Advice on Backhand into Forehand

First impressions:

Serve: You should try moving as close to the endline as possible, this will give you much more control over the serve placement. Also stop trying to move forward when you serve, this would only make your serves inconsistent (could be solved by moving closer to the endline). In fact, if you watch top players, most of them do FH serves with their left (right for you) leg inside the endline. Try a parallel stance for your BH serves, I bet your stance with one feet way behind another is costing you a lot of control on your BH serve.

Your BH pushes and loops are a major loophole in your game now. Try to think weight transfer (right to left) when you do your BH loop, and and think of pulling the ball sideways from right to left as you loop it. Try pulling with your body instead of just your arm. Again, try to practise more BH looping against underspin (which is where you're struggling now). For pushes you need to brush the ball actively instead of just bumping the ball back. Bumping the ball makes it hard to control placement and height on pushes as you're completely at the mercy of the opponent's spin.

You also give your opponents very comfortable balls in terms of placement, mostly to your opponent's BH corner. Seems like you haven't discovered the dark side of lefty tactics! The wide FH is the hardest to get to for righties, just exploit that wide FH (esp with sidespin serves, loops and pushes), then switch to deep BH to jam them after they start moving towards their FH sides. The corners are your friend...

mickd wrote: Ty blahness. Those are some very simple things to try.  I actually tried serving with parallel feet for my backhand serves a few times during that match, and it didn't make it any harder, so I'll stick with it. I'll also try get closer to the end line. Another very easy thing to do. Just need to get my body to remember it. I actually have no backhand loop at the moment. It's a huge issue for me. A lot of people know that, and return underspin balls to my backhand. 9 out of 10 times I'll have to push it back and wait for it to come to my forehand, or try and step around to attack it. I do sometimes attack it if I think it's close to a no spin ball, though. And even then I don't feel like I have any control. I've never had the chance to practice something via multiball, so most of my "practice" comes from game play, or random play. Only recently I've been able to work on things I want to once a week, usually for about an hour. But I've been trying to improve my footwork, and consistency with my regular backhand counter so far. As for my backhand pushes, I know they're far from perfect, but in a lot of cases I actually try to add underspin on the return. I have a very very small stroke with my backhand push. Sometimes it's only a few centimeters, but in general people say my pushes do have spin. Maybe not very heavy, but a decent amount. I only bump the ball back if I'm trying to return it very short, or if it's too short and I didn't get close enough in time. As a leftie, one of the biggest issues I have is actually with a wide forehand ball. I'm not sure if that's just me, but it's good to see that righties struggle with it, too. My placement is horrible at the moment. I can never get good placement on my first attack, usually only if we get into a hitting rally. I guess I need to think more about better placement early. As for serves, I do a lot more wide forehand serves with my pendulum serve, and a lot less with my reverse pendulum. My reasoning is that with the pendulum serve, the spin will move away from the player's forehand, so a wide forehand serve will be hard to reach. With the reverse pendulum, the serve goes into the body, so if I serve it wide, it'll come back slightly, making the distance not as far. Because of that I try to serve it so that it moves into the elbow area. If they don't move, they get an awkward return, and a lot of the times they don't move because the initial course makes it look like they'll have space, but then it curves into them. I'll definitely practice more placement!!!!

A functional BH loop which can handle all sorts of balls thrown to you is quite essential for shakehanders, so that should be high on your priority list! I think what you're missing in your pushes is the extra oomph of acceleration in your wrists, aka the whip effect, when you've mastered that, it would make it hard for the opponent to return it well. You can practise it simply by pushing and chopping everything in practise matches. It's a shortcut to developing good feeling. I think another good way to master them is to learn how to serve tomahawk serves on both sides, it has similar mechanics of the pushes and you also get a good serve to boot.

Another easy way to train your loop against underspin is simply to serve heavy backspin all match long (don't vary your spin at all) and attack all the returns. Even if you lose 3-11 every game it would still do wonders for your game.

I'm training my BH over the table sidespin flip these days, so I simply commit to flipping every single short serve I encounter. This costed me many ugly losses but at least I have a semifunctional BH flip now which drives some opponents crazy haha....

Thanks blahness. I actually have a robot, but I lack the chance to use it (wherever I go, there are people around to play, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes I do want to train solo). I think I'll have a chance to use it this week though, so I'll work on my backhand loop.

mickd wrote: Thanks blahness. I actually have a robot, but I lack the chance to use it (wherever I go, there are people around to play, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes I do want to train solo). I think I'll have a chance to use it this week though, so I'll work on my backhand loop. I'll also serve more short underspin serves to help improve my loop. It's very lacking at the moment. @tom My city has 60k people. It's still classified as rural, though. My neighbouring city has about 70k.

For all strokes, while people may not be patient enough, it is best to start with a bucket of balls, just drop the ball on the table, and get the stroke and timing right. Even before hitting with a robot or doing multiball.

Sorry, the forum went down for awhile so I couldn't post my reply!