Eddie Van Halen has the tone

I walked into the shop and the staff member picked up the cheapest electric guitar, plugged it into an ordinary amp and started to play some awesome guitar riffs. I was really impressed with the amazing sound and bought the guitar and amp. I took it home and tried to play it. What do you think the result was?

Unfortunately I couldn’t reproduce the sound because I was only a beginner. I’d learnt a few chords on an acoustic guitar but simply did not have the skills to play like the guy in the shop who was a super guitar player who had practiced for years and years.

So what’s my point? Well as one guitar magazine put it – tone is in your fingers.

So how does this relate to Table Tennis?

Give a great guitar player an ordinary guitar and they will still sound brilliant. Give them a guitar with only one string and they won’t be able to produce the same results. I mention this point because if you give a great Table Tennis player a hard bat that can’t generate any spin, it will be the same as giving a musician a guitar with only one string. The resultant play will be pretty bad. So to make a relevant comparison, we need to think of a minimum level of equipment that enables a player to generate some decent spin. With this minimum level of equipment, a great Table Tennis player will still be great regardless of equipment. In fact why don’t you challenge the best player in your club to a match where you swap bats. I bet it won’t change the normal outcome!

So don’t get too focussed on your equipment. Choose a reputable brand, ensure you replace the rubbers regularly to maintain their tackiness. Then simply forget about your equipment for a while. Get on with playing and practicing because that is how real improvement occurs.

I’ve had people ask me, what is wrong with searching for the perfect equipment for my game if that gives me an extra 1% advantage? Well if all things were equal then nothing. But this point of view assumes the time you took searching for the “perfect equipment” could not have been better used. Instead of trying out different combinations of rubbers over 2 hours, you could have spent the 2 hours practicing your serve and actually improving your game. The changing of equipment also takes your focus away from your own technical improvement. When you make a mistake, the focus is immediately on the equipment rather than on your technique. Think about this scenario. You are hitting with a new bat. You hit a forehand into the net. What will your thought be? Yes, probably, “this bat didn’t work properly”. Whereas the truth may be that your technique was incorrect on that stroke. The more you focus on equipment, the harder it is to focus on your own skills. Practising, with focus on your technique, is where you should be spending your time.

I don’t want people to never think about changing the brand or type of rubbers they use but too many people go overboard on this as if it is the solution to their problems. As your skill level improves you may think about moving to a different rubber or blade and that is fine. Once you are at this stage, try out a few different rubbers, pick the combination you like best and stick with it for a while. Remember, improvement results from hard work and not from your equipment.

Now that we have a membership system in place, it is easy to keep track of all your questions to PingSkills. We’ve added a link to the right hand side bar (underneath the topics) called “My Questions”.

What about all my existing questions?

The good news is that when you create your new membership with PingSkills, we will match your email address with any existing questions and comments and assign them to your account. So if you haven’t already then sign up now and take a look at all of your contributions to Ask the Coach.

We’ve made a change to make using the PingSkills Vault even easier. When you are entering a date for your match or training session, all you need to do is click in or move to the date field and up will pop a calendar. Simply choose the correct date and the field will be automatically populated for you.