Variable shadow play
Discussion
Marcus Carli Asked 1 week ago
Hi Alois.
Being an oldie, I do have mobility problems, coming back to table tennis. I listened to one of your ‘ask the coach’ podcasts and you covered the benefits of ‘shadow play’ for someone like me. I was thinking that what would make it more interesting is doing the shadow play, without the knowledge of where the next ball would be coming from. Consequently I decided to use ChatGPT to call out the directions while I was doing the appropriate shadow play to cover the ball. I started with something simple:
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“Hi ChatGPT. I’m wanting to improve my mobility in table tennis and would like you to help with a shadow play drill. Could you keep calling out (using audio-possibly your conversation mode) a random instruction, the options being “LEFT” or “RIGHT”. I would like the intervals between the instructions to be a random number of seconds between .5 sec and 2 secs. Could you please continue the drill for 5 minutes. Thanks.”
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It offered promise initially but ended up pretty clunky and ended up simply downloading an mp3 file to be used. Anyway, this could be improved by adding more options such as “LONG LEFT”, “WIDE LEFT”, “CENTRE” etc. While ChatGPT and Copilot currently has issues, I thought that Jeff (the IT guru) could create an app for it. I was looking to see if the Pingskills Scoring app was still around, it could be added to that. But it appears that that app no longer exists.
If you think it’s a good idea to create an app - being an IT person myself, I would be happy to draft some requirements which would allow the user to set parameters to enable variability.
Thanks
Marcus
Alois Rosario Answered 2 days ago
Hi Marcus,
Doing this type of training is something that players use as a way to improve their mobility and also responding to cues.
It has some good benefits as far as helping you to improve movements. I am not sure of the real value with the cues. In the game we respond to very different cues such as the movements of your opponent and the direction of the ball rather than audio cues.
I think providing visual cues to someone with this type of training is beneficial.
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