thoughts

Last weeks progress: I finally learnt how to do forehand flips and how to control them. Learnt how to do the Ma Long full swing forehand, which is incredibly powerful. Learnt how to control the direction of serving with footwork instead of adjusting my hand movements. Realised that I must always put my leg inside the table and lean forward when receiving short balls near the net.

The backhand chiquita flips are currently unusable on short balls to the extreme backhand corner. Need to figure out how to get into position for these type of balls.

At the moment I'm still trying to learn Kreanga's backhand movement which I still don't fully understand yet. Things learnt: Body should not go downwards but should be rotated to the left. If performed against downspin, I have to go a bit downwards to the left. Arm should always be put in front with wrist rotated inside. Things to work on: the coordination of the muscle groups to produce the fastest arm movement, the exact location to hit the ball, how to adjust the angle of the bat. Also when learning this type of backhand, when stroking(or slow practising) you need to adjust the technique since the normal backhand does NOT help you to develop Kreanga's explosive backhand loop.

Meanwhile, I'm currently stuck with an extremely ineffective backhand as I'm transitioning to his style. So I'll have to learn to stand way to the left and cover the whole table with my forehand, which is way stronger and dangerous. This would improve my footwork as well. I got caught by a few ppl sending fast serves down the line yesterday, so I'll have to be faster on my footwork. Also I keep getting caught too near the table b'cos I forgot to go back to ready position after flipping/pushing.

Also I'm in the process of learning how to push with heavy downspin or no-spin with the same movement. Since I'm without a training partner who can serve heavy downspin serves to me, I'll have to start with learning how to serve heavy downspin/no-spin with the most basic chop movement.

And I finally won a female sarawak state player 2-0, but after losing to another girl badly in the first game. Funny that the girl I lost to usually loses to the girl I won! But I'm sure she's giving me chance, since she keeps serving 1 type of spin to me, heavy downspin. I won mostly by service misreads by her, but lost majority of the rallies b'cos she's just too fast. But there was 1 incredible point I won lobbing/blocking 3-4 times in a row....LOL. Marcus discovered how to do the timo boll slow loop against backspin and it really looks incredible, with the ball going high initially and jumping forward in a straight line! I'm going to have to learn from him.

Edit: new serves added to previous post. I don't know why but though I no longer need to have more serve varieties, I just can't stop myself from serving some nonsense serves and then realise that it could be good, then figuring out how to add varieties to it.
It's just too addictive, the process of copying, modifying and inventing serves.

Modifying a credit card advertisement.... hahahaa
Developing unique serves: few hundred hours of my time
Watching other ppl go "what the hell" with my serves: priceless.
Watching their facial expression when the ball goes directly into the net/ flies out of the table: even more priceless

Added 3 more serves there. That post will be getting longer and longer I guess.