The Expert Table Tennis Blog

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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