random TT diary of sorts

I see what you mean now. I guess what I'm trying to show is that the way I'm achieving the "convex" backswing is entirely with my body action - not the wrist or arm. I too have my bat pointing up during the backswing - not down. I too found that the method with the bat pointing down during the backswing is weaker - my hypothesis is because the wrist is dropped too much and is in a weak position to transfer force. 

But because I haven't really activated pronation/supination etc during the "convex" backswing - I can freely supinate once I make hard solid contact with the ball with my backswing. It's not like I went from supination to pronation or whatever, I just have one "wrist" action which is thumb driven supination (in actual fact that comes from the forearm but whatever). So basically I have a "convex" looking backswing (initiated solely by the body) and when I contact the ball i still wrap over the ball with supination, thus I would "classify" my stroke as a "concave" stroke fundamentally - because the ball doesn't feel what happened during the backswing. It's my experience that if you don't supinate and use other wrist mechanisms (for eg extension/flexion), you can still get a strong shot in if you use the body well but the degree of topspin will be less. If you use pronation it's gonna be worse because you're opening the bat angle and lifting the ball - it's easier to lift backspin this way but it'll become very hard to produce real hard dipping topspin like for eg Wang Manyu or Miwa Harimoto style. 

From a body use perspective - I feel like you are doing the hip bending + squatting action but not really the hip rotation (achieved by bringing the right knee forward which rotates the left hip backwards relative to the right during the backswing). The other mechanism that you can add is the pulling of the elbow with the lats (rotating the right elbow clockwise and the left elbow anticlockwise, like ripping apart a piece of paper). Using this means that your hand can move even less than what it's doing now and you can have an even more compact and powerful stroke. 

My game against BH pendulum servers is usually quite a bit weaker than my game against FH pendulum servers so I asked one of my partners to serve much more BH during the games - he actually came quite close in a few games and I was struggling. The issue is that even if I manage to loop the fast long BH serve it's like a 50-50 rally situation unless I can loop down the line - but that's really hard to do against wildly varying serves. And the BH serve to the FH short corner is not so easy to attack either. 

I actually experimented with the Truls Moregardh style of BH sidespin chopblock against these long BH serves and surprisingly it worked wonders because it didn't require much preparation and poses a few questions for the server because instead of a loop where he's ready to counter - it's a junk ball with weird sidespin on it with accompanying topspin or underspin - it's very hard to attack, and if he pushes it it's just gonna be a simple underspin which I can just loop very spinny off and he's gonna be in trouble. I could use this receive against FH pendulum serves too if I'm lazy to use my BH loop. 

Against the FH short balls I have to rely on a lot of variations to win the point - it's not as simple as just chiquita on the BH short balls to win. Everything from short pushes, fast long hook pushes and fade pushes, to FH flicks with varying placement/spin. 

Already from the warmup he wasn't missing loops at all when we were training loop vs block, I should have suspected something.... 

When it came to the matches it was bizarre, he was attacking and chiquitaing my spinniest hook serves with confidence and I had no idea what he was serving and quickly found myself 10-4 down. Miraculously I made 8 points straight to close it out 10-12, it was partly luck and partly me not giving up. 

With him it was more of a cat and mouse game like playing against myself because he loops hard on both wings and also has good serves. His hook and reverse pendulum serves are really hard to receive now - the difference between sidetop and sideunder is so subtle that I was guessing a lot - the fake movements are just so good. Somehow his pushing has improved a lot too, there's no easy mistakes to get points from. He was also positioning himself very well in general and there wasn't any gaping holes I could exploit in general. 

In the end I still won most games thanks to my better serve/receive game but many of them were very close and I had to dig deep. In the end what worked well was the sidespin chopblock receive on the BH (which he hated) to deal with long balls and FH looping anything drifting long, and then I can focus my attention on the FH short ball receive.

Many, many brilliant points - I made 2 around the net BH loops and 2 very strong FH counterloops lol, he made a few chopblocks, a few ridiculous short blocks which left me hanging out to dry, and a ton of FH powerloops to my middle (damn those are hard af to block) and wide angles. His BH down the line loop was also landing surprisingly high percentages yikes. 

Also played games against quite a good tall lefty shakehand two winged looper who had very good serves, pushes and powerful af loops. He seemed to be quite well trained. Unfortunately for him I was in the form of my life and he only managed to get 1 set out of 10+ sets. I was just attacking all his half long serves with a lot of spin and also in general received his serves quite well, while he got bamboozled by my serves quite a bit gifting me many attacking opportunities. Even did a few FH counterloops which I was quite proud of lol. 

One thing I did differently today was wearing compression Tshirt. It worked incredibly well because it helped to stabilise my core without my abs having to do too much work - this really increased my speed of movement I reckon. Will look to buy a few more.

Maybe your body was needed a couple of extra days to fully recover?

Now I guess I need to kinda integrate all the different over the table strokes including chiquita, chopblock, strawberry, fake/real loops. For FH I have the tomahawk push, hook receive, fade, windshield wiper flick and of course my trusty FH loop. I guess that's probably more than necessary and I can focus more on solidifying them now.

I noticed that counterlooping is really too much of an advanced stroke that is prone to failure especially against very high quality opening loops. And topspin blocking is basically useless because it does nothing to prevent the next powerloop.

Will be looking to incorporate some disgusting block variations especially sidespin blocking. 

On reflection, I've been abusing the down the line BH a bit too much and people are adjusting to it. I'll need to get working on the diagonal BH with extra hip rotation (such that the starting position between the down the line opening and the diagonal opening is almost the same)

I also worked a lot on incorporating the intermediate step after pushing, I think it's still a foreign concept to me, I was still pretty frozen after the push and didn't recover properly. I did some drills to drill it in but during matches I only did it maybe twice. Will need to do a lot more shadow training for that. 

I also worked on defending loops with the hook sidespin wrap on the FH (I'm already quite decent at it on the BH) - worked really well.

After that I worked on smashing short high balls with me just tossing the balls. With BH now I can do the bomb smash and it's actually getting easier to do it. On the FH I actually discovered the easiest way to generate good easy power on the ball, having high dwell time and generate weird disgusting spin for the opponent to deal with, and that's the fade flick-kill which is an extension of the fade FH flick. It produces a pure sidespin ball with some small amounts of underspin or topspin depending on contact, the ball goes out like a C shape with speed and is a nightmare to counterloop against. I think it's now the strongest version of the FH flick in my opinion. When combined with the tomahawk chopsmash and the wiper flick it's enough variation to punish opportunity balls to the short FH for me imo.

The Chinese style of a bent arm tack-back and letting the arm go straighter in the forward swing is very powerful. If you are really relaxed it just happens naturally. I see a 20% improvement if I do it in my forehand.

Another thing I am working on is the wrist flick and at the end a shake of the bat. I feel this principle can be used in most strokes to increase bat speed and to allow a shorter swing. Interested in your thoughts?

I see hiromoto get a hand shake on his backhand punch at times with a good wrist flick.

It has great contact on the ball but he adds topspin by use of the wrist.

 I feel the modern pro game is so fast you need short strokes close to the table and the wrist flick is needed to generate topspin on the backhand, flick etc

Set your robot for 0.5 second  intervals and try your backhand. Rotating left to right takes too much time.

The Hiromoto style backhand can give full power with spin even for this fast interval.

I agree on the forehand its a different story.