip removes the normal weakness of the Chinese penhold grip since it is able to produce a heavy topspin ball with good power and a wide reach. At the beginning it was a surprise stroke, gradually players had brought the stroke in regular game. Some players will use a mixture of the rpb grip and the Chinese penhold block and push on the backhand side to give more variation. The added side spin to the ball using RPB grip pushes the opponent always from the backhand side which gives a opening in the forehand side to finish the ball. But the stroke is quiet complex one.

Natural drawback occurs when the rpb grip is used exclusively from the backhand side, it suffers from the same problems as the shakehand grip, in that the player will have a crossover point, or an 'area of indecision', where the ball cannot be easily struck with the forehand or backhand side, and a decision to use one or the other stroke must be made. Another limitation of the rpb grip is that it is actually quite difficult to produce a topspin ball from the backhand side that does not have sidespin, and hitting down the line from the backhand side is more difficult than hitting crosscourt.

Service Practice - Training in Table Tennis/Ping-Pong

Doing it for Yourself
Practicing your serve is one of the easiest and best things that you can do to improve your table tennis. But it must be quality practice - half an hour of standing at the table serving random serves without any thought just won't cut it. Here's what you should do to get the most out of your serving practice.

* Serve one ball at a time. Don't get in the habit of holding two or more balls in your hand when serving. It affects your ball toss and you are better off practicing what you would do in a match anyway. Have a box of balls on the table instead. Having to reach for another ball will stop you from rushing into the second serve.

* Have targets to aim at. You need to be able to get feedback about the success of your serve. So have small targets on the table to allow you to focus on the areas you are trying to hit, and also to allow you to judge the success of your efforts.

* Pay attention to the results. Is the serve bouncing too high over the net? Are you not getting enough sidespin kick off the table? Are you consistently serving too long or too short? Do you struggle to perform one particular type of serve? The answers to these sort of questions will give you valuable feedback and allow you to make the necessary corrections to your service action.

* Take your time. In order to understand the results of your serve, you will need to be practicing at a steady, unhurried pace. The idea is to get the most out of every serve, not serve 500 serves as fast as you can.

* Use both repetition and randomness. When perfecting a serve, you need to repeat it many times in order to groove in the motion into your muscle memory, so you can perform it automatically. Once you are successful at doing so, it is time to mix the serve in with the other serves you have mastered, and make sure that you can still perform it successfully. The ability to perform a variety of serves without making a mistake when changing from one serve to another is a vital skill.

* Remember the rule of quality over quantity. A few very good serves that you can rely on under pressure will help you more than a ton of serves that you can't keep short or low when you need to.

* Don't serve and stop. To get the most out of your practice, continue the service motion and get into the ready position for your third ball. Remember that the ready position will change depending on where you have served the ball, and move to that location. For example, if you serve short to the forehand of your opponent, your ready position should be more central to the table than if you serve to the backhand side, where you should be recovering more towards your own backhand.

If you really want to take it that extra step, visualize the type or return your opponent would make and shadow play the third stroke - this will help you groove in the common service routines you are planning to use.

* Steal from the pros. Pay close attention to how the professionals and top players serve, and copy them shamelessly. Remember, these players have spent hours at the table perfecting a service technique that works at the highest level. The more you can replicate what they do, the better your serves will be.

* Innovate a little. Although copying the top players is a great way to get your serving up to speed, spend a little time coming up with your own particular variations. Have some fun when serving and try a few weird and whacky motions. You just might find a unique serve or variation of your own that you can use as a surprise serve on opponents.

* Don't stop practicing. Treat your serving practice as a necessity, not just something you do when you can't find a partner to train with. An hour of focused serving practice a week will do wonders for anybody's ping-pong game.

Fitness for Intermediate Table Tennis Players

At the intermediate level, physical fitness starts to become a more important factor. You and your opponents now have better technique and consistency. Footwork starts to become more important since your opponents are starting to place the ball in hard to reach locations, and your game tends to become more physically active as you move around to allow you to use your better strokes. You can also hit the ball harder more often, so strength and power start to become more important too.

However, even at this level some players can compensate for lack of fitness by having better technique or tactics. Naturally though, it is better to be fitter, since you will play better for longer.

Intermediate players should be getting most of their fitness work from playing table tennis, in order to make the best use of their time. But for those times when you can't find a partner, doing some specific activities to improve your aerobic fitness and strength will be of benefit too.
Fitness for Advanced Table Tennis Players
At the advanced level, physical fitness is very important. Almost all your opponents will have good technique and tactics, so giving your opponent an edge in physical fitness can be the difference between victory and defeat. Anaerobic fitness (i.e. the body's ability to contract muscles without burning oxygen) is needed during strenuous counterlooping or loop to chop rallies, while aerobic fitness is required to keep up the intensity over a 7 game match which can last up to a hour, or to compete successfully in several matches during one day.

