Pro Tip Blog: Pioneering the Backhand Banana Flick with Petr Korbel

It's been a while but I managed to get something together to write a new blog post finally. The Pro Tip Blog is an area of my blog which I really wanted to develop more but had a lot of difficulty contacting the players I wanted for it. Fortunately I was able to organize this new piece on the backhand banana flick or the chiquita with its pioneer, Petr Korbel. I have laid it out in more of an interview style piece with some additional ideas below.

Pioneer of the backhand banana flick - Petr Korbel

How To Beat Your Practice Partners in Matches

I had a great question this week asking how to beat the players you practice with, who know your game and particularly your serves. This is a great question and I really had to take a little time to consider how I would go about answering it because it is a very difficult area of the game. Hopefully I can provide some insight!

For more advice and help in multiple areas of the game, visit my Coaching Blog.

Jorgen Persson
Courtesy of elevenpoints.wordpress.com

How to Recover Table Tennis Form and Confidence in Training

Table Tennis is a sport of reflexes, speed, delicate techniques and automation along with split-second timing. When one of these things goes out the window it can create a less than pleasing shift in balance and cause errors and flow-on effects like lost confidence. How many times have we played a match and thought or said out loud, "I just can't play a forehand today" or "My backhand just isn't working." This can occur in matches or in training.

You can read my blog on 'How to Deal with Losing Confidence When Your Best Shots Start Going Wrong' or check out more free and useful articles from my Coaching Blog.

The mighty Chinese Team training
Image from TTDaily

Expectation: A Danger for Athletes in Table Tennis

It's a common phrase, if you expect too much, you will only be disappointed. This blog talks about expectations can adversely effect your match-play and mentality. We have seen plenty of upsets where the pressure got too much for players 'chokes' from substantial leads. Ma Lin had significant leads in a handful of WTTC finals but always ended up losing and as a result never became World Champion.

This is just one example of an incredibly number of issues that can come from expectations and can really harm your game and ability to perform and remain mentally strong in competition.

Wang Hao, three time Olympic Silver Medalist

Basic Rules of Table Tennis and Common Myths

When I'm coaching in the club I get a lot of social players coming up to me to clarify rules on some basic areas of the game. I figured since I'm trying to branch out and make posts which relate to all levels that it was a good idea to make a post on the most common areas of conflict among new and social players. Here are the basic rules and common conflicts:

Be diplomatic, learn the rules of table tennis to save disputes!