Translation

Simplified Physics behind a Powerful Forehand Loop in Table Tennis

By Yingjie Liu (). Technical Editor: Mi Duo Duo ().

(1) The "pulling force" is the key for the conduction of a player's body force
to his paddle.

It's well known that to attain both power and accuracy in a stroke, a player
should use his body force to power the stroke while keeping his arm relaxed
for fine control. How is it possible to have the body force conducted through
the relaxed arm to the paddle ? Let's assume the player's arm is a flexible rope
and the body is like a short stick with one end attached to the end of the rope.
Think of the body rotation as the rotation of the stick (w.r.t its midpoint).
Then there will be a significant lag for the rope. Therefore the rotation of the
stick can not be conducted to the far end of the rope immediately. Now let's
try another experiment. First align the rope with the stick. Before rotating the
stick, let the stick pull the rope in their direction, and maintain an acceleration
movement. Then there is a tension created along the rope (since it has mass).
And the rope now behaves more like the extension of the stick rather than a
flexible rope. While keeping this movement, we rotate the short stick. Then
the short stick and the rope will move together like a long stick. The short
stick under the superposition of the two movements looks like a tangent line
segment sliding along a circular curve. The more pulling force the short stick
is acting on the rope with, the more tension is created along the rope and the
smaller is the lag angle between the stick and the rope. In other words, the
stick and the rope can be viewed as a long stick under the circumstances, and
the stiffness of the long stick increases with more pulling force. From this
experiment we know that in order to loop with a relaxed arm, it's better to
straighten the arm and place it on the same surface of the upper body during
preparation. When starting to loop, the upper body first pulls the arm along its
direction to create a tension in the arm, then the upper body rotates while
keeping the pulling action. The arm then moves as if it were fixed to the body,
thus quickly conducting the action to the paddle with relaxed arm muscles.
Since the body pulls the arm in a continuously changing direction, the
trajectory of its gravity center is a curve.
(2) Keeping the extended arm length fixed before hitting the ball is important
for improving the speed and acceleration of the paddle.

Due to the relatively large mass of the body, the angular speed of the body
during a stroke is considered smoothly increasing before hitting the ball.
Therefore the farther is the arm extended away from the body, the greater are
the speed and acceleration of the paddle. If the player shortens the arm in the
middle of a stroke before hitting the ball, the conservation of angular
momentum will cause the arm to rotate faster than the body temporarily, thus
interrupting the energy transfer from the body. On the other hand, if the player
is extending his arm during a stroke, the tension in the arm will be reduced
which causes the lag of the arm from the body rotation. Therefore, the player
should fix his extended arm length (according to the incoming ball prediction)
during a stroke before hitting the ball.

(3) The tension in the arm should be raised at the moment of hitting the ball.

When the paddle hits the ball its kinetic energy is reduced, which shortens the
time the paddle could have used to push and create spin on the ball, and also
reduces the control to the ball. With the assumption of smoothly increasing
angular speed of the body during the stroke, the strategy for reducing the
kinetic energy loss of the paddle is to suddenly raise the tension in the arm, so
that the arm and the body can be virtually bonded together more tightly,
increasing the overall rigidity. There are two ways to achieve this goal. One is
to suddenly increase the pulling force the body acts on the arm. The advantage
of this method is that the entire stroke uses essentially no force from arm
muscles. The other way is to suddenly shorten the extended arm length when
hitting the ball, thus increasing the tension along the arm. This method uses
arm force along the direction of the arm, so it's also not difficult to do.