Advanced players will be combining on the table work with off the table training in order to raise their fitness to the necessary level. A play who intelligently uses off the table training can use his time more efficiently and get an edge in fitness over someone who only plays table tennis.

Physical Fitness - Training by Yourself in Table Tennis/Ping-Pong

In regard to most sports, being fitter is better than being fatter (except for sumo wrestling maybe!). In the course of this article, I'm going to give a few tips on how table tennis players can use their spare time to improve their fitness and their table tennis.

How Important is Fitness in Table Tennis?
Before I launch into how to improve your conditioning, I want to briefly discuss just how important physical fitness is in ping-pong. The importance of being fit rises as your table tennis level goes up. So the amount of fitness needed for a beginner is less than that of an intermediate player, which in also different to that of an advanced player. Let's look in each in turn.
Fitness for Table Tennis Beginners
At the beginner level, your amount of physical fitness is unlikely to be an important factor in improving your table tennis, provided you have the ability to walk around for a few hours without getting tired. The biggest limiting factor at this level is your technique and consistency. Due to the number of mistakes you and your opponents make, most of the rallies that you play while you are learning the sport will not be long enough or vigorous enough to tax your physical limits all that much, unless you are playing for several hours in a row.

Being very fit will not affect the level of your play all that much as a beginner. It certainly won't hurt, but it won't be a great advantage either.

Secrets of Chinese Table Tennis

The Chinese National Team

The Chinese team has more depth than any other team in the world. The primary training center is in Beijing. The team is made up of 96 players 24 men, 24 women, 24 boys and 24 girls.

Players are given tryouts early on, usually with trips to major tournaments in Europe or elsewhere, to see how they do internationally. From this, the Chinese judge if this player has the potential to become a star.

A huge advantage China has comes from their depth. If a player on the national team isnt working hard, doesnt do well internationally, or has technical flaws hurting their progress, there is always another hungry player with potential on the outside waiting to get in.
rs" and they can do so right from China!

Chinese Technique

Some say China is good at table tennis only because of sheer numbers. There is, of course, a degree of truth to this. However, as shown by Europe's (especially Sweden's) rise in the early 1990s, and China's decline, numbers cannot overcome poor technique. In the late 1980's/early 1990s, China was slow to adjust to changing technique, sticking too long with most pips-out style games while the rest of the world was changing to inverted looping, especially shakehand style. China has learned from that experience, and now leads the world in this very style. Wang Liqin was recently re-crowned as world men's champion (he also won in 2001). On the women's side, Zhang Yining just won the Worlds; she was preceded by Wang Nan, who won three straight. All three of these players are shakehand loopers, and are probably the most emulated players in the world.

What happens in China is that the players with the best technique, talent, and mental & physical skills tend to rise to the top. Where before some of these players might have been kept out because they didn't play the right playing style (with most shakehand loopers relegated to becoming practice partners who copied the European loopers, like Cheng), now they become regular Chinese team members. Because there are so many Chinese players, they are loaded with skilled and hard-working players. And so the best Chinese players tend to be the ones with the best technique.

New techniques are regularly coming out. Probably the most noticeable is the reverse penhold backhand, best exemplified by Olympic Silver Medalist Wang Hao and World Men's Singles Finalist (and recently ranked #1 in the world) Ma Lin. Historically, penholders use the same side of the racket for both forehand and backhand. In the 1990s, a number of Chinese players began using the reverse side of the racket to attack on the backhand, most prominently by Liu Guoliang (1996 Olympic Gold Medalist, 1999 World Champion), who used it mostly as a variation. Ma Lin raised it to a new level, using it as a primary shot. Wang Hao raised it to an even higher level, making it his primary backhand shot.

While Europeans pioneered backhand looping, the Chinese have developed over-the-table backhand looping to a higher degree. Europeans like Klampar developed this technique in the 1970s, but few others developed this style. China did. Now Chinese players like Wang Liqin, Kong Linghui and Zhang Yining are among the best in the world at this (along with Austria's Werner Schlager and Korea's Oh Sang Eun).

Above all, Chinese players dominate with serve & receive techniques. Other countries have closed the gap in serve techniques, yet most consider Ma Lin's serves the best among world-class players, and before him, Liu Guoliang's "both Chinese players. But it is return of serve where the Chinese really dominate. Where other countries learn to return serves to neutralize the serve, the Chinese return serves to throw opponents off and take the initiative. Ma Lin is probably best at this, tying opponents in knots with his returns, but all the Chinese players train many hours at this, and so have few peers at receive. Outside China, Waldner may be the only one who can do this at the Chinese level.

