3rd Ball Forehand Attack - eBaTT Tutorial P2 -15th Apr 2019

Hey guys, it's Eli Barate from CoachMeTableTennis and today alongside me is Guy Benaroya, he's my assistant, former student of mine many years ago, got to top 5 in England and today he is also a full-time table tennis coach alongside the eBat team. Today we're going to talk about third ball attack, which is your forehand. We're going to be focusing mainly on your forehand third ball attack to try and help you elevate your placement, technique and how to execute a positive forehand third ball attack. Okay, so there's four key elements that I'm going to discuss today in terms of the third ball attack. Number one is the technique, how you should play the stroke. Number two is the contact point, where you want to contact the ball. And number three is the angle of the bat, which corresponds with the contact point. And number four, slash three, is placement, how you can develop your placement and disguise your stroke and then it will enable you to generate a much more difficult stroke or shot for your opponent to return. Okay, so as you just saw the demonstration there, I'm going to talk about the technique. So as the ball is rising, I'm looking to try and catch the ball as it comes off the table. Then I drop my arm behind my knee, not in front of my knee, behind my knee and I load my left leg. For you guys, right hand is your right leg. So I load my left leg and I try and open, not fully extend, I don't want to hyperextend, I want to have a small little break here and then I cock my wrist back and try and catch the back of the ball as I go up and my forearm snaps closed into an L shape. So I'm here, I drop, I snap and that allows me to lift the ball up and over the net. So that's the technical aspect. The next aspect that we need to focus on is the spin. So I need to understand how much spin is on the ball. I'm going to show you on the diagram in a minute how the spin changes my timing point and my contact on the ball. Okay, so as we discussed earlier in terms of the contact point, we have to first analyse whether the ball has not a lot of spin, meaning float, a little bit of spin, meaning around medium amount of spin or high, heavy amount of spin. So if the ball's got lots of spin, meaning it's heavy, it's rotating very fast and it wants to go down when it hits your bat, so what you want to try and do is contact the ball in and around this area. If the ball's got medium amount of top spin, back spin, sorry, then you want to try and contact the ball there and if it's got float, almost no spin on the ball, then your contact point becomes there. So it's three different contact points and three different angles. Angle number one, angle number two and angle number three. You have to be very careful as to analysing what the opponent has done in terms of what spin are they giving you and then quickly adjust the angle of your bat to get the ball on the table on the other side. So as you just saw on the board, you have to change the angle according to the spin. So if my opponent didn't give me a lot of spin, meaning float, then I can close the angle a lot more and hit through the ball there. Well rather than through the ball, you spin, a spin through the ball at this angle. If it's a little bit of back spin, around medium amount of back spin, then I need to open my angle a little bit more and go at this point of contact and if it's a lot of back spin, then I want to try and go right behind the back of the ball and lift it upwards there. So those are the angles that I need to incorporate depending on what spin I'm receiving. Another element you want to try and focus on is the timing, where you contact the ball. As the ball is bounced and then it's rising, if you can take it before top of the bounce, that's great, it gives your opponent less time but it makes it a little bit harder for you as well because it's low and the trajectory is a little bit lower. Top of the bounce is where generally most players will take it and they will enable them to execute a more aggressive shot and some players like to take the ball even after top of the bounce to generate extra top spin. It's down to where you feel comfortable but if it was me and I was playing against you, I'd try and dominate by taking the ball as early as possible. The last part, and for me this is for the more advanced players, is the disguise element and placement. So if you're really good at disguising your shots, it makes it very difficult for your opponent to receive your third ball forehand attack. So what do I mean exactly by disguising? Number one, you've got to practice your placement, so the placement you can practice by making sure that you change your timing point, so slightly later for down the line, a little bit earlier for the middle and slightly earlier for going cross court. So those are the three key elements for placement but then when we're talking about disguise, some people what they do is if they're going down the line, they're like this, if they're going to the middle they're here and if they're going cross court they're there and they've kind of told their opponent where they're going. With me what I try and do is I disguise my shot initially by really rotating my shoulder around and making it very difficult for my opponent to know where I'm going. So once I've rotated, then I can either go down the line, cross court, down the middle. My choice. And it's very difficult for my opponent to read that in the body language. So that's a nice little tip for you guys to implement. We're going to try and have a look at it in action. That was good. That's it. That's good. Okay guys, hopefully that will help you with your forehand open up third ball attack. Just another little tip for you to try and think about is doing an exercise with your opponent. You serve, they push long to your forehand, you do a forehand open up but they put the bat, for example, on the forehand side and you have to use your peripheral vision to try and go to the other side. See where the bat is and go to the other side. So if it's on the backhand side, your aim is to try and go over there. This is obviously for more advanced table tennis but it's something for you to think about and to hopefully elevate your game when you're playing matches and just keep an eye on your opponent and try to go where they're not. Just to finish off, I'd like to thank Guy Benaroya for helping me out today. And for more information about table tennis, please visit my website at coachmetabletennis.com and we'll see you at the next video.