repeat drills training
Training and Drills
adam saunders Asked 13 years ago
hi guys. finished watching your secrets dvds and im raring to get training and have a go at your drills. im wondering though is it better to repeat the same drills for a few training sessions in a row to ram home drills or keep mixing things up to keep training more challenging. great dvds and i would really value your opinion on this one.
Alois Rosario Answered 13 years ago
Hi Adam,
How often you do drills is a bit of a personal preference.
The drills are not as important as the purpose of the drill. For example you can do the Forehand, Backhand footwork drill and work on consistency, speed, your forehand topspin with speed and backhand block with consistency.
The important thing is to have a focus of what you are working on for that session or that particular drill.
If you are finding that you are working on a particular skill and you feel you need a few sessions to work on that skill or feel that it still needs attention, then repeat the drill for the next session.
You do need variety with drill over time otherwise training would get too monotonous.
Thoughts on this question
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adam saunders Posted 13 years ago
Jeff Plumb from PingSkills Posted 13 years ago
Hi Adam,
In a way you are right, when you get to a match you want it to be automatic. The problem is that in matches the ball comes anywhere and not in repeatable patterns you can emulate in training.
You certainly want to have your strokes well grooved so that you can play the same stroke every time. Your drills do help you do that but as Alois mentioned, it is the intent of the drills that are important. If you want to practice switching between your backhand and forehand, there are literally hundreds of different drills you could do to improve this. It doesn't really matter which drill you choose as long as you are improving your switching. Therefore you don't have to stick to a single drill but you can mix it up to keep you interested. Using random drills where your partner doesn't place the ball to specific spots each time can be very beneficial.
It is important to develop your skills on top of each other. For example you shouldn't focus on improving your topspin against topspin, if you haven't yet learnt how to consistently make a topspin off block. So you do need to make sure you don't try and progress to far without having developed the skill to a decent level. Keep working on that skill, in my example topspin off block, until you are confident in that stroke. Learning this can be done with different drills to keep you engaged.
I'd love to hear what other people think on this topic and how they train.
Mantas Pocius Posted 13 years ago
Yeah, I think learning basic skills is really very important before learning some advanced stuff. However, for it is hard to hit topspin ahainst topspin (when I am close to the table), but it is easy for me to do a topspin against backspin or against a no spin ball. That's mainly how I lose all my points. I do a topspin against backspin and if it is not very powerful and my opponent returns that, I can't return it and ball goes outside off the table, because the ball has a decent amount of topspin (even if they return it with a block)
By the way, if the ball has some topspin and I am close to the table, do I still need to finish above my eyes level?
Jeff Plumb from PingSkills Posted 13 years ago
Hi Mantas,
If the ball has some topspin on it and you are close to the table, you probably don't need to finish above eye level but around eye level sounds right. You can swing more forward than vertical and you can close the angle of you bat so that you counter the topspin and also brush the top of the ball to generate your own topspin.
Alois Rosario from PingSkills Posted 13 years ago
The transition between topspin off backspin and then topspinning the next ball is often difficult. This is something that you should practice often. The last ball you do need to come right over the ball. However it is more just the change between the two strokes that causes problems. You will find that the error normally always goes off the end of the table. So over adjust and really get over the ball even more than you think you should.