Strengths and Weaknesses

Hi Alois

Back in high school when I was playing a lot of table tennis, my only source of technical expertise and glimpse into orthodox table tennis thinking (in the days before pingskills and youtube) was a very thin and tattered book with black-and-white photographs. 

I don't really remember much of this book anymore, but one advice stuck in my head.  Every player has strengths and weaknesses.  Instead of spending your time trying to shore up your weaknesses, a player should work on improving his/her strengths.

Now, such blanket statements are of course limited by their very nature, and every individual case is different (for example, if you had a great smash but you couldn't land a legal serve, you'd probably be better off working on your weakness first!).  However, as a general principle, I was wondering if you agreed that a player should work on making his/her strengths even more dangerous rather than have work on weak links.

I guess one possible scenario might be with some players who have a much stronger wing...usually a forehand.  One approach would be to work on your backhand side more, to make it harder for opponents to focus in on the weaker wing.  Another approach would be to keep concentrating on making your forehand even better, and then use placement and footwork to try and avoid having to use your backhand.

Hi Ji-Soo,

I htink we need to do both.  I think the crucial thing is the itming of whenyou work on the two different areas.  There are so many different styles of players that you need to have a good general base.  If your backhand is particularly weak you need to be able to improve it because at a higher level you will be exploited.

I think a good way to think about things is that during the off season you can work a lot on your weakkneses and try to plug up some gaps.  The mix may be 70% on weaknesses and 30% on strengths.  As the competition gets closer, you would start to shift that percentage more towards working on your strengths.

The week before an important competition I tend to work almost exclusively on strengths because your weaknesses are not going to improve enough over that short period to be effective.