Practising when your partner just wants to play games
Have you ever wanted to practice some routines but your partners just want to play games?
Doing routines is an important part of training. You need to be able to get your strokes consistent and practice your placement.
So they want to play games and you want to practice some routines. Well it is possible to do both. While you are playing games you can choose what you want to work on and just focus on that.
Some Practice Ideas
For example, you could hit everything to the backhand side. Or then you could hit everything to the forehand. You could also hit one to each side, so alternate where you are hitting the ball. The variations are endless. You could hit one to the backhand and 2 to the forehand and so on. Or you could only topspin to the forehand and push to the backhand.
You could serve only backspin to the forehand or again different variations on this theme such as only serving no spin or long to allow them to attack you. In this way you can practice your blocking or defense.
So you can choose to practice whatever you want in this way. It’s not quite the same as having someone to practice drills but it may be better than just playing games when you really want to drill.
Thoughts for a New PingSkills DVD
PingSkills is looking to make a DVD on ‘How to Practice and Training Routines’ in the early part of 2009. Let us know what you think.
Ji-Soo
commented on November 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Personally I don’t find training suggestions very helpful (as important an area as this may be) because I don’t have a regular playing partner who has the patience to do training with me. I either play competition table tennis (where it is just warm up and go) or else find opponents at the table tennis centre on the weekends (but they usually prefer just having a bash, or a game). I suspect many others would have the same problem.
Personally I would prefer a DVD on advanced strategy that you mentioned earlier.
Cheers
Ji-Soo
Darek
commented on January 30th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I often play with friends which don’t like to practice too much. I’ll try with them your method. Thanks.
Hunter
commented on March 23rd, 2009 at 7:54 am
I play with my brother all the time in our basement…and he always wants to do games. So instead, we play a game where he always hits crosscourt and I always go down the line, its pretty fun but you have to be significantly better than your partner to do it