Blade Weight

AmekunRaiane Rivadeneira Asked 11 years ago

Hi Pingskills Team its been a while :)

i heard that the overall weight of a whole set up can affect your gamestyle a player told me that my blade was too light. Well i did agree with him on that case. He mentioned that when i was doing my FH Spin Drills my spin doesnt increase as much and he told me a physics formula " Force = Mass x Acceleration "

i was kinda shocked cuz i never thought about it that way, it gave me a lot of things to think about but i thought it cud have been my technique is still lacking or im doing something wrong. He suggested increasing the weight and buy a chinese rubber to replace one of my lighter ones. Should i take his advice? And how does weight affect the gamestyle of a person? when its light? When its heavy?

Thank you Pingskills Team

Merry Christmas :)

Alois Rosario Answered 11 years ago

Hi Amekun,

Weight is just a preference of each player. I would go with the one that feels comfortable for you.

The lighter bat is easier to accelerate quickly. The heavier one will take longer to get moving fast and also will take longer to stop and get back for the next shot.

Hope this helps.

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Ji-Soo Woo Posted 11 years ago

Good to see a physics formula on pingskills!

Just my two cents.

First of all, if you want to apply F=ma to the striking of the ball, then I think the relevant mass is of the ball and not the blade (i.e. if you strike a ball of mass m with a force F, the ball will accelerate at a rate of a=F/m).

In a standard physics text book question, if you had a stationary body (ball) being hit by another body (a bat), then the mass of the bat would have some impact on the resulting velocity on the ball (due to conservation of momentum). Of course, even in this artificial case this would be a fairly minimal impact since the mass of the ball is so much lighter than that of the blade, and the difference in weight between light and heavy blades isn’t that significant anyway.

However, when a table tennis player hits a ball, it is not just the force of the blade contacting the ball, but also of the player’s muscles, arms, shoulder rotation, hip rotation, etc… In the context of the power of the whole body, the difference of an extra 20g on your blade isn’t going to make much difference.

Also, as Alois mentioned, a heavier blade means the player has to apply more force to accelerate the blade by the same rate.

Going back to the general question, I was once advised to select the heaviest blade I could handle without impacting negatively on my stroke. However, I tend to agree with Alois. Pick whatever you like. Some people enjoy heavier blades and others (like myself) enjoy lighter blades. Also, defensive players tend to use lighter blades. I suspect this is because 1) balsa wood works well with LPs, and 2) lighter blade means you can react a little faster to incoming attacks.

P.S. feel free to disagree with my understanding of highschool physics. It’s been a while since I’ve done highschool physics!

Aasim Showkat Posted 11 years ago

Your formula will fail, he there will be on air around;-p

Alois Rosario from PingSkills Posted 11 years ago

Thank Ji-Soo. I thought you would know more. That explains things a lot better.