There is another secret strength of Chinese technique, except it's not really a secret: they have the best basics. They spend huge amounts of time on the "boring" basics, and so are nearly machine-like in their efficiency. You rarely see a Chinese player miss an easy shot. Cheng said of his winning the USA Nationals in 2004 at age 46 that most of his opponents simply didn't have good basics. (This is relative, of course " good basics at the world-class level are pretty advanced for most of us.)
Practice Partners

Most countries don't have the resources to have as many practice partners as the Chinese. However, this is a must if they wish to challenge the Chinese.

Teams that are not among the best in the world need world-class practice partners to help them raise their level. It's nearly impossible for 2600 and 2700 players to become 2900 players unless they train with 2900 players.

Teams that are among the best in the world need world-class practice partners that emulate players like Wang Liqin and Ma Lin. When Wang Liqin or Ma Lin plays, say, Samsonov, they've been practicing with Samsonov-like players regularly, and so they're ready. Meanwhile, Samsonov has been practicing with whoever he can get, meaning mostly weaker players, and none who really play like Wang Liqin or Ma Lin. Anyone watching Michael Maze against Ma Lin in the semifinals of the recent Worlds can see how uncomfortable he was against Maze game. Most likely, two years from now he'll be equally uncomfortable as he won't get to train against this style. Meanwhile, in China, there are players whose main job is to play like Maze, and so Ma will be even more prepared.

It's unlikely that other countries can regularly train with two practice partners in the way the Chinese do, at least in the foreseeable future, but the first step is just getting these practice partners. Surprisingly, the answer is to go right to the source: China itself. China has a huge number of top players who are not on the Chinese team, players who, if given the chance, would be among the top 50 in the world or even better. Since costs in China are cheap compared to most other countries (which is why USA was able to hire former Chinese team members Cheng Yinghua, Huang Tong 'Jack'Huang and Huazhang Xu as practice partners in the late 1990s), they are affordable, if this becomes a priority. Countries can pool their resources and hire practice partner.

Mental and Tactical Training

The Chinese team meets at least weekly with sports psychologists. (This is common practice in other countries as well.) One aspect that is probably different is that these sessions are joint psychology and tactical meetings. This is linked together as it takes proper mental training to execute proper strategies under pressure.

The Chinese team has a tactical support staff that develops these strategies. According to Zhou Zuyi of the Shanghai Daily (May 7, 2005), Insiders give credit to the backroom staff that devote themselves to analyzing the opponents games and developing new techniques and strategies. The technicians work out a game pattern for each major foreign player, which is in turn followed by training partners whose only job is to emulate different stars from around the world.

Two-on-One Practice Partners

A common problem for the best players in the world is finding a strong enough practice partner. During his prime, Waldner once quipped to the Swedish coach, When do I get to practice with someone stronger?

China has more depth than any country, but even there, the best players are the best players. Players like Wang Liqin and Ma Lin can't find anyone better to practice with than themselves. Or can they?

China has developed a way of doing this. Cheng was hesitant about even talking about this, as this training method has been relatively secret, even to this day. It is normally only used in closed training sessions as they prepare for major tournaments. Cheng hinted that at one time, if heâd told outsiders about this technique, heâd have gotten in trouble.

The technique involves having two practice partners for one player. This is a luxury that other countries can't afford, but that China, with their playing depth, can. Two practice partners are selected, one with a very strong forehand, one with a very strong backhand (but also a good forehand), and they learn to play together as a team. Together, they do drills with the best Chinese players. With one player only playing forehand from the forehand side, and the other only playing from the backhand side (favoring backhand, but also playing forehand from backhand as top players do), suddenly they become a stronger player's than even Wang Liqin! And so even the best Chinese players are pushed to the limit, practicing with these “stronger players.

Training

The Chinese train long and hard. Typically they do seven hours of training each day both table play and physical training away from the table. In the mornings, they normally do physical training away from the table, and serve practice. There is a morning and an afternoon training session, usually six days a week. (Training includes both regular practice with a partner, and multiball training with a coach. This is the same for most countries.) Some players play extra practice matches at night or on off days. Players generally get 12 days off per year, although they also get rest days after major tournaments (which often are travel days).

They normally focus on training from November to April, and with more tournaments the rest of the year. During Cheng's years on the team, this was more clear-cut, but now with the ITTF Pro Tour and various leagues, there is more and more year-round competition.