#1 – Matt Hetherington: Consistency vs Power
It brings me great pleasure to be able to present to you episode number one of The Expert Table Tennis Podcast. I have wanted to start a podcast for so long now and I’ve finally got it all together. My…
Ben Larcombe
Hi, I'm Ben Larcombe! I'm 29 years old, I live in Tunbridge Wells, and I'm a professional table tennis coach.
Bryan Song: Talent Transfer From Tennis to Table Tennis
The following post was adapted from an email I received from Bryan Song, an Expert Table Tennis reader and follower of the Expert in a Year challenge. Bryan has a great story to tell and finds himself in a fairly…
Mental Training for Table Tennis
They say that at the highest level of sport it’s an athlete’s mental strength that is the difference between winning and losing. All the top table tennis players can play the best shots, and are in great physical condition, but…
Physical Training for Table Tennis
I still haven’t quite decided how important physical table tennis training is for table tennis players. There’s no question that elite-level players need to be doing physical training but should beginners and intermediate-level players be allocating any time to it? I think…
What I Learnt From 10 Weeks of Grip Experimentation
I came back to table tennis training in January after 12 months of coaching Sam for the Expert in a Year challenge. I’d been playing pretty much every day in 2014 but it certainly wasn’t deliberate practice. I felt slow and…
Tactical Training for Table Tennis
Tactics are an often neglected area of table tennis training. It’s easy to get stuck in the technical training, become obsessed with perfecting your technique, and forget all about how you are going to use your technically brilliant strokes to…
Technical Training for Table Tennis
I believe to become an expert table tennis player you must master the four aspects of the game (technical, tactical, physical and mental). An expert is proficient in all four areas and can be described as a ‘complete’ player. The…
Don’t Skip the Warm Up (Unless You’re Trying to Lose)
How important is it to warm up before playing table tennis? When I was training as a kid, as a member of group training sessions at Crusaders TTC, we would usually always do a warm up before getting onto the…
Sometimes to Win the War You’ve Got to Lose a Battle
It would be nice to win all the battles and the war but sometimes that just isn’t possible. When it comes down to it we need to focus on winning the war. That might mean losing a few battles along the…