The Expert Table Tennis Blog

The tagline for the book ‘Bounce’ by Matthew Syed is ‘How champions are made’, which sets the tone for a book dedicated to searching through academic literature, and engaging with top professionals, in an attempt to determine the causes of elite performance.

Watch the video below for a great introduction to the book by Syed himself.

Syed, is an ex-International table tennis player and now writes for The Times, amongst others. His interest in the topic of elite performance, athlete development and the ‘talent vs practice’ debate has obviously stemmed from his personal experiences in life and sport. This enables his to write in a way that is personal, while at the same time always ensuring his points of view are backed up by research. It makes for a very engaging book and style of writing.

While flicking through some table tennis videos on YouTube I came across this one of Paul Drinkhall’s multiball training.

A big thanks to Table Tennis Talk for the video and I especially liked the use of the two camera angles.

I’m not sure how old the video is. It was published May 2012 but, from the shot of Danny Lawrence at 3:43, I’m guessing it’s at least a couple of years old now. Possibly from around 2010.

In this post I will be analysing what it is that Paul does in his multiball training. I wont be attempting to critique his technique or performance. My aim is to explain the drills taking place, so that you can try them yourself and to point out a few coaching tips I picked up from the video.

Table tennis players come in all shapes and sizes. Table tennis is not a sport that relies on players possessing certain physiological traits such as height in basketball or weight in sumo wrestling.

However, from looking at top table tennis players’ it is clear they many have a very similar build. Elite table tennis players are generally of athletic build. They don’t look like power lifters but at the same time most of them aren’t that skinny either.

I have found height and weight information on the top 50 table tennis players in the world (as of 4th September 2012) and I have created body mass indexes (BMI’s) for them too. In this article I will be highlighting the players at the extreme ends of the scale and providing some recommendations for table tennis players based on the averages from these top players.

This is my first post for ExpertTableTennis.com so I thought I would make it a good one. I graduated university last summer (July 2011) and my dissertation was on deliberate practice and table tennis. I thought I would use that as my first post and publish my results online.

I’m not going to copy and paste the whole thing (because it was over 10,000 words long) but I’ll give you the important bits. I hope you enjoy reading it.

I guess I should start with the participants. I interviewed 36 senior male English table tennis players. Their mean age was 21.2 years and they ranged from 18 to 26 years of age. They were all currently active on the English circuit and had a ranking.

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