Make your forehand loop even more powerful!

I tried writing a small article about a part of the forehand loop technique that is, in my opinion, not talked about enough and more than slightly misunderstood.

You can see it on there, it's the only posted article and I will gladly write more if it seems like something some of you enjoy.

I'm not sure this is allowed on the forum, so if it isn't don't hesitate to tell me so I can remove it :)

And if it is allowed, please make sure to leave me feedback, questions or comments on the blog post or on here so we can discuss :)

Good luck with your blog.

Where do you play?

Radial/Ulnar deviation- this is the motion of the wrist you are saying not to do. Note most players hold the paddle in a fixed position with some degree of ulnar deviation with a slight amount of wrist flexion.

Flexion/Extension- this is the movement you are promoting. If you hold out your hand palm facing the floor and bend your wrist so that your fingers point towards the floor that is the flexed position. If you point them towards the ceiling then the wrist would be in the extended position. 

There is one other movement I think you need in there and that is Pronation/Supination. So arm out palm facing the floor. If you rotate your arm so the palm faces up that movement is supination. If the palm is up and you rotate it down that is pronationation. 

So the FH stroke usually goes in the sequence of pronate on the take back, supinate at the transition along with some wrist extension and then pronate again with wrist flexion going into ball contact. 

Somehow all this time I was thinking that wrist action everyone talks about (and which I lack) should be of radial/ulnar deviation variety, since it kind of enhances the brushing of the ball, at least in theory. I guess I was wrong, but my question is how do you learn to do it the right way. Just trial and error? 

I also agree with the pronation and supination part.

My way to think about it is that when trying to do the motion I am trying to explain in the article, the pronation of the wrist will happen on it's own. I don't want to promote pronating by itself as readers might get the wrong idea that you have to pronate as you would when doing a tennis forehand which is not exactly the case in table tennis.

I do agree it does not need to be a big motion, because then you would be overusing your wrist in comparison to the rest of your motion.

Looking at this WLQ video does demonstrate that he does not use his wrist too much. If you slow down the moments he starts the swing, and unfortunately the video is not slowed down enough for it to be obvious, you can see his racket head is slightly lagging behind his wrist, as a result of the slight extension of his wrist caused by the momentum of his swing. As stated above, the extension should not be forced, it should be created by the swing itself and a relaxed wrist. Now, however small that extension may be, to get the most out of your forehand you do need to force the flexion and slight pronation to compensate from this lag and gain the most racket speed. This is my view on the matter at least, hopefully that clarifies it! :)

From my limited experience with ITTF manuals that I had for coaching certification, my answer to this would be that it might be too fine of a detail for something that is not really trying to be too specific and is also outdated.

For tutorials, it may be because it is a quite difficult matter to try to explain. I do know chinese give a lot of importance to it as I've seen in different videos from chinese coaches. It may simply not have reached to western coaches as much yet. 

In WLQ's FH (hailed as the stroke of the decade):

Brian Pace's (inferior) FH - from his training video

You see it on Mizutani's shot here.  This is the kind of loop that works with max sponge.  I am working on it because I use a slower racket and I think I can take full advantage of that with this stroke.

Full article: