The Expert Table Tennis Blog

Ariel Hsing is the current up-and-coming star of women’s table tennis. She put in a great performance at London 2012, only narrowly losing 4-2 to the eventual winner, Li Xiaoxia of China, in the third round.

And she’s only 16! And she’s from the USA, a country not particularly known for it’s table tennis champions.

I have to admit that before the Olympics I had never heard of Ariel Hsing! It is likely that I’m not as clued up on women’s table tennis as perhaps I should be but from talking to some other players, it seems I am not alone. I therefore decided to try and find out as much about Ariel Hsing as possible.

This article will track the rise of Ariel Hsing, from a regular seven year old kid to a US national champion, and beyond. My aim is to look at how she became so good, so early. Did you do loads of practice? Is she just naturally talented? Were her parents overly pushy? What clubs and programs was she part of?

If you love coaching table tennis you may have toyed with the idea of becoming a professional table tennis coach. Wouldn’t it be great to get paid to do something that you love. To get to spend your days helping people start out, improve and compete at table tennis.

That’s exactly what I was thinking last summer (June 2011). I thought becoming a full-time table tennis coach would be a great job but I wasn’t sure if there was enough money in it.

Well, 15 months later, here I am. I’m a professional table tennis coach and I’m loving it. In this article I’m going to show you that, with a bit of hard work and dedication, it is possible to take your passion for coaching table tennis and turn it into a career.

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.