Does (or can) anybody vary spin on pushes?

I was recently thinking about this and it's an idea I honestly never do.

Edited by suds79 - 09/06/2016 at 10:04am

suds79 wrote: I was recently thinking about this and it's an idea I honestly never do. Take your standard push game before someone opens up in a rally. When pushing back & forth (I want to know if this could also be done vs a backspin serve), I've always performed my pushes with inverted roughly the same. The same motion. The same bat angle. etc. Is anybody here experienced in taking a standard backspin ball and pushing it back with either heavy backspin or very little? Almost killing the spin? If this could be accomplished, it's a factor in my game I'd like to practice. I've seen an old, but very good, penholder at my club who can put on an extraordinary amount of backspin in his pushes. Always takes me a couple of strokes vs him to adapt it's that heavy. His stroke is short, aggressive and it looks like he's hitting the back to lower part of the ball pretty aggressively. These are typically long pushes. That much makes sense.  But what about killing the spin? Is that possible? Would my blade be more flat (vs open) blade angle and with a forward and slightly downward movement? Would that work? Or would I just be more likely to push those balls in the net... I have a friend who claims to be able on pushes to slightly lift under the push (vs brushing under it & forward) almost like scouping it which he says varies the spin but I haven't tried myself.  Okay enough rambling from me. Any tips or advise someone might have I would appreciate.

You don't need to kill the spin completely or exaggerate excessively the amount of spin.  From what I have seen from people who are really good at this (not me during the point!!), the spin just needs to be somewhat different from what it appears to be.  A former coach at my club Wang Huijing (a penholder) was a master of this. When she pushed her opponents were never quite sure how hard she brushed it and it was always changing.  I saw her mess up 2600 players this way.  When I would play with her it was pretty remarkable how hard it was to see what she was doing.  

Edit added. It's mainly true on serves but on other shots too -- as a general rule it is hard to disguise big changes in spin and much easier to disguise smaller changes, but the small change is often enough to force an error or a weak shot.

suds79 wrote: But what about killing the spin? Is that possible? Would my blade be more flat (vs open) blade angle and with a forward and slightly downward movement? Would that work? Or would I just be more likely to push those balls in the net... I have a friend who claims to be able on pushes to slightly lift under the push (vs brushing under it & forward) almost like scouping it which he says varies the spin but I haven't tried myself.  Okay enough rambling from me. Any tips or advice someone might have I would appreciate.