Tips from China Coach

When contacting the ball, it must be striking the ball, NOT letting the ball strike the bat (ie passive shot) 


There is less all-out-power drives when training - more of the continuous sustainable driving. For those who have been professionally trained, it is very hard to change the technique and action that you've been drilled into doing. 
This has affected the way Chinese penholders loop - where there is not much power used. So I've encountered a problem these few years in training penholders using inverted rubber. Thus, when I trained Ma Lin and Wang Hao, I had to change their old habits, especially powerful spinney looping. This was the main thing I had worked on and that many penholders need to change.
I had to change their attitudes - action small, quick, continuity, to action was comfortable, quick around the court (covering wide spaces), powerful and continuity. A special stress on the important of having a POWERFUL loop and how it needs to be continuous and have the ability to be lethal. In normal training situations I told Ma Lin and Wang Hao to add more power to their loops and the follow up needed after that. In a stable training environment my aim was to get them to exert more powerful loops from mid distance by feeding them half-high backspin balls. I asked them to use as much strength as they possibly could. 
The focus was to time it right so that you could unleash your power when you needed it. Slowly they learnt how to loop with lots of power - utilising power and technique from the legs, waist, upper arm, forearm and wrist to combine into a power loop. The main thing was the use of the legs and waist to generate the power needed and the shift of body weight from right to left. 
The next thing was to train their 'all table' (from all angles) power loop from topspin balls. The focus here was to improve continuity and footwork all over the table. Through this training, Ma and Wang's forehand powerloop was dramatically improved. 


This modernised the game and was a breakthrough in the development of CPEN with inverted rubber - getting rid of the old ways. In terms of people who are not necessarily professional, if you want to improve your forehand loop's lethality, you must integrate maximum power looping into your training.

The forehand is actually a very complicated technique - it includes: near table looping, mid table looping, far table looping, looping topspin, backspin, counter looping other peoples loops, looping half-out balls etc... Aside from all these shots, a more important point is footwork. It affects the 'life' of your forehand, it affects the way you can time your loops and adjust the level of power on it. If you want to train your loops well, you first need to train your footwork. That's why amateurs cannot train at the same intensity as professionals - their footwork just doesn't allow for it. Despite this, amateurs can still get the right technique for striking the ball - even if their footwork isn't as good as the pros.


by: KPPj8