Research Review: "Ready Position" and Back Pain

I'm starting a free "research roundup" service for table tennis players. If you'd like to get an email once a month or so with a roundup of the latest research on table tennis, you can join here:

The first issue comes out on the 13th of this month.

I try to keep each breakdown concise and provide some practical take-aways as well. See below for an example!

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In this study, 22 competitive female table tennis players completed a questionnaire on spinal pain and were given a body postural assessment that compared their normal standing posture with their table tennis "ready position." Over half of the participants reported a medium level of back pain with 36% citing a level of pain that required them to stop training. The athletes were also tended towards a kyphotic (hunched forward) posture, and were asymmetrical in the alignment of their pelvis and spinous process.

The researchers concluded that due to the number of practice hours required to become competitive in table tennis, the risk for postural defects, asymmetries, and spinal pain may be higher than average. They recommended being wary of training volume, assessing technical form issues with a coach, and performing exercises that improve symmetry of the work of the upper limbs, body trunk muscles and the pelvis.

Athletes displaying sport-specific asymmetries is nothing new. To some extent, this is unavoidable. If you are proactive, however, you may be able to counteract this to some degree.

Here are a few places to start:

- Incorporate things like Cat/camels, Wall slides, Bird dogs, and T-spine mobilizations as part of your warm-up

- Engage in full body strength training using unilateral movements

- Balance all that TT flexion with movements that work on extension and external rotation—Face pulls, Y-raises, External rotations, Supermans, etc.

Note: Most people are a little asymmetrical. And few have perfect posture. If you're not experiencing any pain or restrictions in movement, don't "WebMD" yourself into a crisis here. 

A large part of posture is awareness. Simply strengthening certain muscles is unlikely to change your daily posture; you need to actively build an awareness and self-correct throughout the day (shoulders back, proud chest, etc.). 

Without a doubt, TT is a tough sport for the lower back for some players at all levels..

With that said as someone who serves as on the editorial boards of four different scientific journals,  I find the study cited in the first post to be laughably bad, the authors should really be embarrassed.   I'm NOT criticizing the OP!!  He always has good suggestions.   But really, there's not a single conclusion in that article that can be supported by what the authors actually did.  The thing is, there has been such a proliteration of so-called open access academic journals that pretty much anything, no matter how $hi##y can get published.